Who is usually to blame for parish closings?

Whenever a diocese announces a round of significant parish closings, I see a number of Catholics online making commentary about the current bishop.

However, it is very rare that the current bishop is primarily to blame. I think we should unite to fix the longer-term issues behind parish closings rather than just critique current bishops.

There are two main groups of reasons parishes close. These are demographic reasons and reasons that we, as Catholics, are more to blame for. There are a few less common reasons that I will skip. And bishops can be too slow or too aggressive in closing parishes, which is a whole other question.

Any parish closing is somewhat sad, as that history is lost. My community has decided to sell the boarding school building where I did my final vows. I won’t be able to go there again. Parishes have similar things: remembering weddings, baptisms, etc.

However, of the two main causes, I think the second is much sadder for the Church. (I am dealing here with the US and English-speaking Canada; I am not familiar enough with other places to speak with any authority.)

Parishes those close due to demography

Some parishes no longer have enough Catholics to support them, relatively independent of the Church’s actions. I can think of three main types, but there are others.

1. Ethnic parishes where the (great) grandkids of those who built it go to non-ethnic parishes if they are practicing Catholics. Further generations living here want to identify more as Americans or Canadians rather than wherever their ancestors came from. You can see this actively happening in the Church by how later generation Hispanics often prefer to speak English over Spanish. As a priest, I would hear Confessions during Spanish-language catechesis at a parish, and more than half would prefer to confess in English (I speak both). The same thing happened in the past with other nationalities.
2. Some parishes have population collapses. For example, a mine closes, farms mechanize and now only need a third as many people as in 1950, or neighborhoods are abandoned in a city. The parish simply has fewer people in its boundaries than before.
3. Finally, in the demographic group are parishes where the ethnic makeup radically changes. These are most often in cities. We know that a higher percentage of certain nationalities are Catholic. Ideally, we’d convert everyone, but it also makes sense to reduce parishes if an area goes from 95% Italian to 95% Chinese over a few decades. Occasionally, parishes can adjust: St. Therese Chinese mission in Chicago used to be in an Italian neighborhood (it has a statute donated by Al Capone’s mom praying for her son’s conversion). However, conversion of a large portion of a new nationality can rarely happen enough to avoid reducing three neighborhood parishes to one or similar.

These are sad for the local people, but populations change for non-Church-related reasons—and parishes should change to reflect the local population.

Parishes that close because of our failures

Two factors showing a decline in Catholicism are often causes for parishes to close: lack of practice and lack of priestly vocations. How can we maintain a parish if we have few attending and/or lack the priests to cover it?

This is much sadder for us as it shows our failure as a Church. We must reflect on how we failed in these areas, and on how to avoid these issues in the future.

Both are long-term issues, not something that can be solved in 5 or 10 years. Thus, it is more the duty of the whole diocese over the past 60 years than of the bishop who has only been here a bit.

Priestly Vocations

For example, most priests in active ministry in 2026 entered the seminary between about 1970 and 2017. The current priestly vocations of the diocese depend on the health of the diocese in those years, and few active bishops were bishops of their current diocese for even 10 of those 47 years. Even if a bishop has 20 men enter the seminary this year, it will be almost a decade before they are ordained.

Some propose that we just keep stretching priests, but that is bad in the long-term, as it makes them burn out and counteracts promoting vocations to the priesthood. Constantly burnt-out priests present a poor image to attract young men to the priesthood.

Parish Attendance

Likewise, with parish attendance. Here I refer to people no longer practicing Catholicism or leaving the Church. This has been a slow decline over many decades, not a big drop at one moment. (There have been some moments of steeper drop, as during the 2002 abuse crisis and many places not returning to pre-COVID numbers after it, but I know of no diocese where numbers just fell off a cliff due to the current bishop compared to prior decades.)

Most parishes closed for low participation had low participation for a decade or more before, usually before the current bishop. The overall pattern of attendance has dropped over decades.

How many are at Mass is the responsibility of all of us Catholics. Our baptism calls us to evangelize. To put that all on bishops ignores our responsibility as the Body of Christ. We should all be encouraging people to become Catholic and non-practicing Catholics to become practicing.

Yes, ordination gives me or a bishop more responsibility here, but we can’t do it alone. We need to collaborate over decades.

Conclusion

I think bishops have made imprudent decisions in the US and Canada. So, this essay is by no means a defense of those decisions. However, usually parish closings refer to issues that are outside the Church’s control or largely predate the current bishop. Let’s try to be charitable with bishops in this tough spot. If we all work with bishops taking these hard steps, we can often emerge in a better place for the Church.