The Archdiocese of Baltimore has released its final plan for reconfiguring operations of the Catholic church in the Baltimore area, a blueprint for change that will slash by about two-thirds the number of parishes in the city and several nearby suburbs.
The plan, made public Wednesday at the end of a meeting of priests and pastors, will preserve a number of historic — and historically beloved —churches that diocesan officials earlier proposed closing or repurposing. Those spared included St. Joseph’s Monastery Parish in Irvington in Southwest Baltimore, St. Peter Claver in Sandtown-Winchester in West Baltimore and Our Lady of Good Counsel in Locust Point.
However, it keeps plans to shutter or repurpose other landmark parishes, including St. Vincent de Paul in downtown Baltimore, St. Ann in East Baltimore Midway and St. Pius X in Towson.
The leadership team of “Seek the City to Come,” the multiyear realignment campaign, shared the earlier proposal with the Baltimore faithful during Masses in mid-April. At that stage, the draft suggested reducing the number of parishes from 61 to 21 and the number of worship sites from 59 to 26.
Note: Two Baltimore City parishes that the Archdiocese of Baltimore says don’t currently have worship sites are not mapped. The Church of the Immaculate Conception is to merge with New All Saints (parish seat) and St. Cecilia. St. Pius V is to merge with St. Bernardine (parish seat), St. Gregory the Great and St. Edward.
Map: Steve Earley, Annie Jennemann, Source: Archdiocese of Baltimore
The final plan will result in 23 parishes and 30 worship sites.
Archbishop William Lori made the plan official Wednesday with his signature. He told The Baltimore Sun that feedback from four town hall meetings on the draft plan, while hard to hear at times, was crucial in a process.
“I hope that this lays the foundation for what the prophet Jeremiah calls a future full of hope,” Lori said. “It’s a move away from putting most of our energy into aging buildings, into leaky plumbing, I-beams in danger of collapsing, and roofs long beyond their capacity, and into having a manageable number of parishes really equipped to provide all the services that parishioners themselves have told us they want.”
Bishop Bruce A. Lewandowski, co-leader of the campaign, had told parishioners that radical change was necessary because attendance at city churches has cratered, and because of the widespread disrepair of aging buildings. The archdiocese lacks the resources, he says, to offer robust services under the geographically focused parish system that prevailed in the city for centuries.
The goal, he has said, is to grow through reduction and direct more energy to what remains.
Lewandowski and other campaign leaders designed the process to include parishioner feedback via emails, phone calls and meetings over more than two years. Those resulted in more than 6,000 instances of feedback, the archdiocese says. Hundreds packed four often-contentious town halls held after the release of the initial proposal.
Parishioners’ arguments led to changes. At an April meeting for the city’s African American Catholics, some said St. Peter Claver, one of the city’s oldest Black Catholic congregations, welcomed minority worshippers in an era when nearby parishes did not. Under the previous proposal, its members would have had to transfer to formerly segregationist churches.
Members of St. Joseph’s Monastery pitched its charitable work and community outreach, and others from Our Lady of Good Counsel shared concerns about having to attend Holy Cross in Federal Hill, a church just 1.3 miles away with a different vibe and little parking.
“The feedback was very helpful,” Lewandowski said. “We received all different kinds. It gave us a good picture of the folks who live in the city and come to the city, and their love and care and concern for their church. It also gave us really good insight into where there were some flexible points where people would be willing to negotiate and into what people really wanted to hold onto.”
Among the concerns parishioners shared were how accessible their new churches would be to public transportation, how the finances of merging parishes would be handled, when Masses would be held, and whether they could bring artifacts from their old churches to their new ones.
Lewandowski said he would generally encourage the latter. “We want folks to have something they recognize as their own” as they transition, he said.
Other concerns were cultural. Representatives from St. Veronica’s, a mostly Black Catholic church in Cherry Hill in South Baltimore, told officials at several meetings that when the parish was founded in the 1940s, it was located in a former tavern and didn’t get a building until 1955.
The original proposal called for closing the church and opening a storefront-style worship site in the Cherry Hill Town Center. That plan, archdiocese leaders learned, told members they were being relegated to a secondary status they’d left behind long ago. Also, parishioners resisted the suggestion they could attend nearby St. Rose of Lima in Curtis Bay, a historically white parish they believed would be less than welcoming.
“That was one of those experiences where you sit and listen, and it brings tears to your eyes,” Lewandowski said. “We really made a mistake in this proposal. We actually apologized. We didn’t know that history, and they taught it to us. If we’d known that history, we’d have never made that proposal in the first place.”
The final plan makes St. Veronica the seat and only church in its own parish.
Nina Duckery, a longtime member, said she’s “joyful and over the moon” that it will stay open.
But she was still less than happy that, in her view, church officials and consultants who visited the parish early on asked questions that had little to do with its individual history. And many were outraged at the earlier proposal to replace St. Veronica’s with the storefront-style worship center.
That plan was canceled, as was another to open a storefront-type space in Edmondson Village.
“I’m glad Bishop Bruce acknowledged that he made a mistake,” she said.
Other decisions are certain to raise hackles. Members of Holy Rosary Church, a historically Polish congregation in Upper Fells Point, showed up in droves at the town halls, decked out in custom T-shirts and brandishing signs, to oppose a merger with St. Patrick’s, a mostly Hispanic congregation blocks away, out of fear it could weaken traditions.
However, Holy Rosary will indeed absorb St. Patrick’s. While Holy Rosary will remain open, it will be as a worship site, rather than a standalone parish. Both Holy Rosary and St. Patrick’s will become part of a larger parish anchored at Sacred Heart of Jesus, the largest church in Baltimore with Masses in Spanish.
Maryann Chorabik, who attended Mass on Thursday evening at Holy Rosary, said she was married in the parish in 1988 and noted that Cardinal Karol Wojtyla (the future Pope John Paul II) visited the church in the 1970s. She said Sunday Mass in Polish frequently draws more than 200 people. Chorabik said as the parish moves, the Holy Rosary congregation is worried about the future of its basem*nt social space, which is used for Polish language school and cultural events, such as meals and dances.
“Instead of consolidating our churches, we should be growing our churches, and the archbishop should have more of a hand in that,” she said. “People will stop giving money if you’re consolidating. If you close our church, then a single person isn’t going to donate to that collection basket ever again.”
Lewandowski said that Holy Rosary’s congregation is small, but its building can hold a thousand people. That should help support a Latino population growing so fast it has left Sacred Heart bursting at the seams.
“This is what we call an opportunity,” he said. “There is a certain level of stress and anxiety that comes with coming together with people who are different from yourself, and I can understand that, but what they do share is the immigrant experience and the riches of culture and language and faith traditions. Not that it’s going to be easy, but I do think things will look different three or four years from now when we see how this comes together.”
Seek the City leaders also overruled pleas by two other of Baltimore’s historic African American Catholic churches, St. Ann’s in East Baltimore Midway and nearby St. Wenceslaus, to remain open. Both will join a parish seated at St. Francis Xavier, the first exclusively Black Catholic parish in America.
Ralph Moore, a longtime member of St. Ann’s, called it “sad, very disappointing news” that the church will close, especially given its historic stature. Father Donald Sterling, the first African American priest ordained in the Baltimore archdiocese, grew up in the parish.
Moore said he believes many in the church will switch to other denominations.
“I expected more and better from the people involved, but it was not to be,” he said.
The final plan appeared earlier than expected. Officials worked to finish earlier than the June release they’d forecast because they knew the wait for an outcome would be stressful for many, Lewandowski said.
In an email he sent Wednesday to parishioners, Lori rebutted rumors that the mergers and possible sales of church properties were tied to the archdiocese’s ongoing bankruptcy proceedings in the wake of a report by the Maryland attorney general that found more than 600 priests and brothers sexually abused children dating back to the mid-20th century.
“This is not true,” he wrote. “Proceeds from any building sale will remain in the parish and follow the people to the newly formed parish.”
He also prefaced the next phase of Seek the City, that of implementation. “While some parish mergers will occur more quickly in the coming months, others will continue over the next year or so,” he wrote.
Lewandowski said he hopes the past two years of intense conversation across parish lines have brought city Catholics together in a way that will help them build a more effective Baltimore church.
“My hope is that in 25 or 30 years, the vision we’ve put out has led to a church that is vibrant and alive, full of people caring about their neighbor and each other, people that don’t just commute to church in Baltimore but actually live there,” he said. “And that it will be a community church in Baltimore.”
Baltimore Sun reporter Dillon Mullan contributed to this article.
