From Philadelphia to Newark, N.J., New York to Boston, Cleveland to Chicago to Detroit and beyond, the church of the immigrants is going the same route as the old industrial America of our forebears. The huge plants — churches, schools and parish halls — markers of another era, like the hulking steel mills and manufacturing plants of old, can no longer be sustained. There aren\u2019t enough Catholics left in those places, not enough priests and nuns and certainly not enough money to maintain the church as it once was.<\/p>\n
According to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University in Washington, the church in the United States has lost 1,359 parishes during the past 10 years, or 7.1 percent of the national total, and most of those have been in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m developing a theory that one of our major challenges today is that American Catholic leadership is being strangled by trying to maintain the behemoth of the institutional Catholicism that we inherited from the 1940s and \u201950s,\u201d\u009d New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan told NCR\u2019s John Allen in the recently released book-length interview A People of Hope.<\/p>\n