As bad as this sounds, I suspect the problem is more likely that there are fewer parishioners, not just priests (while the latter is also a problem). My diocese in NJ is doing the same thing; we’re past closing schools, and now close churches.
The American Catholic hierarchy is reaping what they’ve sown.
But here in the greater Tucson area the parishes are bursting and expanding, except that is, in the predominantly Mexican areas. Even daily mass is well attended in the five churches that I go to in my area.
I think that because we have gotten a lot of retirees from the Midwest, they have brought their devotedness with them, which is a beautiful thing.
I am so sorry that the Catholic church has lost its vibrancy in those communities. I liked listening to the stories where on each corner there was a Catholic church, and many times they were the center of a European enclave in that neighborhood, where traditions were kept alive through the generations.
The bishops sided with the federal gov’t against their people when the gov’t decided to ethnically cleanse American cities, dispersing the Catholics into the suburbs, where they have become what the gov’t wanted them to become: Nones.
Christianity in the U.S. is collapsing, while the Nones are exploding. The Christians will be carted off to the camps, while the Nones will applaud.
Yet growing in the south and southwest.
The Catholics have moved. Pope Paul was the first pope to visit Americans. a reporter noticed the unexpectedly sparse crowds lining the streets in NYC. Manhattan, he said, is not long a Catholic island. That was fifty years ago. The parishes in Chicago, were ethnic. and no blacks etc, are now living where Poles, Germans, Irish used to live. Now, to be sure,there is also a theological split. The arrival of a modernist priest will drive away traditional Catholics. A friend of mine said that he had his whole live just attended the nearest Catholic Church. But the last time he moved he found he could not stomach the local priest and so ended up driving thirty miles to find a tolerable parish.