Dear fatnotlazy,
Thanks for the reply.
Is it possible that with only a hundred or so members, maintaining all the customs and traditions of the previous parishes just wasn't in the cards?
I know that in my own parish, we have a Knights of Columbus Council. Everyone loves all the things we do in the parish and the community. However, our parish registration has declined by about a third over the past few years, and as an organization, we are not unaffected.
Anyway, like I said, folks love all the stuff we do: Communion breakfasts, basket bingos, golf tournament, making and selling funnel cakes during community events, Keep Christ in Christmas event, Catholic school scholarship fund, parish spaghetti dinners, etc.
However, there are perhaps 12 or 15 folks on whom can be counted to come out and work an event. It gets hard to do everything we do. Our previous pastor helped by permitting us funds to substitute for labor (it's easier to hold a spaghetti dinner when you get the local Italian restaurant to bring in the food, it's easier to hold the annual golf tournament when you get the local rib place to cater the event, etc.) and often gave us parish funds to support these events.
Our new pastor, looking at the books, declining registration, etc., has determined that the parish just can't afford to subsidize some of our events, no matter how worthy they are, and we, frankly, just don't have the participation to substitute elbow grease for funds. So perhaps some of our events may go away, despite the fact that they're quite popular.
We have around 600 families in our parish. I can't imagine the kind of difficulties a parish would have keeping up all sorts of different customs and traditions with only a hundred or so families. I wonder whether some of what I see in my own parish was happening in this consolidated parish.
sitetest
I supposed it might have been inevitable for traditions to die off as the older folks pass on and the younger ones, who are working and don't have the time to spare, no longer keep them going. But as I said, in this particular parrish, things were handled badly. People became alienated and it just accelerated the decline.
It really made me sad when I attended the Greek Festival at St. Nick's in Oakland. This ia a vibrant parrish -- they even had very small children dancing the traditional dances and young and old keep their traditions alive (not to mention that wonderful food). I was thinking of how the traditions I learned as a child are gone -- the young in my neck of the woods don't know the first thing about them and now with the older folks gone and the younger ones no longer active participants, the future generations will never know.