NEWS STORY: New Orleans’ Catholics Considering Painful Church Closings

c. 2000 Religion News Service NEW ORLEANS _ In an all too familiar sign of the times, a committee of neighborhood pastors and laypeople has recommended the Archdiocese of New Orleans close three historic Catholic churches, including one Irish immigrant church dating to 1860 just a few blocks from the French Quarter. Although archdiocesan planners […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ In an all too familiar sign of the times, a committee of neighborhood pastors and laypeople has recommended the Archdiocese of New Orleans close three historic Catholic churches, including one Irish immigrant church dating to 1860 just a few blocks from the French Quarter.

Although archdiocesan planners stress that no final decision has been made, they cast the recommendation to merge the three parishes with a fourth as a more effective way to serve Catholics and non-Catholics in several depressed neighborhoods where white, Catholic families have been replaced by largely Protestant African-Americans.


It is a story that is being repeated across the country, including in some of the church’s major centers such as Chicago and New York, as the urban population of Catholics shrinks and the center of church life moves to the suburbs.

“We have some beautiful churches, but we don’t have communities of faith that are really vibrant,” said the Rev. Michael Jacques, the pastor at St. Peter Claver Church, who help draft the plan.

“This is not about abandonment, not at all,” he said.

David Peltier, a past president of the Bywater Neighborhood Association, conceded that with shrinking congregations area churches face an uphill struggle, but said he doesn’t see the archdiocese raising money to keep old neighborhood churches open the way it has campaigned to restore St. Louis Cathedral in the French Quarter.

Critics inside the church include a neighborhood activist who participated in the planning process as president of the parish council at Annunciation, one of the churches that may close. “It’s the most evil, vile, vicious thing that has ever happened to the community,” said Chita Manuel. “I’ve heard all their arguments. Mine is, if we can’t reach the people with four churches, how are we going to reach them with one?”

Talk of closing historic churches in New Orleans raises the same passions that have stoked bitter public fights in such cities as Philadelphia and Detroit, where the Catholic Church closed old ethnic churches that were struggling but still much-loved.

Five years ago, Archbishop Francis Schulte, responding to a suggestion from a number of his pastors, ordered the archdiocese’s 146 parishes to begin looking into the future, counting their strengths and weaknesses, and considering solutions to coming problems.

The bottom-up planning process, called Catholic Life 2000, began with months of brainstorming sessions among Catholic parishioners and their pastors.


Their ideas, parish by parish, were passed up to regional committees of pastors and laypeople who were to suggest solutions covering big neighborhoods.

Those proposals, in turn, were examined by a high-ranking planning committee and are being forwarded to Schulte for executive decisions that only the archbishop can make.

Manuel said she and her neighbors feel that shuttering the churches would signal an abandonment of the neighborhood.

“A church is a very stabilizing factor in every neighborhood,” she said. “It’s a place where a person can go in a time of need. You can walk into one in a time of need and find some spiritual calming. Some neighborhoods are deprived when churches are locked up during the day, but I see people on steps just feeling that presence,” she said.

DEA END NOLAN

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