Church Faces Priest Challenge

Dayton Daily News:

Plans to merge two Warren County parishes at a new church in Springboro are part of a regional strategy by the Archdiocese of Cincinnati designed to reorganize 230 parishes into 100 regions by 2015.
In the Dayton-Cincinnati diocese, the numbers of both Catholics and able pastors dropped between 1997 to 2012.
The number of Catholics in the diocese has dropped more than 12 percent during the past 15 years, from 546,100 in 2007 to 477,338 in 2012, according to the Official Catholic Directory.
During the same period, the total number of priests in the diocese dropped more than 20 percent from 646 to 512 — the number of active diocesan priests by almost 25 percent from 242 to 176, according to the directory.
In Cleveland, Boston, and other cities around the U.S., Catholic leaders are merging parishes, closing churches, importing priests and turning to laypersons to offset the shortage and shifts in the Catholic population in the U.S.
“It’s diocese by diocese,” said Melissa Cidade, a research associate at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University in Washington D.C.
From 1965 to 2012, the number of American priests shrank from 58,632 to 38,964, according to CARA data collected from dioceses around the U.S.
Overall, the number of Catholics in the U.S. grew from 45.6 million to 66 million, according to data collected by the center, located at Georgetown University.
While parish populations have dwindled in the Northeast and Midwest, large, new parishes are building new churches in the Southeast. “Catholics are following the same migrations as anybody else,” Cidade said.

The numbers are pretty grim, but with the Church's political positions and sexual teachings alienating young people, a shortage of priests may end up being just one of a number of problems the Church faces.  As the numbers from the Archdiocese of Cincinnati show, without Hispanic immigration, Church  membership is tailing off pretty hard.  Closing parishes will be inevitable, with or without priests to staff them.