Chicago Archdiocese to Shut 31 Parishes, Many Schools in Sweeping Cost-Cutting

The nation’s second-largest Roman Catholic archdiocese prayed for understanding--and cash--on Sunday as it unveiled a sweeping cost-cutting plan that will shut down at least 31 parishes as well as several schools and missions.

Beset by white flight, falling attendance, a priest shortage and mounting deficits, church officials said that drastic measures were needed to head off a fiscal crisis that could cripple efforts to serve the faithful and lure straying Catholics back into the fold.

“These decisions are a response to the realities of the present so that we will be better able to respond to the needs of the future,” Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin said in announcing the opening round of what could be the broadest restructuring ever attempted in the history of the American Catholic Church.

In a pastoral letter read at masses throughout the city, Bernardin acknowledged that the closures would cause pain to many. But he said a leaner, more cost-efficient church would be better positioned to revitalize itself.

To raise cash, Bernardin said, the archdiocese might even sell off large chunks of the more than $1.1 billion in Chicago area real estate it owns. If it could fetch a good price, the cardinal said he would even be willing to part with the Victorian mansion on Chicago’s posh Gold Coast that he uses as an official residence.

Although the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the nation’s most populous with 3.5 million Catholics, has initiated cost-cutting measures and consolidated some parochial schools, there are no immediate plans to close or merge parishes, according to a spokesman.

But problems are plaguing other large urban dioceses. The Chicago program could foreshadow a tough, new approach to dealing with the financial woes of the church across the nation.

Already, the Detroit archdiocese has tried to streamline its debt-strained operations by shuttering more than a quarter of its inner-city churches. Parishioners were outraged when the closures were announced, unexpectedly, more than a year ago. Some accused Cardinal Edmond Szoka of being insensitive to the needs of the poor and several churches even filed a lawsuit to block their demise.

Perhaps hoping to avoid a similar experience, Bernardin and his aides took great pains to cushion the blow in Chicago. A blue-ribbon panel was appointed months ago to study solutions to the fiscal crisis. Parish priests and leaders were included in the process. Meanwhile, Bernardin made a special address on two local television stations Sunday, and the archdiocese opened telephone hotlines for affected parishioners.

Still, many Catholics maintain strong emotional ties to their churches and the official announcement left them shaken. “I feel like I’m losing my family,” sobbed 69-year-old Ray Rean after Mass at the soon to be closed St. Cyril and St. Methodius, the southwest-side church where he was baptized and has worshipped his entire life. “I feel like I’ve been betrayed.”

On Sunday afternoon, several dozen demonstrators marched outside Bernardin’s residence to protest plans announced last week to close the racially mixed Quigley South preparatory high school for would-be seminarians. The Rev. Michael Pfleger, a Quigley graduate, criticized the shutdown as racist and counterproductive at a time when the church is struggling to hold on to black members. “We can’t says we’re serious about black vocations if we close the place that has the most black students,” Pfleger, who is white, complained in a recent interview.

But church leaders said they were forced to make painful decisions by a sea of red ink. Nearly two-thirds of all parishes rely on subsidies from the central archdiocese treasury to make ends meet and the archdiocese, as a whole, is presently $15 million in hock to local banks. Church analysts projected that, without change, the accumulated debt would soar to $128 million by 1993.

Though it is second in size to Los Angeles, the 2.3-million-member Chicago archdiocese includes 416 parishes in two counties, more than any other archdiocese in the nation. More than half the churches are in Chicago proper, and all but a handful of those slated for closing are also located in the city.

The number of churches in Chicago proliferated as waves of immigrants from Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Ireland and other European nations flocked here to work in the steel mills and meat packing houses. Often, they lived in the same neighborhoods but refused to associate with each other or worship together.

As a result, many neighborhoods in old ethnic enclaves have a Catholic church every few blocks. Up until World War II, the churches were packed. But then came a growing exodus to the suburbs, which accelerated as many of the neighborhoods increasingly turned from white to black or Latino.

Typical is the fate of St. Cyril and St. Methodius, a 99-year-old parish founded to serve the Bohemian community in the Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood near the old Chicago stockyards. When the Rev. Charles Kouba was appointed pastor in 1963, the church membership role included 900 families and Kouba celebrated five masses each weekend. These days, fewer than 150 families belong. Kouba, 66, is down to two masses a weekend and the church needs $45,000 to repair its copper gutters.

There are three other churches within 6 blocks of the parish, many of them preferred by Latinos, who now comprise the largest ethnic group in the area. When Kouba read the official closing announcement at Sunday’s service, there were only about 50 worshipers on hand, virtually all Anglo and all but a handful senior citizens.

“It’s hard,” Kouba confided after Mass. “But some people get so attached to the building. In the church, we’re interested in people, not buildings.”

BACKGROUND Although Protestant denominations are growing, Roman Catholic Church membership in the United States has plummeted from 73 million to 53 million in less than a decade. The number of priests and nuns has also dropped. Changing demographics and housing patterns have also hurt church membership. Squeezed by a tightening contribution base and greater reliance on lay workers to run schools and services, Catholic churches across the country are now struggling to cut costs. Detroit closed more than a fourth of its inner city churches last year.