Losing parishes they cherish

With slices of lemon cake set out on paper plates and a dance troupe standing by to entertain them, members of the seniors group at Our Lady Queen of Heaven parish in Cherry Hill rose from their tables.

"Hail Mary, full of grace . . .," they murmured, as they do the second Thursday of every month. They laid their hands on their hearts and sang the national anthem.

Still, a few hours of entertainment and the laughter of old friends could not ease Dolores Colace's anxiety.

Sometime next year, Queen of Heaven, a tan brick fixture on Marlton Pike since 1955, will close and merge with St. Peter Celestine parish, less than two miles away - part of a sweeping plan to halve the number of parishes in the six-county Roman Catholic Diocese of Camden.

Announced in April by Bishop Joseph A. Galante, it is the most drastic reduction ever attempted by a Catholic diocese in this country.

Colace, 70, understands why her parish and St. Peter's have to be dissolved and a new parish created, with a new name and new geographical boundaries: There are not enough priests.

Yet "I'm very heartbroken," said Colace, a parishioner for 31 years. She sighed. "I'll do it. But I've been a part of things here for so long."

The merger is one of two in Cherry Hill, a microcosm of Galante's plan to compress 124 parishes into 68 in the 500,000-member diocese.

Now home to six Catholic churches, Cherry Hill will wind up with four, served by three priests total. In addition to the union of Queen of Heaven's 1,800 families with 2,500-member St. Peter's:

Holy Rosary, with 545 families, will merge with the 1,650 families at St. Pius X.

St. Thomas More, with 767 families, and St. Mary's, with 1,567, will remain intact, but in about three years only one priest will serve both.

Across the diocese's counties (Camden, Atlantic, Cape May, Cumberland, Gloucester and Salem), 37 new parishes will be formed through mergers, while 25 will be unchanged. Three "clusters" will be created, each containing two parishes served by one priest or a team of priests.

Galante's plan is powered in part by his vision of parish life as more "dynamic" and relevant for modern lay Catholics. Yet its scope and urgency are driven by a somber fact: In 2015, the diocese expects to have only 85 active priests. That would be about half as many as today - far too few, Galante said, for 124 parishes.

The coming changes have provoked pickets, threats of civil lawsuits, and appeals to the Vatican by some congregations. None of them, however, are in Cherry Hill.

"Sure, there are people who don't want to see it happen," said the Rev. Michael Field, Queen of Heaven's pastor, "but if you make people aware of the vision, they will step back and try make sense of it."

That was the sentiment among parents interviewed last week at St. Peter Celestine's parish school, brimming with about 400 children. This month, Queen of Heaven's 100 students began attending classes there.

Among them are Michele Brown's children. "I love it," she said. "My kids are very, very happy to see more kids. It looks like a real school."

Her family has already started worshiping at St. Peter's, whose music-filled liturgies "make me want to get up and dance," said Brown, 42.

But many older Catholics fret about moving.

After decades in the parish where they married, or baptized their children, or buried a spouse, they will soon say goodbye to the statues and stained glass so familiar they can feel like family.

"I'm bitter," said Marie Gambino, 80, a Queen of Heaven parishioner for 45 years. "This is a church. It has warmth," whereas the angular, modern architecture of St. Peter Celestine, built in 1961, "feels cold."

She and her husband will move instead to the more traditional St. Pius parish, although she said she didn't like the idea. "It'll have to grow on me," Gambino said, and shrugged. "Or I'll have to grow on it."

On Burnt Mill Road, near the Voorhees border, Thursday morning's Mass at Holy Rosary Church drew just 14 worshipers, led by a frail, retired priest. The pews held mostly seniors. Among them was Bud Kaliss, 71, who said he would miss the parish. But "it had to be."

Paradoxically, many of the parishes in the diocese were created for the very reason they are being closed: priest supply.

In 1960, the diocese had half its current lay population but 217 priests - many more than Archbishop Celestine Damiano knew what to do with.

His solution: an explosion of new parishes. On a single day - June 10, 1961 - he created 18 parishes, including three in Cherry Hill, and appointed 16 new pastors. A decade later, the diocese had 348 priests, more than double today's number.

Galante's radical surgery calls for creating mostly large parishes with financial and human resources sufficient to become "vibrant" church communities.

Mass attendance in the diocese has been a painful issue for Galante, who calls the Sunday average of 24 percent "appalling."

Rather than blame the laity, however, Galante has said the low attendance - a third what it was in 1960s - is evidence that many parishes are not inviting, spiritually or socially.

During the next year, the future pastors of the new parishes and their "core teams" of lay leaders are to define the needs of their parishes, then start translating those needs into the ministries and programs that will "touch people and bring them back to the church," Galante said in an interview.

Full-time paid youth ministers or music directors are the examples Galante cites most often, but he is also urging parishes to think about senior centers, or day-care centers, or even coffee bars as ways to vitalize church life.

Michael Nowlan, 81, a Queen of Heaven parishioner for 48 years, has heard it before. "We were here for the groundbreaking of the parish school" in the early 1960s, and saw it close this year, he said.

Queen of Heaven, he added, was "a major part of your life" - the place where his six children were baptized, and where most were married.

Still, he views the merger with St. Peter's as "an opportunity for growth . . . and starting a new life."

Dolores Colace worries about her place in that new life.

At Queen of Heaven, she is the refreshments coordinator for the seniors group.

"I make the cakes," she said. But "when you go someplace else, it's like a new job. You're the new kid on the block."