Worshipping in the wreckage

I felt yet another pang of sadness earlier today as I watched a video clip from the demolition of a decommissioned Catholic school not too far away from here, in Marshfield, Wis. It's the same pang I felt a few months ago after learning that the near-empty convent down the street from where I grew up not too far away in Stevens Point, a structure for which a team of horses owned by my own great-grandfather helped to haul the bricks, was to be sold off to developers, with the few remaining elderly sisters moving to a facility in Illinois. The magnificent, towering parish church from which that order of teaching sisters was born, my home parish, still holds three weekend services. But on the Sundays when I visit, the music echos strangely in the near-empty pews. I read that a north side alderman moved recently to silence the Angelus bells.

On the far side of the Diocese of La Crosse where my wife grew up, and where we've inherited her parents' farm, we attend Mass at a magnificent ridge-top church built by German immigrant-farmers more than a century-and-a-quarter ago. These near-penniless newcomers mortgaged their farms and provided virtually all the labor in order to raise a church with a soaring steeple, which is today visible for miles around in the rugged, wind-swept countryside. Everything from the hand-hewn, hand-laid masonry on the outside to the beautiful, hand-wrought woodwork on inside bespeaks their pride, their sacrifice, and their devotion. Recently I came across an article I had written back in my journalist days about the closure of this exact-same parish's school a decade ago, one of the oldest schools in the state, a decision that made perfect sense given there were fewer than a dozen students in grades K-through-eight.

What is this pang, which I feel nearly every Sunday as I listen to my devoted pastor, who juggles the administration of this parish with two others, deliver his homily to dozens in a church built for hundreds? I know, I know, part of it is that demographics have changed; there simply aren't the families to draw on. There are too many churches in this diocese, where the push a century ago, in the era of horses and buggies, was to construct a church within seven miles of any geographic point, no matter how rural.

But let's not fool ourselves by blaming it on demographics. These structures were full just two generations ago, my grandparents' generation. While nearly everybody in my parents' generation was baptized and received the sacraments, something went awry, and only a percentage in my own generation received the sacraments. And if I had to tally up how many from my own Catholic high school class are today practicing their faith, I'd have to guess that I'd be able to count the number on my fingers.

We are one generation away from a radically smaller church, and it's apathy, plain and simple. Even out here in the rural countryside, my wife can point to farm after farm and say, that's the so-and-so family, and they used to be in church on Sundays. Many people have moved away, but many people are still here. And they're just not interested. The exuse is it's this or that priest, it's this or that scandal, it's this or that out-moded teaching. I understand, and yet I don't. Where is the faith that led families to mortgage their farms, their very livelihoods? Can it really evaporate just like that?

My personal take is that a lot of it had to do with lack of community. I don't know whether the same sort of intentional community that inspired these churches and schools is possible anymore. Our lives no longer revolve around our parishes. We have too many other geographically disparate identities-- work, schools, social groups, children's activities. Even the thriving North Carolina suburban parish we attended during our time there struggles to keep its school afloat, despite having thousands of parishioners. We have so many different identities, and even the most thriving of parishes only feed part of who we are. To be clear, I'm not blaming parishes, or priests, or, really, anybody at all. I have friends who are priests or who work in parishes who are doing heroic work. But it's just the modern reality that our allegiances are ephemeral.

Obviously these matters are too big for a blog post. There's more, theologically speaking, to church than weekly attendance at services. Really, there needs to be more, and that's why the church is dying. We aren't made to be bifurcated between our spiritual and social bonds, as our modern reality forces us to be.

So again, I don't have any answers today, only a peculiar strain of sadness that I wanted to express as the soaring structures of the past, shadows of their former selves, continue to crumble into dust.

Who knows, maybe we'll be born a smaller, purer church. In the meantime, I'll worship in the wreckage.