(Image: Wikimedia/Joe Mabel)

HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE
Subscribe to CHS to help us hire writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. To stay that way, we need you.

Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for as little as $5 a month. 

A “Pastoral Planning” process will place Catholic parishes in partnership around Puget Sound. The impacts on churches in Capitol Hill and the Central District — two Seattle neighborhoods with long histories shaped by the church — won’t likely be known for another year.

This process is very different from the round of church closures in 2021 which lead to the church shuttering St. Patrick’s and St Mary’s churches, according to Helen McClenahan, spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Seattle.

The archdiocese may close the houses of worship — but many other options are possible.

Some of the driving factors behind the effort, however, have not changed.

As with many faith communities in Western Washington and nationally, church attendance is down, and has been trending that way for years. Even though the region’s population has been growing, fewer people are attending church and receiving the sacraments that are an integral part of the Catholic faith.

There is also a labor crunch. Fewer priests are expected to be available in coming years. Earlier this year, the archdiocese noted that currently there are 80 pastors for 174 locations. By 2036, it expects only 66 pastors.

Bowing to these realities, the archdiocese, which stretches from Canada to Oregon in the western half of the state, is undergoing a “Partners in Gospel” initiative. This year long planning process will be twofold, McClenahan said.

The first part involves a region-wide effort to find ways to strengthen the various ministries, including things like education, outreach, youth ministries and more. All churches in western Washington will be participating in this effort, and ideally, learning from each other about different strategies.

The second part, which may lead to some closures, is placing parishes into families. Essentially combining the resources of two or more churches. Once the process is complete and the families of churches have been established, it will fall to each family to determine how best to dispose of their assets. It might make sense to keep all of their various properties open and functioning for some groups of parishes. Others might convert a church building into some other use. Still others may decide to simply close a building completely.

St. Patrick’s Catholic Church rectory at Broadway E. and E. Edgar St., May 1979 (Image: Seattle Public Library Special Collections — Werner Lenggenhager Photograph Collection)

The hope is that by creating a family of parishes, there will be a larger group of congregants which might help build sufficient numbers to increase programming. For example, McClenahan said some churches don’t have youth groups, simply because they don’t have enough youth to form one. But a couple parishes combined might get them to the point where such a group becomes viable. This would also help ameliorate the shortage of priests, as combining multiple churches would mean fewer churches holding a mass.

The creation of families of churches will only really impact the various churches, meaning a school such as Holy Names, which isn’t directly affiliated with a specific parish, won’t be involved. Though the school will be asked to participate in the other part of the initiative about finding ways to strengthen the church generally.

The whole process is in its infancy, so it’s really too early to tell how many different churches might combine into a family, or the impact on local churches. McClenahan said that even though some churches are still dealing with merging their congregations with those from the recently closed local parishes, they’ll still participate in the process. However, those challenges will be taken into account as the family structure is developed.

In 2021, St. Patrick’s in North Capitol Hill and St. Mary’s in the Central District were both added to the closure roster.

She said there is no formal range for how many parishes might end up combined into a single family. There might even be cases, such as if a church has a very large, active congregation, or is geographically remote, that it may not make sense for it to partner with other churches.

This process, happening with the help of a consultant, is expected to play out over the next year, with input from a number of different groups before a draft is released publicly this fall. Early next year, the archbishop will make a final determination of the family structure, with an eye to everything going into effect in July. Each family will then have three years to figure out how to join their congregations.

As this process unfolds, members of the two local churches that were shuttered are waiting to hear on their appeal of the closure.

Congregants from both St. Patrick’s and St. Mary’s have appealed the shutterings to the Vatican. That review is in process, and a decision will come from Rome, soon.

Meanwhile, it appears increasingly likely the church will rally around the largest parishes like Capitol Hill’s St. Joseph’s that remain.

HELP KEEP CHS PAYWALL-FREE
Subscribe to CHS to help us hire writers and photographers to cover the neighborhood. CHS is a pay what you can community news site with no required sign-in or paywall. To stay that way, we need you.

Become a subscriber to help us cover the neighborhood for as little as $5 a month.