I live in an area where there are three RC parishes within blocks of one another, each with a church and school building (only one of which is in use for one part of a regional RC elementary school). There used to be four parishes, but maybe 15 years ago or so, one that was already combined with a neighboring parish was finally closed and the church sold.

In 2020, a tornado came through and tore half of the roof off of one church and damaged the structure of one of the steeples. The church and (unused) school were the smallest of the three. I am a member of the parish, and have been since we moved here when I was a kid. I have a lot of memories there (most good; serving with a weird priest who we later found out was into young boys, not so much). I haven’t been able to figure out why we were keeping all of these churches and buildings. Well, tornado causes a massive amount of damage, ok, this will be the thing to push the diocese to do something.

They did something alright. They decided to spend millions of dollars to restore and repair the damage. You know, so the local parishioners can continue to be saddled with maintaining three large physical plants that all have large utility bills and maintenance needs. And then we get pestered every month or so with notices saying, “Look what we did for you! Now you need to donate more money to us because we lost members and things are expensive! And we need to maintain these buildings!”

Imagine what a couple of million dollars could have done for local folks in need? Imagine how much better the available income could support the physical buildings if there were fewer buildings?

After this massive waste of resources, I can’t help but see even more clearly that we’ve lost our way. We care more about buildings and things and prestige than we do about people. I know that has been an ongoing theme among church leadership for a long time, but when it makes it all the way down to the local parishes, it is really pretty sad.