Earlier this year, Rev. George Omwando, the pastor of St. Catherine-St. Lucy Parish, 38 N. Austin Blvd., was abruptly transferred to another parish in Chicago, leaving the 132-calendar year-outdated establishment without a entire-time priest.
“The parish is incredibly upset that he still left,” claimed Tom Lynch, a longtime St. Catherine-St. Lucy parishioner and former chair of the church’s finance committee.
“He was very a great deal a people today human being,” Lynch claimed of Omwando. “Wherever he went, he just unfold smiles and pleasantries. He did his occupation and he did it nicely. He had a perfectly-arranged parish.”
The Archdiocese of Chicago did not give an rationalization of the reassignment. Omwando, who joined the Oak Park church in 2012, commenced his new position as assistant pastor at the Parish of Our Lady of Grace and St. Sylvester in Chicago’s Logan Sq. community on Aug 1. An endeavor to speak to Omwando on Aug. 16 was unsuccessful.
The pastoral modify at St. Catherine-St. Lucy is indicative of the fluid point out of Oak Park’s Catholic landscape, explained Rev. John McGivern, the pastor of St. Edmund Parish, 188 S. Oak Park Ave., who was appointed administrator of St. Catherine-St. Lucy in March.
“Changes are coming to the Catholic Church in Oak Park and I really don’t know what the last footprint will glimpse like,” McGivern reported on Aug. 16. “It’s attainable four parishes become two or 3. The total method has scarcely begun.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for the archdiocese claimed that all four Oak Park parishes belong to the 100 Renew My Church groupings throughout the archdiocese.
“The Oak Park grouping will satisfy by the tumble to discern the most effective path ahead for the four parishes in the grouping,” the archdiocese spokesperson stated. “We hope to share far more updates in the New Yr.”
In June, the 4 Oak Park parishes that make up one Renew My Church grouping — St. Catherine-St. Lucy, St. Edmund, St. Giles, 1025 Columbian Ave., and Ascension, 808 S. East Ave. — started off “the system of discerning the long term of the Catholic Church in Oak Park,” Rev. Carl Morello, the pastor of St. Giles, wrote in a letter to parishioners which is posted on the church’s site.
Past yr, the archdiocese assigned Morello to come to be administrator at Ascension, effectively succeeding Ascension’s previous pastor, Rev. Jim Hulbert. Rev. Rex Pillai, a Chicago priest, was assigned to provide as Ascension’s pastoral chief.
McGivern explained the archdiocese utilizes two benchmarks for serving to it figure out a parish’s vibrancy: a least of 800 worshippers attending the parish on a specified weekend and a bare minimum yearly functioning spending budget of $750,000. These bare minimum benchmarks were being altered downward to check out to account for the affect of the pandemic, McGivern stated.
The pastor said based mostly on his ballpark guesstimate, St. Catherine-St. Lucy’s weekly mass attendance has been around 100 while the weekly attendance at St. Edmund has been all around 200. He also explained that monetarily, St. Catherine-St. Lucy’s profits figures ended up substantially lower than the archdiocese benchmark.
“What I know is that attendance is down in all places,” McGivern reported. “The figures had been presently down just before the pandemic, which was partly, not exclusively, what precipitated Renew My Church. But Covid has truly dropped the figures even a lot more radically.”
Church attendance throughout the place experienced been trending downward a 10 years ago, according to the Pew Study Center’s most the latest Spiritual Landscape Research, conducted in 2014.
The review uncovered that only 27% of more mature Millennials (those people born among 1981 and 1989) attended spiritual services at minimum weekly, as opposed with 56% of Era X grownups (born among 1965 and 1980) and 61% and 67% of Newborn Boomers (born among 1946 and 1964) and the Silent Era (born in between 1928 and 1945), respectively.
And only 29% of grownups in the Chicago metro spot claimed attending religious products and services at minimum at the time a week, in accordance to the Pew research.
The declining church attendance figures and the fiscal deterioration of a lot of parishes across the Chicago metropolitan place are what, in part, prompted Cardinal Blase Cupich to announce the Renew My Church initiative in 2017.
In accordance to the initiative’s internet site, mass attendance across the archdiocese has lessened by 27% about the earlier 20 many years and only 17% of Catholic Millennials claimed attending mass each and every week.
“With Chicago becoming these a group of immigrants, there were parishes that had been a few of blocks from each individual other,” McGivern reported. “One might be German, one particular could be Polish, just one may possibly be Irish. Whilst that made perception when there was an inflow of immigration, it no lengthier would make perception now and it isn’t spiritually and economically possible for there to be so lots of parishes so near to each other.”
But whilst weekly mass attendance and revenue might be flagging, people aren’t the only indicators that the archdiocese utilizes when assessing specific parishes, McGivern explained.
Other factors, these kinds of as significance to the community neighborhood, also arrive into engage in. In accordance to Lynch, that is in which Oak Park’s 4 parishes definitely stand out.
“I never know if this was by strategy or what, but Oak Park’s parishes are astonishingly effectively dispersed,” Lynch claimed. “You’ve obtained just one north, 1 south, a person east and just one west.”
Lynch said he believes that all 4 of the village’s parishes have persuasive conditions to make when it arrives to arguing their one of a kind and indelible impression on the nearby neighborhoods in which they are found. He stated that is specially the scenario with St. Catherine-St. Lucy , which has historically served components of Chicago’s Austin neighborhood.
McGivern stated he’s even hopeful about the future of Oak Park’s Catholic neighborhood, even as neighborhood churches modify to consolidation and Covid.
“Since getting to be administrator of St. Catherine-St. Lucy, I’ve genuinely valued remaining section of that group,” McGivern said. “I’ve been welcomed warmly and we’ve started to bridge the parochial divides involving St. Edmunds and St. Catherine-St. Lucy parishioners. We now share a weekday worship agenda, so we’re now gathering as a single community of faith and that is a superb detail.”
Lynch reported he’s hopeful that attendance will eventually rebound as younger grownups mature older.
“This is a big local community and we’ve acquired a large amount of Catholics,” Lynch mentioned. “We want our church buildings and even although attendance has dropped, I believe ultimately it will come again as the youthful individuals get a minimal more mature and appreciative of what we have to provide.”
CORRECTION: A former edition of this post improperly described Fr. John McGivern as Fr. George McGivern. This article has due to the fact been up-to-date. Rising Community Media regrets the mistake.
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