Faith & Parish

WASHINGTON – In just 10 years U.S. Catholic parishes have become considerably bigger and more diverse, the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate reported as part of a major new study on Catholic parish life.

In 2000, just one-quarter of the nation’s parishes had more than 1,200 registered households. By 2010 that had grown to one-third. At the lower end, parishes with fewer than 200 registered households dropped from one-fourth of the nation’s total in 2000 to barely more than one in seven a decade later (24 percent to 15 percent).

WASHINGTON – Addressing more than 300 U.S. Catholic social justice leaders, the Vatican’s Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson urged them to keep their focus on building a just society “at a time of great financial difficulty not only for the United States but for the world.”

In working for justice “we are the reflections of the living body of Christ,” he said.

Turkson, former archbishop of Cape Coast, Ghana, and now president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, is in Washington for the 2011 Catholic Social Ministry Gathering, which has drawn more than 300 participants from dioceses and other Catholic organizations across the country.

In his keynote address he focused on the 120th anniversary to the first papal social encyclical, Leo XIII’s 1891 letter Rerum Novarum, on the condition of labor, and the legacy of Catholic social teaching that has grown since then.

The Catholic hospitals in Arizona provide managed health care to qualified poor people under a state Medicaid program called the Mercy Care Plan -- a plan that is now under severe church scrutiny.

In December, Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of Phoenix challenged Mercy Care, saying that under it Catholic facilities are providing, or at least formally cooperating in providing, abortion and other family-planning services that are prohibited by the U.S. Catholic bishops’ “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Facilities.”

The directives are normative for Catholic health care in the United States.

Olmsted decreed that St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix can no longer call itself Catholic because in 2009 it performed an operation that he and his advisors consider a direct abortion and because he has judged that its involvement in the Mercy Care Plan over many years violates several of the bishops’ directives.

NEW YORK -- As Jennifer Sawyer prepared the remarks she was to deliver on Jan. 29 at a Fordham University conference titled “Lost? Twenty-Somethings and the Church,” she Googled “spiritual but not religious” -- a phrase she said many of her friends use to describe themselves -- and discovered an entire Web site dedicated to the idea of seeking faith on one’s own terms. What this brought into focus for Sawyer, a 23-year-old production assistant who divides her time between three New York City parishes, was that people are looking for a spiritual connection, but not necessarily finding it within the walls of the church.

“People have difficulties trying to have a relationship with something that doesn’t seem to understand them,” Sawyer said at the conference, “especially when everybody seems to be talking about us, and not to us.”