Faith & Parish

It may be difficult to see how the manner in which the church handles parish closings, the priest shortage or the sometimes bitter debates among its members relates to a bigger picture. At the local level, it becomes a matter of survival, of finding the community that "fits," whether to preserve Latin ritual, for instance, or to preserve a Eucharistic community with lay leaders.

Phyllis Tickle, however, would say that those competing tensions, the anxieties of the era, are among the signs that we are squarely in the midst of a grand shakeup that regularly occurs on a bi-millennial basis to institutionalized Christianity. In her latest book, The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why, she argues that this phenomenon has been "sending intimations of itself" and "slipping up on us for decades in very much the same way spring slips up on us week by week every year."

The idea of taking an extended road trip to get a closer look at Catholic America began to take shape little more than a year ago when I attended a national meeting that demonstrated rather clearly that something is bubbling up from the grassroots in U.S. Catholicism.

The meeting was a kind of culminating gathering, to that point, of a four-year study, funded by the Lilly Endowment and titled, "Emerging Models of Pastoral Leadership."

Cleveland

When I arrived here April 28, the gloom and anxiety hung thick in the air around some Catholic leaders and groups who were either grieving or making plans to resist the news they had received the preceding month: Of the diocese's 224 parishes, 29 would close, 41 would merge, meaning the diocese would end up with 18 new parishes and a net loss of 52.

The situation in Cleveland is one of the latest indications of the seismic shifts in demographics, structure, ministry and other fundamental elements rattling the Catholic church in the United States. The forces moving the plates beneath the surface of the Catholic landscape are many, some well known and obvious, some unseen and mysterious.