Proposal would radically reshape Catholic Baltimore, cut parishes by 66%

The Archdiocese of Baltimore has been working for two years to develop a plan for retooling its operations in the city, and officials have taken their biggest step so far in asserting how serious they are about changing its way of doing business in Baltimore.

A proposal shared Sunday with parishioners would, if approved, cut the number of parishes in the city and several suburbs from from 61 to 21. It would slash the number of worship sites in the same area from 59 to 26.

The sites that would be lost reflect more than 730 years of Catholic life in the city.

Each of these new, geographically larger parishes would feature a single central worship site where Mass would be held and sacraments such as weddings, baptisms and funerals offered. Four of the big parishes would include a second site of worship within their borders.

The plan would incorporate three new models: a mosaic, in which a single site serves as a “one-stop shop” that offers a range of services; a “radiating” type, which calls for one worship site to connect in outward “rays” to locations with specialized services, and a “Catholic commons” approach, a format that resembles a corner store. Most of the remaining worship sites would fit the mosaic model, but at least four would be part of a radiating format. One or two of the corner-store variety would be created.

All would ideally serve what the archdiocese says is the goal of its “Seek the City to Come” initiative, which is to build a church that is leaner and more responsive at a time when Catholicism and Baltimore itself face an array of existential challenges.

The Most Rev. Bruce A. Lewandowski, the Baltimore auxiliary bishop who has helped direct the initiative, says he hopes Seek the City will create parishes that, while smaller, “are alive with Mass, the sacraments and the Gospel [and] are well resourced with ministers and pastoral care workers, and also with material resources.” Another goal, he said, is that they help restore neighborhoods in decline.

Perhaps most excruciating for many, it would mark the end of an era for dozens of landmark Baltimore churches, including St. Vincent de Paul in downtown Baltimore, St. Wenceslaus in East Baltimore’s Middle East neighborhood, St. Joseph’s Monastery Parish in Irvington in Southwest Baltimore, Our Lady of Good Counsel in Locust Point in South Baltimore, and St. Pius X in Towson.

St. Vincent de Paul, which was dedicated in 1841, is the oldest Catholic church in continuous operation in Baltimore. St. Wenceslaus, founded in 1871, was parish home to generations of Czech and Lithuanian immigrants before becoming a mostly Black congregation in recent decades. One Father James Gibbons became Our Lady of Good Counsel’s first pastor in 1862 and laid the cornerstone for St. Joseph’s Monastery Parish 19 years later, when he was a cardinal. St. Pius X has long been a core worship site for Catholics in Towson and North Baltimore.

It has yet to be decided what would be done with those and other buildings in question if they go out of service. They could be sold or repurposed for other uses as anything from recreation or senior centers to legal-service facilities for immigrants. But their days as centers of weekly worship would be over.

The Seek the City process isn’t related to the archdiocese’s bankruptcy case nor the scandal surrounding clergy sex abuse that reappeared in the public eye last year with the publication of a Maryland attorney general’s report, according to Christian Kendzierski, a spokesman for the archdiocese. Also in 2023, the legislature passed the Child Victims Act, allowing lawsuits by more adults who were abused as children.

The initiative began “long before the passage of the law lifting the statute of limitations and the subsequent filing for Chapter 11 reorganization,” he said in an email to The Baltimore Sun. “It’s a ground-up solution being developed based on the church’s decades-long need for creating a sustainable Catholic presence in Baltimore.”

One of the key challenges the city church faces, Lewandowski said, will be accompanying and encouraging parishioners who will be asked to relinquish their attachment to such familiar places and transition to churches within the newly created larger parishes.

While he considers realignment a necessity, he said he’s aware it won’t be easy.

“‘Happy’ is not a word we associate with this,” he said after officials finalized the proposal Friday. “We’re going to go through a tremendous time of grieving, a sense of loss. This is a very significant change.”

Lewandowski stressed that the proposal, the first of a handful his team may produce, is not final. City Catholics will have every opportunity to review it, submit comments about it on the archdiocese website, and share their thoughts at two town halls later this month.

The Seek the City team, which includes some 200 lay and clergy contributors from across Baltimore, will process and incorporate that feedback, develop a more refined version, and run that past several archdiocesan committees before delivering it to Archbishop William E. Lori.

Lori is expected to approve and present a final version in late May or sometime in June, and that will be the one implemented.

But Lewandowski called the proposal a major first step. As hard as the archdiocese has worked to include as many of the faithful as possible in the process so far, he said it will probably hit many with their first real taste of the magnitude of the impending changes.

“For a good number of folks, this is going to hurt,” he said. “They’re going to remember that they were baptized in that church, or maybe their parents were married there, or maybe they’ve buried family members from that church. It’s a heartbreak. I’m not immune to that. This is where we will have to be at our pastoral best for folks, just to be present and listen.”

That said, Lewandowski and other officials decided more than two years ago that the time for radical change had come.

In a city that was once home to as many as 250,000 Catholics, that demographic began a steady decline in the 1980s and has essentially fallen off a cliff over the past decade. Fewer than 5,000 were on church rolls in the city as of 2019, the coronavirus slashed that number even more, and only about 2,000 people now regularly attend churches that were built to seat 25,000 at a time.

The infrastructure that took shape around neighborhood parishes over the decades remained in place. But it became an expensive albatross and was marked by the sharp physical decline of many structures.

“We inherited what we have now, and it worked for generations,” Lewandowski said. “But it isn’t working for us now. Many of our buildings, as beautiful as so many are, were built for a church of the last century and before that … This initiative is really for new life, new energy and rebirth.”

It was in September 2022 that the team started a multiyear process — gathering data and engaging with parishioners to develop a plan for a new landscape for the church in Baltimore. The proposal disseminated Sunday is the end result of a “discerning” phase that included the creation of maps that illuminated matters ranging from population density and median age to cultural background and availability of services.

A number of familiar landmarks would function more or less as before, though with twists. The historic Basilica of the Assumption in downtown Baltimore would anchor a diocese that includes the territory of the Church of the Immaculate Conception in West Baltimore’s Madison Park, for instance. The Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in Homeland would anchor a North Baltimore parish that would absorb St. Pius X, St. Mary of the Assumption in Govans in North Baltimore, Northwest Baltimore’s Shrine of the Sacred Heart in Mount Washington with its 200-strong Filipino community, and other churches.

Meanwhile, St. Bernardine in Edmondson Village in Southwest Baltimore, St. Ambrose in Central Park Heights in Northwest Baltimore, and New All Saints in Howard Park in West Baltimore, would anchor a largely African American region with parishes called West Baltimore, Near Northwest and Far Northwest. Sacred Heart of Jesus in Highlandtown in Southeast Baltimore would be one of four churches serving the city’s growing Hispanic population, including a revamped Holy Rosary in Upper Fells Point (also in Southeast Baltimore) that would double as home to its Polish Catholics.

Innovations include storefront-style sites in the Cherry Hill Town Center in South Baltimore and the Edmondson Village Shopping Center in Southwest Baltimore. St. Thomas Aquinas in Hampden in North Baltimore would merge with the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen, but it would also serve as a campus for two missionary communities that would train laypeople to evangelize.

Church officials believe the proposed changes would bolster existing strengths. St. Leo the Great in Little Italy, near downtown, would absorb St. Vincent de Paul’s longtime mission of serving the homeless. Archdiocese officials hope focusing resources from across a larger area would improve such services.

“We need to concentrate our efforts to strengthen what we have,” Lewandowski said. “We need to get smaller to get bigger.”

Whatever changes do meet with approval over the next several weeks, he added, the church will work prayerfully to accompany the faithful as they adjust to new conditions. Churches in transition would remain open indefinitely for performing important sacraments, for example, and church leaders will serve as sounding boards for those considering which worship sites to attend.

“If we prune a tree, it concentrates its energies, and then it continues to grow,” Lewandowski said, adding that such cutting, while painful, is necessary to preserve the larger organism.

The archdiocese will hold two comment sessions on the proposal: on April 25 at Archbishop Curley High School in Northeast Baltimore and on April 30 at Mount Saint Joseph’s High School in Southwest Baltimore. Both will start at 6:30 p.m. Lewandowski said anyone who wishes to participate will also be able to do so remotely.