The Decline and Fall of the Roman Catholic Empire

One weekend, on a bleak, and dreary Saturday afternoon I looked around in the middle of mass and realized that I was the youngest person in the entire church. Now, I have been going to church with my parents since I was a toddler. I made my First Communion in the Catholic faith when I was 7, my Confirmation when I was in high school. Then when I was old enough, I began teaching Sunday School to third graders. Never once in all my years did I imagine the day would come when my mother would call to tell me our church had been closed. The parishes of St. Theresa and St. Anthony in Agawam, a small town in Western Massachusetts where I lived for 27 of my 28 years, have been cornerstones of our neighborhood since they were built in the 1920's but the churches strangely began to show signs of struggle a few years back when they combined to form All Saints Parish under one priest.

Then in the wake of the Mullin Report, issued by the Diocese of Springfield in 2004, St. Theresa fell victim to a declining parish population and financial difficulty that couldn't be surmounted. Rev. Steve Amo had tears in his eyes as he read the announcement from Bishop McDonnell that stated the church would be closed by January 1, 2009. It seemed as if the recent history of scandal in the Catholic Church had taken more of a toll than could ever have been predicted on the life of the church. Beginning in 2007, the University of Massachusetts aided the Diocese of Springfield in analyzing the churches in five of the ten regions the diocese represents, helping the diocesan higher ups to predict which parishes would be consolidated and which would ultimately be closed. It began to appear as if the state of Massachusetts had begun to lose its faith in one fell swoop.

There was a time when entering the church was a viable option for many young men and women of faith. Seminaries were breathtakingly beautiful stone mansions on acres of crisp, green land where the religious pledged themselves to a life of service. Students enrolled in Catholic schools to receive a top notch education that included a substantial dose of faith, but now parents fear sending their children to Catholic schools or allowing them to become altar servers for fear of being treated inappropriately by the clergy. As a result, the younger generation of church goers has thinned leaving a massive hole in most parish populations. While I watch each successive age group die out in our local churches, I wonder just how much longer the mystery of religion will survive. The family unit has already gone the way of black and white televisions and rotary phones, so it's only natural that faith in a higher power would go next. It seems impossible to work God and catechism into video games or Facebook, the only way to make things attractive to the under 12 set these days. What kid wants to go to school for six hours a day then give up their TV time in order to go to Bible Study or youth group? Certainly not any of my students. The few 12 year olds that talk about church do so grudgingly, admitting to me, their teacher, that they only go because their parents force them to. Given the choice, I highly doubt any of them would continue to explore their faith in religion, much less pass it on to their own children in years to come.

One has to wonder if this isn't a sign of our world to come. People have become insulated in their own worlds of text messaging and checking emails via their Blackberry, leading this author to believe that perhaps the only way religion will begin to figure prominently in daily life once again will be if Jesus suddenly makes an appearance in his own blog or Podcast. Should priests simply stay in the seminary and conduct mass via webcam? Will the electronic version of the Bible one day replace the good old fashioned leather bound version that my grandmother used to carry back and forth with her on Sunday morning? It's certainly a frightening thought to say the least.