In 2020 the diocesan plans for holding a Synod were highjacked by Covid. The Synod was the big plan: to engage the whole of the diocese in a conversation and ask everyone’s opinion on how we as a diocese should move forward. However, even by the middle of the next year, we couldn’t have the big meeting that was planned, but had to hold it online. Out of this came the Pastoral Plan which highlighted six areas that we needed to concentrate on as the church in this archdiocese moves forward and works together. They are:
- Becoming a church that accompanies people through life;
- Becoming a church that honours the vocation of all the baptised;
- Becoming a church where synodality is embedded;
- Becoming a church that renews its organisational structures and administers its property to serve its mission;
- Becoming a church where young people and young adults flourish;
- Becoming a church that cares for its priests.
It’s five years on from the Synod and it may appear to you that not much has happened since then. After all, young people and young adults are still scarce on the ground in our churches and whilst a good deal of work has been done on caring for its priests the other four areas appear not to have been started on.
And yet … There has been a good deal of work done on area four: becoming a church that renews its organisational structures and administers its property to serve its mission.
The first thing we have done is to organise each of the thirteen deaneries across the diocese into families of parishes. So, take our deanery for instance of Wigan and Leigh. We have organised ourselves into four separate families: Wigan is one family, Ashton and Platt Bridge another, Atherton and Boothstown another and finally we, Golborne and Croft are linked with Leigh. The idea is to work together across parish boundaries and to pool resources and support one another. So, for instance we operate joint baptism and Confirmation programmes with Fr Kieran, we advertise each others events and we have organised walks to bring parishioners together. Going forward there is the prospect of employing a catechesis/pastoral worker to function across the family, paid for by our joint parishes.
In addition to families of parishes across all the deaneries, each deanery also has a Deanery Synod Council comprising one rep from each Parish, alongside the parish clergy and chaired by in our case Linda Morris. The DSC as it is known has been functioning for four years now to bring the deanery together, increase communication across the deanery and see how we can better function as a deanery.
Much but not all of this has come about because of the figures we have regarding the number of priests that we will have serving our archdiocese going forward. Whilst we have over 100 diocesan priests at present, it is projected that within 12 years this figure will have dropped to around 40. In our deanery we currently have 11 priests serving 14 parishes and 20 churches. That figure will over time drop to no more than five priests for each deanery and in some deaneries they will have only 4. And five priests covering 20 churches I’m afraid isn’t doable.
So this is what is driving our future development as church within the archdiocese- and it’s no different across the rest of the country. With so few priests it will be difficult to administer so many churches and associated buildings. But in truth we have put off looking at restructuring our parishes for some time now for fear of upsetting parishioners. Some parishes are running at big losses, others don’t really have a big enough congregation to sustain themselves going forward but continue on. But now we have to act. Through the Parish Development Strategy which we began last February and which will take probably two year to complete we will identify how we can reorder each deanery so that we can work together better. The fall in clergy numbers won’t show any significant improvement for a good while and by that I mean it might be decades before we see an increase in priestly vocations so it means that in all our parishes the laity: ie all of you, will need to play a more significant role in how your parish serves its people.
As part of the Parish Development Strategy (or PDS as it has come to be known) an audit has been taken of all resources – of people, buildings and finance so that a proper understanding of parish can be seen by the diocese. We’ve also been asked to share our vision for our parishes going forward- what do we expect our parish to look like in the future and how might we be able to serve its needs. The reality is that we have in our diocese not enough priests and not enough parishioners for all the churches buildings we currently possess. And as I said some of our parishes are running at big losses. And whilst we are being positive in how we can evangelise in our churches the reality is that some of our church buildings will have to close, and others will have to work in a markedly different way.
As to which churches stay open and which churches close, the audit and vision documents that we have sent to the archdiocese are just the first stage in the PDS process. But allow me to remind you again, this is a diocesan wide process- in the past churches have closed when priests have retired or become ill. But doing things piecemeal is not the best way of doing things. We need to see how we can properly structure our churches across the deanery in order to best serve the needs of the peoples they serve. On one level this process may well look like it’s only about loss and the prospect of the church closures, but once we have settled on which churches are going to remain we then have to focus on how we build them up and grow them and apply the resources we have, both people and finance to the churches growth.
Later on, all parishioners i.e. everyone will have the opportunity to voice their concerns, opinions and suggestions for the future of each church when we hold individual parish meetings before we submit them to the Archdiocese for consideration. Ultimately the decision as to which church will close and which will stay open lies in the hands of the Archbishop. Some churches and their parishioners may well consider themselves safe – thinking that the Archbishop wouldn’t dream of closing us. But even churches that do stay open may have to function differently- for instance those that have two weekend masses may well have to reduce to one and so on. For now we have to recognise that church as we know it is changing. And we may have to look beyond the normal parochial boundaries to see how we can function as church and continue to live the gospel that is fundamental to our lives.