Informal Statistical Study: Roman Catholic Parishes
in the Archdiocese of Boston (Part I)
Stan and Eileen Doherty
February 19, 2004

We have just passed the midpoint in the most recent “reconfiguration” of parishes in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston (hereafter RCAB). For each parish in the Archdiocese, there are three possible outcomes:

• Status quo: No change in parish configuration.

• Merger: The services and personnel of one parish are merged with those of a nearby parish. The parish facilities remain in operation.

• Suppression: The services and personnel assigned to a parish are reassigned or terminated. All parish assets and debts are subsumed by the Archdiocese.

RCAB has merged or suppressed parishes in the past (see http://www.rcab.org/Parish/reconfiguration.html), typically after conducting a lengthy and generally public process involving many members of the affected community. An ongoing evaluation of ones resources and mission is a healthy practice for both profit corporations and not-for-profit corporations. That said, this round of evaluations and decisions about parish closings has some unusual qualities:

• Timetable: This is happening quickly. From the announcement to priests that there would be closings to the actual announcement of parishes to be closed, there will be scarcely 3.5 months. Historically, RCAB schedules discussions and decisions about closing individual parishes to take place slowly, within 12-18 months.

• Scope: There will be 60 or so parishes merged or suppressed. That’s roughly 17% of all parishes in the Archdiocese. There is no precedent in this Archdiocese or in other US dioceses for closings of this scope.

• Rationale: When the effort to evaluate and close parishes was announced, there was significant discussion about the reasons why RCAB needed to evaluate its resources and mission. That’s good. There was little or no discussion of alternatives to parish closings. The decision to close parishes on this scale was not placed in the context of alternative solutions to the problems facing the Archdiocese. Surely closing 17% of our parishes was not the only option discussed.

• Specific selection criteria: The Archdiocese described several of the factors that would influence its decisions about which parishes would stay and which would go, but it did not assert that these factors were the only ones or that they were in any particular priority. For all practical purposes, the specific criteria are not known publicly.

• Mission: When organizations make decisions to increase or decrease resources, they do so in the context of their current mission and their future mission. As the mission changes, so do the resources required to achieve and sustain it. There is a curious disinterest in characterizing the revised mission for the Archdiocese in the 21^st Century. Where does it want to be in thirty years? What is the master plan?

Faced with these unusual circumstances, the laity living and worshipping in RCAB parishes do not have sufficient information to make an informed opinion. Yes, we’re Catholics, but we’re also American citizens and we’re accustomed to being informed about issues (whenever possible) before decisions get made that affect us. Although we can assume that the clergy and laity involved directly in the decision-making process have access to detailed and comprehensive information, public sources of detailed information are limited. We are aware of three public, official sources of information about the status of parishes before this round of closings:

• The special feature “Parish Pastoral Statistics for 2003 Released” published in the January 30, 2004 issue of the Boston Pilot. This article provides a sacramental index for each parish: average weekly attendance, 2003 Baptisms, 2003 First Communions, 2003 Confirmations, 2003 Marriages, and 2003 Funerals. This report is also available on the RCAB website at:
  http://www.rcab.org/Parish_Reconfiguration/PastoralStats2003.html.

• The television special hosted by Archbishop Sean O’Malley that aired February 5, 2004 on Boston Catholic TV. Archbishop O’Malley shared some statistical information and put that information in context.

• The Archdiocese also publishes an annual Directory and makes most of that directory information available on the RCAB website at: http://www.rcab.org/Parish/HomePage.html. The 2004 edition of this directory will be published some time this spring. Until the new edition is released, the 2003 edition will have to suffice as the most comprehensive, public source of information about RCAB parishes.

Toward the end of assisting interested members of the Archdiocese in understanding where we were before this round of parish mergers and suppressions, we offer this informal, statistical study of the information published in these three official sources.

A. Background for this Informal Study

Here’s how we collected and analyzed the information published about RCAB parishes in the 2003 online directory (hereafter 2003OD). This source serves as the foundation for most of the statistical work in this informal study.

1. Data Collection

We converted to an Excel spreadsheet file all available data from the 2003OD as it appeared on January 25, 2004. Similarly, we converted the web site containing pastoral statistics to Excel format and integrated it with the 2003OD data. We may, inadvertently, have introduced a small number of transcription errors into the spreadsheet data, but we did our very best to check the spreadsheet against original sources.

Between these sources, we captured the following information for each parish in the 2003OD:

• Parish information: parish name, location, RCAB region, RCAB vicariate, and date of establishment

• Parish staff: pastors, parochial vicars, priests in residence, senior priests, deacons, directors of religious education, school principals, youth ministers, and music ministers.

• Educational institutions: elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools associated with a parish

• Language and ethnic affiliations: language masses and outreach services associated with parishes

• Sacramental index statistics

This is a significant amount of information. When entered into an electronic format such as a spreadsheet, this data allowed us to do some rudimentary statistical analysis across many fields of interest.

2. Data Not Available

The 2003OD was not intended to provide exhaustive information about every aspect of parish life in every parish. The following information is not published in the 2003OD and, therefore, plays no role in our statistical analyses:

• Registered parishioners: 2003 data and long-term trends

• Financials: Average weekly collections, parish contributions to annual fund-raising events, special donations, cash assets, outstanding debts, and average contributions per registered parishioner

• Buildings: square footage of parish churches, rectories, convents, schools, and other facilities

• Physical plant: the state of renovations, reconstruction, or new construction

• Real estate: acreage of parish property, fair-market value for buildings and grounds

• Annual operating budgets: staff, physical plant, debt repayment

• Schools: student enrollment, staff teachers, custodians, support personnel

• Volunteers: numbers and roles

Note: The 2003OD does not focus on seminaries, religious houses, and educational institutions unaffiliated with parishes, Catholic charities, campus ministries, other non-parish ministries, or administrative offices. Information rolled up from the 2003OD, therefore, will not accurately represent all the staff, institutions, or activities in RCAB.

3. Data Accuracy

How accurately does the 2003OD reflect the state of our RCAB parishes before this process was announced this past December? Several variables affect the accuracy of the information that we used for this informal analysis:

• Data collection on the RCAB side: The Archdiocese updates the content in its directory largely in response to updated information received from parishes. The 2003OD cannot be significantly more accurate than the data feeding into it. A casual review of information in the 2003OD suggests that the information for some parishes is quite current while that for other parishes is months or years out of date.

• Publication cycle: Typically, the annual RCAB Directory is published in the spring. If the 2004 Directory is published this spring, then the data published in the 2003OD and captured in January 2004 can be up to 10 months out of date. If the publication of the 2004 Directory is postponed, the 2003OD data will be further out of date.

• Database errors: There are occasional, obvious errors in the 2003OD data. These are generally harmless discrepancies between the database headings and the values published for those headings. In converting the data to our spreadsheet, we silently corrected these few errors.

The 2003OD information for an individual parish is more likely to be out of date than the aggregate information derived from the individual parishes. In other words, the big picture is probably accurate.

4. Updates to the Data

The 2003OD data is our baseline. As the process of identifying parishes to be merged or suppressed advances, we plan to add new fields to this spreadsheet database and to assess what has changed relative to the 2003OD. Certainly the results of the reconfiguration process and the data to be published in the 2004OD would be appropriate to evaluate and integrate. Stay tuned.

B. RCAB Parishes and Their Communities

The 2003OD provides significant insight into the state of our parishes before the closings.

1. Basic Information

The 2003OD provides data on 361 parishes organized into five regions.

Table 1: RCAB Parishes by Archdiocesan Region

Chart 1: RCAB Parishes by Archdiocesan Region

2. Parishes in Their Geographical Communities

Relative to other states in the US, the population in Massachusetts is quite dense. The US Census Bureau reports for 2000 that the national average for persons per square mile was 79.6. The same census reports that the average for the entire state of Massachusetts was 809.8. When we consider that the relative population density in Western Massachusetts is much lower than that in Eastern Massachusetts, it’s obvious that most of the communities in RCAB are populous. By any national standard, RCAB has no rural communities and few sparsely populated suburban communities. Our parishes, therefore, are predominantly serving the following types of communities:

Table 2: Types of Massachusetts Communities

Roughly half of RCAB parishes serve suburban communities with a population of less than 30,000. Inner-city parishes make up the next largest class.

Table 3: RCAB Parishes by Type of Community

Chart 2: RCAB Parishes by Type of Community

Based on parish establishment dates in the 2003OD, we see a clear trend. The urban parishes were established earlier than the metro parishes that were established earlier than the suburban parishes.

Table 4: Average Parish Dates of Establishment by Type of Community

3. Parishes in Their Ethnic Communities

Parishes in RCAB continue to support traditional American ethnic communities as well as new immigrant ethnic communities (see http://www.rcab.org/oea/directory/Default.htm). The 2003OD does not call out ethnic support explicitly in its data, so we have made best guesses based on languages in which Mass is offered and community outreach centers affiliated with a parish. We see quite a variety.

Chart 3: RCAB Parishes by Ethnic Affiliation

4. Parishes and Community Income

Developing strategies to maintain and increase income is a necessity for every non-profit corporation. Although we do not have public data on the amount of money collected from each RCAB parish, we can apply some common sense to guess where revenue is flowing in to or out of RCAB parishes. We can correlate two data points for each parish:

• Location (town or city)

• Mean household income for that location (town or city)

The Massachusetts Institute for Social and Economic Research (MISER) publishes income statistics for each town or city in Massachusetts. We used its most current free database for 1990 income statistics (http://www.umass.edu/miser/dataop/data.htm) to classify Massachusetts towns into four income categories: affluent, comfortable, moderate, and low. Yes, this approach has obvious flaws if applied to an individual parish. Within any town there are variations in mean household income. In a big city like Boston, these variations can sometimes be significant. Holy Name Parish in West Roxbury, for example, serves a different community with a different mean household income than Saint Patrick’s in Roxbury. At a high level – across the entire Archdiocese – the correlation between location (town or city) and mean household income for that location is meaningful and relevant to the issue of parish mergers and suppressions. Here’s how parishes in RCAB stack up against income categories:

Table 5: RCAB Parishes by Location and Mean Household Income

Chart 4: RCAB Parishes by Location and Mean Household Income

Numerically, households with affluent and comfortable incomes make up about half of the parishes in the Archdiocese. In terms of Sunday collections and special fund-raising drives, it is reasonable to assume that these same parishes contribute the vast majority of the revenue coming into the Archdiocese.

5. Parish Establishment Through History

The 2003OD offers some insight into the growth of the Catholic community in Eastern Massachusetts.

The history of parish establishment

Using the data on establishment dates in the 2003OD, we see how many parishes in RCAB were established since 1788 (Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Boston).

Chart 5: RCAB Parish Establishment Since 1788

Although some of the church structures established since 1788 have been demolished and replaced with new structures, it is safe to conclude that the vast majority of church structures in RCAB parishes are as old as their establishment dates. The Archdiocese is in the same position as the State. Funding the ongoing maintenance and renovation of these aging structures will consume an ever-increasing percentage of Archdiocesan and parish revenue. The money required to repair and maintain them prevents parishes and Archdiocesan agencies from promoting other pastoral programs.

Historic preservation

78% of our parish structures are over 50 years old. Any structure over 50 years old in the State of Massachusetts receives limited protection from demolition under the Massachusetts Historical Commission (http://www.state.ma.us/sec/mhc/mhcidx.htm). Most communities have historical commissions charged with the preservation of historically significant structures. These commissions cannot prevent the demolition of any structure indefinitely, but they can delay any permit to demolish a structure for 6-12 months. Historic preservation will be an issue.

C. RCAB Parish Staffing

Although we cannot reconstruct complete parish payrolls from the 2003OD data, we can get some sense of the numbers of people who would be affected by parish closings. These parish closings will affect the lives and livelihoods of many, many more laypeople than clergy. Laypeople, especially full-time staff people, have a direct interest in the deliberations about closing parishes that is disproportionate with the degree to which they are allowed to participate in those deliberations. The many full-time volunteers, largely invisible in the 2003OD, will be affected as well. Local parishes represent an opportunity for these many volunteers to make a contribution to their community, parish, and Archdiocese.

1. Staff Profiles in RCAB Parishes

Although the information in the 2003OD is not comprehensive, it provides insight into the numbers and roles of parish staff people potentially affected by the closings.

Table 6: RCAB Parish Staff

Chart 6: RCAB Parish Staff

Without more detailed information about everyone working in our parishes, it is impossible to determine whether the ratio of laity to clergy is 5:1, 10:1, or 20:1. Continued employment for clergy displaced by parish closings is all but assured; this is not the case for other parish employees or for dedicated volunteers.

2. Ordained Priests Assigned to Parishes

The declining number of ordained priests is undoubtedly a major factor motivating the closure of RCAB parishes. To get a handle on the issue, we need to make a distinction between priests assigned to RCAB parishes primarily to perform parish tasks from those assigned to parishes or living in parishes for other reasons.

Table 7: Roles of Ordained Priests in RCAB Parishes

Priests in residence and senior priests can assist pastors and parochial vicars in day-to-day ministry, but they are not, from a personnel point of view, at the center of “rightsizing” the number of parishes to the number of available, full-time parish priests.

Looking more closely at the number of pastors and parochial vicars assigned to RCAB parishes, the 2003OD indicates that the majority of RCAB parishes are served by one ordained priest, the pastor.

Table 8: Parish Assignments by Pastors and Parochial Vicars

Chart 7: Parish Assignments by Pastors and Parochial Vicars

58% (208) of RCAB parishes have only one ordained priest (the pastor) assigned. 47% (152) of all pastors work in a parish that has no other priests (parochial vicars, priests in residence, or senior priests). This represents 28% of all priests (547) listed in the 2003OD.

3. The RCAB Priest Shortage in the Next 20 Years

In his February 5 television address, Archbishop O’Malley mentioned that the average age of ordained priests in the Archdiocese was approximately 60 years old. This conforms to the national statistics compiled by CARA (http://cara.georgetown.edu/) for the US Council of Catholic Bishops. Relative to the number of priests staying in active ministry, only 10% of the ordained population is being replenished by newly ordained priests in any decade. Assuming a standard deviation for the age of RCAB priests around the average age of 60 in 2003, we can project the effects of retirement (age 75) and death (varying percentages for men in their 60s-90s).

Table 9: RCAB Priests by Age 2003-2023 (Projected)

Table 10: RCAB Priests – Active and Retired 2003-2023 (Projected)

Chart 8: RCAB Priests by Age 2003-2023 (Projected)

This is an optimistic projection, because it assumes that RCAB sustains the current number of young men in priestly formation programs and that no priests younger than 75 years of age leave active ministry for any reason. By 2043 RCAB will not have sufficient number of available ordained priests to support the one-priest-one-parish staffing model for more than a fraction of the parishes in the 2003OD. Either the current model for ordained ministry needs to change or the staffing model needs to change. In either case, it is clear that the role of permanent deacons and pastoral associates in the day-to-day management of parish life will expand significantly in coming decades.

This begs a question – will the parish closing in 2004 attempt to “rightsize” the number of parishes for the number of ordained ministers available in 2003, 2013, or 2023? Anyone who has been involved in the unpleasant task of planning a layoff or RIF in the corporate world knows that it is better to make one deep cut every few years than to make incremental cuts every year or two. The disruption to the overall organization of continuous downsizing is significant.

D. Parishes and Education

It is likely that some Catholic schools will close when the geographical parishes supporting them are merged or suppressed. There are three types of Catholic educational institutions in the Boston area:

• Schools directly affiliated with RCAB and with an RCAB parish: An RCAB parish owns and subsidizes the operation of a school. Theoretically, the parish school could be merged or suppressed in conjunction with its parish being merged or suppressed.

• Schools directly affiliated with RCAB but not affiliated with an RCAB parish: A Catholic school operates under the general auspices of the Archdiocese, but functions apart from any local Parish. Closing a parish near an independent Catholic school would not automatically change the status of that independent school.

• Schools not directly affiliated with RCAB or an RCAB parish: These schools operate independently.

See http://abcso.org/schooldirectory.htm for a current directory of schools in the Archdiocese.

1. Parishes and the Education of Children and Teens

33% of all parishes listed in the 2003OD have some sort of parish school.

Table 11: RCAB Parishes Supporting Parish Schools

C
learly, RCAB parishes are into the business of providing elementary education to Catholic and non-Catholic children. The majority of these elementary schools were constructed in the early- to mid-20^th Century, so many of the facilities face the same maintenance and renovation issues as do aging church structures.

We would need more information about school enrollments and finances to draw further conclusions.

2. Parishes and Adult Faith Formation

Although RCAB parishes support Archdiocesan adult faith formation programs, notably The Archdiocesan Institute for Ministry: Formation for Laity (see http://www.rcab.org/aim/locations.html), individual parishes do not seem to dedicate facilities and professional staff to formal adult faith formation in the way that they dedicate such resources to the education of children and teens. Parish-affiliated schools focusing on the formal education of adults are not visible in the 2003OD. Parish closings would not, in all likelihood, have much of an affect on the operation or relative level of investment in adult faith formation.

E. Sacramental Statistics

Parishes are responsible for tabulating the number of baptisms, first communions, confirmations, marriages, and funerals performed each year. The “sacramental index” for a given parish is a formula applied to the number of sacraments performed by each parish:

Number of baptisms + (2 x number of marriages) + number of funerals

If a parish performed 50 baptisms, 50 marriages, and 50 funerals in a given year, its sacramental index for that year would be 200 (50+100+50).

Although the sacramental statistics published by RCAB on January 30, 2004 do not provide the calculated sacramental index for each parish, we downloaded all the raw numbers and performed the calculation.

Note: Four parishes listed in the 2003OD do not appear in the January 2004 listing of parishes: Saint Joseph (Andover), Saint Francis (Lawrence), Saint Mary Chapel (Boston), and Saint Nicholas (Abington).

The average parish has an index of 156. The median index is 135.

Table 12: RCAB Parish Sacramental Indexes

Chart 9: RCAB Parish Sacramental Indexes

There is a significant range here. The parish with the largest sacramental index, St. Micheal’s in North Andover (655), has more than four times the RCAB parish average (156). Parishes on the other end of the spectrum such as Saint Joseph’s in Hyde Park (20) or Saint Philip Neri in Waban (19) represent only 14% or 15% of the parish average (156). If the 2003 sacramental indexes for parishes were the primary variable in identifying candidate parishes for mergers or suppressions, then the sixty parishes with a sacramental index lower than 62 would be in trouble.

In Appendix A we have provided a listing of RCAB parishes sorted by their calculated 2003 sacramental index.

F. Other Statistics of Interest

With this baseline data about RCAB parishes, it is possible to build a picture of many topics of interest to RCAB laity. We look at two here – Voice of the Faithful Affiliates in RCAB and signers of the December 2002 petition to Cardinal Law that he resign.

1. VOTF Parish Affiliates in RCAB

The National Voice of the Faithful web site (http://www.votf.org/Parish_Voice/east.html) lists 43 VOTF affiliates in RCAB. These affiliates fall into two general categories:

• Parish affiliates: VOTF affiliates formed in the context of an individual parish. These affiliates were all formed prior to Cardinal Law’s ban on the formation of new parish affiliates.

• Area affiliates: VOTF affiliates formed in the context of a group of geographically close parishes. Many of these affiliates are banned from meeting on their parish grounds.

Each RCAB region has its mix of parish affiliates and area affiliates.

Table 13: RCAB VOTF Affiliates by RCAB Region

Relative to the total number of RCAB parishes, VOTF has established a foothold in the Archdiocese (15%). There are, quite probably, parishioners from most every RCAB parish attending VOTF meetings and events, but organizationally VOTF has significant work to do before it can represent a numerical majority of parishes.

Table 14: RCAB VOTF Penetration

There are more parishes scheduled to be merged or suppressed than there are parishes with formal VOTF affiliations.

2. Signers of the Petition to Cardinal Law

58 priests in the Archdiocese signed a petition in December of 2002 asking Bernard Cardinal Law to resign from his position. We correlated the Boston Globe article listing the signers with the 2003OD to discover that 34 of these priests were assigned to RCAB parishes in some pastoral role. The others worked in the Archdiocese in some other ministry.

F. Conclusion

Aligning organizational resources to organizational mission is a requirement for both profit and not-for-profit organizations. The construction frenzy that the Archdiocese experienced in the 1890s and early 20^th Century was such an alignment on the positive side. Performing a comprehensive review of our parishes and how they are positioned to meet demand in the future is long overdue. Look at the age of our diocesan structures. Look at the trends in population and income demographics. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston was built, in large part, by three generations of immigrants and their children. For the sake of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those builders of the Archdiocese, we do need to realign resources and mission. In the next several weeks we will learn how RCAB plans to adjust its resources for the early 21^st Century. Conspicuously missing from the announcements and discussions and listening session handouts is any sense of a reconfigured mission corresponding to reconfigured resources. What’s the plan for the day after the last parish has been suppressed? How soon will RCAB need to make another round of closings to adjust to the dwindling numbers of ordained priests? What’s the plan for empowering pastoral associates? Is there an expanded role for permanent deacons after this reconfiguration? What happens to all the laypeople displaced by closings? Downsizing a not-for-profit organization without providing a rationale or plan for its future ability to succeed is unusual and disturbing.

Even this informal analysis of RCAB parishes suggests that beginning the process of reconfiguring RCAB resources to RCAB mission was necessary and long overdue. If the previous Archdiocesan administration avoided performing a reconfiguration for many years, we wonder why the decision-making process has happen in a matter of weeks – without a long-range plan and without broad participation from those who built the parishes, the laity.

Stay tuned for Part II.

Appendix A – RCAB Parishes Sorted by 2003 Sacramental Index