Pushing to fill the pews The mission of Malone

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Bishop Richard Malone is looking for a lot more people like Scott Dennis and his family.

The 12-year-old Passadumkeag boy and his 8-year-old sister, Katrina Stinson, were among more than 350 people in Maine who became Catholic this year.

Dennis spoke about his journey of faith earlier this month at a Mass celebrated by Malone at St. John’s Catholic Church in Bangor.

Like many Catholics of her generation, Lois Dennis, Scott’s mother, stopped practicing her faith before her children were born. She enrolled her children in All Saints Catholic School in Bangor for educational rather than religious reasons.

Over the past year, however, as her children studied to become Catholic, Lois Dennis reconnected with the faith of her childhood.

“They asked me why they weren’t baptized and told me they wanted take Communion. I told them what they had to do: Attend classes every week and early Mass on Sundays. But they wanted to do it and never once complained. I’m very proud of them.”

And, most likely, so is Malone.

Installed as head of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland on March 31, the 58-year-old bishop met last week with the priests and lay leaders who serve the 135 parishes in the diocese. Building on work done by his predecessor, Bishop Joseph Gerry, Malone has said that evangelization is the key to the vitality of the Catholic church.

He has outlined a two-pronged approach to make that happen: Filling the pews and restructuring parish “communities.” That could mean transforming the current 35 “clusters,” now a group of churches in the same geographic area, into “parishes.”

“We know from our day-to-day ministerial experience how urgent is the need for a new evangelization in America, and in Maine,” Malone said last week. “And we cannot forget our mission: inviting those who do not yet know Christ to encounter him.”

Malone not only wants to bring in those who have never attended a church. He wants men and women like Lois Dennis to return.

The same demographic trends that have hit other parts of the state’s economy have affected the Catholic church.

When Gerry became bishop in 1989, there were 279,000 Catholics in Maine. That dropped to 234,000 over the next 15 years. In 1990, Maine’s population was 1.23 million; in 2000, it was 1.27 million.

The shift in population from northern to southern Maine, aging and the loss of manufacturing jobs affected some Maine towns dramatically.

Malone said that he saw the effects of those trends on his first visit to northern Maine last month.

“In parish after parish, I heard of the effects of economic crisis, declining populations, public schools closing or being regionalized, decreasing offertory income and more,” Malone said. “In just about every parish I have visited, priests and lay leaders and other leaders have acknowledged that something has to change in the way we structure and staff our parish communities if we are going to become truly effective in carrying out our mission as church.”

Malone last week announced that a committee will come up with suggestions to realign parishes and to more effectively support various ministries. The makeup of the committee is to be announced June 10, and the group’s report is due in January. The bishop also put a hold on construction until the report is completed.

Driving the need for reconfiguration is the expected shortage of priests. Because of upcoming retirements, there will be about 65 priests by 2010 to do the work that about 100 priests do today.

Malone said this will require that Catholics stop equating parishes with church buildings and start thinking of a parish as a community of worshippers with more than one campus or worship site.

“We have to reduce the number of parishes with the objective of making the mission more doable. The idea is to bring several currently distinct parish communities together as one, with more than one worship site or campus. The newly formed parish communities will have a single parish pastoral council, finance council, and commission for each area of parish life and ministry, as determined by the pastor and parish pastoral council. We have models of this sort already existing.”

In Bangor, All Saints School has been using a similar model for years. It has one board and rents space in the city’s two parish centers. The school also describes the building that houses pre-kindergarten through third-grade classes as the St. Mary’s campus and the building that houses fourth through eighth grades as the St. John’s campus.

Malone also laid out some specific figures that have not been made public before.

“We cannot run 135 distinct parishes and 44 missions with 60 to 65 priests and lay leaders in a few years. We will need to give special attention to not abandoning less densely populated areas of the diocese. There are places where needed parishes, perhaps for reasons of location, may be struggling to survive, and the diocese will have to help those parishes.”

Malone said that throughout the restructuring process, the driving must be the question: How does this restructuring support a new evangelism?

Scott Dennis, who attends classes on the St. John’s campus of All Saints, may have an answer. He said this week that being a Catholic means “to believe in God, be friendly to other people and always forgive.”

He also said that his favorite part of the Mass is receiving the Eucharist.

“My favorite part of the Mass is Communion, because I am taking in Jesus Christ through his body and blood” he said. “I feel that’s really important.

“I feel different after communion. I feel happier and I feel more in touch with God every single time I do it. And, I think, ‘Hey, I’m a Catholic now.'”