Within recent memory, the pews at my parish’s main Sunday morning mass, the one with the children’s liturgy, were reliably full, with latecomers standing at the back. Attendance has fallen over the years, to be sure, whether due to the sexual abuse scandals or general societal/demographic changes, but we’ve plodded along. Lately, though, it seems that attendance has had another, rather sudden and steep drop downwards — and it coincides with a new fundraising push, “To Teach Who Christ Is.”
This is an archidiocesan-wide campaign. Each parish is assigned a goal, and told to find needs within the parish for 65% of the goal, with the Archdiocese taking the first 35% for its own purposes, including a scholarship fund for poor parish schools, and reallocation to poor parishes generally. So our parish has identified the “needs” of new school windows, refinished pews, and other deferred maintenance, as well as electrical updates and a new sound system. And we’ve struggled to meet the assigned goal — the fundraising started in late spring, and we’re now at 2/3s of the goal.
It doesn’t help that there have been multiple fundraising campaigns lately: when we first came, there was a campaign to build a “gathering space” addition. This was a quick one as the cost was modest. Then there was a much larger campaign, dictated, again, by an archdiocesan requirement to have a millenial fundraising campaign; in this case, the funds were used to wholly remodel the old convent, which had been used in the intervening years as a group home for the mentally disabled, until that organization ceased to lease the building; the building became a preschool and parish offices and meeting space. Then, just before the recession hit, the parish launched another campaign, for exactly this sort of deferred maintenance, except that it met only a bit more than half of its goal, what with the recession and all. So I can’t blame people for feeling like the fundraising campaigns never stop.
But — as I said, this is really starting to feel like it’s backfiring. If the weekly updates in the bulletin, and now, two weeks in a row, a renewed push with requests to fill out pledge cards during the homily, are turning people off from attending mass, this has got to stop. We can’t make the budget of our regular weekly collection — and, week after week, since the summer, anyway, we have been falling far, far short — so in what world does it make sense to continue making the pitch for even more? Can we at least staunch the bleeding of parishioners? Or is the Archdiocese, in its conviction that suburban parishes can be called on endlessly to support the city parishes, requiring that we keep on until we meet our goal, or collapse trying?
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