Just another painful school closing

Friday, July 10, 2009

I forget when and where it was in which, as a reporter, I heard a stunning lecture on the impact of birthrates and basic demographics on the rise and fall of religious institutions in the United States and elsewhere.

What made the lecture so interesting was the connection the speaker — it might have been the United Methodist thinker Lyle Schaller — made between traditional forms of religion and higher birth rates (and, correspondingly, between liberal forms of religion and much lower birth rates). Think about the recent decline of mainline Protestantism. Think about churches in Europe.

Anyway, enough about my fading Baby Boomer brain. The key is that these factors often figure into news stories about religion — especially in a Catholic context. Think about the priest shortage. Think about the relative health of conservative Catholic orders (emphasis on the word “relative”) and the sharp decline or even death of the orders that appeal to progressive, modern Catholics. Think about those painful parochial school closings in urban areas across the nation, but especially in the Northeast and upper Midwest. the rest