{"id":2606,"date":"2005-09-09T11:39:30","date_gmt":"2005-09-09T11:39:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/its-all-demographics.html"},"modified":"2005-09-09T11:39:30","modified_gmt":"2005-09-09T11:39:30","slug":"its-all-demographics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/its-all-demographics.html","title":{"rendered":"It’s all demographics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, mostly. The Catholic distaste for evangelization plays a role, but a huge part is just simple demographics – What I’ve been saying in the wake of all of these parish closings – smaller Catholic families, migration to the south and the Sunbelt. <\/p>\n

Sarasota-area parishes struggling with growth<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u201cWe\u2019re bursting at the seams here; we\u2019re running out of space,\u201d Organ said. \u201cI don\u2019t know of any pastor who wants to start a building fund, but with the growth, something needs to be done.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is a pattern across the region. <\/p>\n

Fueled by migration from traditional Catholic strongholds such as Boston and Chicago and immigration from South and Central America, the number of registered Catholics in the Diocese of Venice has increased by about 20 percent since 2000. The figure is in sharp contrast to the church\u2019s national growth of less than 2 percent.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t keep a lid on it; they just keep coming,\u201d said Gail McGrath, director of communications for the diocese. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

There are some silly statements in the piece, this one from a professor at Valpraiso, which is not, I note, located in the Sunbelt. Far from it.<\/p>\n

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Piehl said lay people are playing a more important role in parishes in the South both as paid employees and as volunteers. Also, archbishops or bishops are not the single dominant public figures here that they are in traditional Catholic areas. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat creates an atmosphere that is welcoming to new folks in the way that the old traditional hierarchy wasn\u2019t,\u201d Piehl said.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Can we send the professor the webpages of 5 random Yankee or Midwestern parishes and let him count the lay staff? Is it any different than it is in the south? No. Catholic churches were busting at the seems in the Midwest and North fifty years ago, under that "old traditional" hierarchical model (????) – but wait…I thought people didn’t feel welcome in that model? <\/p>\n

No…it would be useful someday if someone writing a piece like this would compare, say, public school decline and growth in various areas to the Church. As is the case with the Church, public school growth in Florida is phenomenal – when I lived in Lakeland, there were at least two public high schools in Tampa that had gone to running double shifts of classes for two different student bodies. I guess in the north they don’t have principals or something.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, mostly. The Catholic distaste for evangelization plays a role, but a huge part is just simple demographics – What I’ve been saying in the wake of all of these parish closings – smaller Catholic families, migration to the south and the Sunbelt. Sarasota-area parishes struggling with growth \u201cWe\u2019re bursting at the seams here; we\u2019re…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nIt's all demographics - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/its-all-demographics.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"It's all demographics - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Well, mostly. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2606\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}