{"id":8076,"date":"2004-01-24T08:38:24","date_gmt":"2004-01-24T08:38:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/good_riddance.html"},"modified":"2004-01-24T08:38:24","modified_gmt":"2004-01-24T08:38:24","slug":"good_riddance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/01\/good_riddance.html","title":{"rendered":"Good Riddance"},"content":{"rendered":"

A WaPo article about the decline of bingo in Catholic churches<\/a><\/p>\n

Once a staple of fundraising for the Catholic Church, bingo night has fallen victim to changing times. A generation of regular players is aging and passing away. Younger churchgoers who might have taken their place favor the flashier commercial parlors in the Maryland suburbs or head for slot machines in West Virginia and Delaware. Competition from VFW halls, fire stations and Elks lodges has also had an impact.<\/p>\n

Susan Gibbs, spokeswoman for the Archdiocese of Washington, said precise numbers are hard to come by, but Kelly said at least seven other congregations in the District recently abandoned bingo. Elsewhere, the number of players continues to shrink. Soren Johnson, spokesman for the Arlington Archdiocese, said bingo is definitely “on the decline” in its 66 parishes. <\/p>\n

“The crowd has petered out,” said Frank Vist, 68, a retired Navy engineer who has run the weekly game at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Beltsville for 25 years. At one time, 200 people turned out for Wednesday night bingo. Now the number is about 80. <\/p>\n

“We lost some of the high rollers when we banned smoking during the games,” he said. At one time, the church made as much as $1,000 a night from bingo, using the money to retire debts, Vist said. Now the take has fallen to $400 to $500. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A WaPo article about the decline of bingo in Catholic churches Once a staple of fundraising for the Catholic Church, bingo night has fallen victim to changing times. A generation of regular players is aging and passing away. Younger churchgoers who might have taken their place favor the flashier commercial parlors in the Maryland suburbs…<\/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-8076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nGood Riddance - 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\/2004\/01\/good_riddance.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Good Riddance - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A WaPo article about the decline of bingo in Catholic churches Once a staple of fundraising for the Catholic Church, bingo night has fallen victim to changing times. 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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\/8076","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=8076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8076\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}