Next steps: Seek the City implementation focuses on walking with parishioners

As the Seek the City to Come parish planning moves from the decision phase to implementation, archdiocesan leaders say the focus is on walking with the parishioners and focusing on evangelism.

“We’re trying to position ourselves for mission, for evangelization and to really reengage the city in a meaningful way,” said Auxiliary Bishop Bruce A. Lewandowski, C.Ss.R., vicar for Baltimore City.

He said that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been done that way in the past, but this will allow the parishes to focus resources on the Eucharist and spreading the Gospel in their neighborhoods, versus building maintenance and financial struggles.

Implementation will begin with a ministry assessment at each parish, some of which was already done during the listening phase of Seek the City, which began in September 2022 and encompassed 61 parishes at 59 worship sites throughout Baltimore City and a few nearby parishes in Baltimore County.

In reducing the footprint to 23 parishes at 30 worship sites, the plan hopes to build on the richness and strengths of each community.

Bishop Lewandowski cited as an example five parishes in West Baltimore merging – St. Bernardine, St. Peter Claver, St. Pius V, St. Gregory the Great and St. Edward will merge into a single parish sited at St. Bernardine with an additional worship site at St. Peter Claver. St. Edward Parish, particularly, has programs that serve people in its neighborhood. 

Part of the job of the transition team – made up of staff and lay leaders of the parish along with support from the Catholic Center – will be to “figure out how to continue doing that work, not necessarily in the church building or in the campus where it was before, but that it’s still there and accessible and really coming to the aid of the people who live in that neighborhood,” the bishop said.

The leadership team acknowledges that change will be hard for the parishioners in the city whose place of worship for years – or decades – may close. 

Adrienne Curry, director of the Office of Black Catholic Ministry for the archdiocese, has been working on evangelization strategies and talking with key leaders in the Black community about grief and mental health. She plans more meetings with clergy and parish leaders to galvanize the parishes.

She said the feedback session for the Black community held at St. Frances Academy in Baltimore after the draft plan was announced in April was helpful. Without citing specifics, she said, “I think those conversations let us have a few more parishes than we would have the (draft) plan had gone through.”

She said as she has met with parish leaders, some have noted that a small percentage of Hispanics are moving to their neighborhoods, and that perhaps Hispanic ministry would be a good idea. Curry dissuades them of that notion.

“I said 90 percent of your community is Black. Where is the outreach to the Black community? You’re Black. They’re Black. … I think people even outside of the Black community think, well, if we start Hispanic ministries, we’ll thrive. But no, we need to evangelize our own,” she said.

Curry said that just as Hispanic and Anglo communities are diverse within themselves, so too is the Black community. Some like gospel music, some want more traditional liturgies. Parishes will have to reach out to people with not just one set thing, but a sense of welcoming.

She and other leaders emphasized that in the mergers, the church where the parish ends up located is not “welcoming” those from the churches that will close. Instead, all are uniting in a new parish. 

“We’re all starting new, and I hope that the parishes, especially the Black Catholic parishes, understand that,” she said. 

Benchmarks will measure parish success in the coming years, so she wants to ensure that the Black Catholic communities have the right foundation to be successful.

She wants them to evangelize by getting involved in neighborhood and civic associations such as BUILD (Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development) and work together with other Christian churches in their area. 

“You can do tremendous work as a group; you can do social justice as a group instead of individually,” she said.

Curry hopes that a year from now, every parish in the city will have a social justice ministry “where they’re doing advocacy, where they’re out doing the two feet of social justice” – direct service charity and action to get at the causes of poverty and other societal problems.

As an example, she said, if a parish food pantry has gone from serving 50 families to 200, parishioners should ask what caused that influx, such as a plant closure or mass layoffs. 

Lia Garcia, director of the archdiocese’s Office of Hispanic Ministry, said her main focus in helping with implementation of Seek the City has been on helping people adjust to the hard changes, especially for parishes that will transition to other locations. She has met with pastors to “brainstorm how to help people not only grieve through the change, but also to embrace these new beginnings.”

She said staff members form the Institute for Evangelization, the Office for Black Catholic Ministries and the Office for Hispanic Ministry are working together to provide the resources to support Archbishop William E. Lori’s “carefully crafted vision for the Catholic presence in the city of Baltimore.”

“We want to give parishes opportunities to thrive, not to be so much stuck in the past and what could have been, but to look to the future with hope,” Garcia said. She said that includes training facilitators, helping parishioners form small faith groups and retreats to reenergize the people serving in parishes.

She acknowledged there has been some resistance to the moves. For example, Sacred Heart of Jesus/Sagrado Corazón de Jesús in Highlandtown will merge with Holy Rosary in Fells Point, seated at the former but with an additional worship site at the latter. Ministry to Hispanics will be added to Holy Rosary, which currently serves primarily Polish Catholics. 

Garcia said that she and others from the Catholic Center have met with Holy Rosary parishioners and leaders to help address some of the misconceptions and misinformation that have circulated and to assure them that Holy Rosary is not closing, but welcoming other immigrants with whom they may have much in common.

“What I said to them at the meeting is instead of focusing on the things that make us different, let us concentrate our efforts on the things that we do have in common – for example, the love of St. John Paul II, the love of Our Lady. The community at Holy Rosary wants to hold on to their cultural traditions, to their language. And I said to them, that’s exactly what the Hispanic community is trying to do,” Garcia said.

Bishop Lewandowski said Seek the City started because Archbishop Lori and others realized that closures and mergers in the city would happen by attrition over the next few years if the situation was not addressed head on. 

“What we’re saying is we’re seizing the day. We’re choosing this moment to move forward now,” he said.

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