Local Catholics are getting more perspective on what major changes coming to the Archdiocese of Dubuque will look like at the parish level.
Kevin Earleywine, who represents St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Hampton and St. Mary’s in Ackley, says the reorganization is part of a long-term effort across northeast Iowa to strengthen parishes.
“We’re taking those individual churches and grouping them into groupings that share a head pastor, a priest who’s a head pastor with associate pastors, what we call parochial vicar, so a team of priests overseeing a region,” Earleywine says. “Those groupings are called pastorates. So the Hampton Church has been grouped with the churches of Mason City and Rockwell and Manly to be one pastorate. So they’re a group of churches that share a team of priests who lead them and so, and also so as sharing resources and so on and so forth.”
Earleywine says the goal is to make proactive changes now rather than continue long-term decline, and to position local churches for future stability and growth.
“So what led to this is our current Archbishop looking towards the future,” Earleywine says. “How do we set ourselves up that we can have thriving churches 30 years from now? And so our Archbishop and our Archdiocese has decided to rather than just kind of continue in steady decline that we’ve been in for the last 20 years about approximately, I think we have 46% less people attending mass than we did 20 years ago. We’ve also had a steady decline in number of active priests. And so how do we, rather than just continuing in the steady state of managed decline, how do we be proactive now to make some hard decisions now so we can set ourselves up to be thriving and growing churches into the future?”
He also says church buildings will remain open even if they are no longer used for Sunday Mass, and can still be used for weekday services and community activities.
“After they decided the groupings, then the question is what would be Sunday mass locations? Because part of the rationale of this process is to pull people together,” Earleywine says. “So we are very clear we are not closing any of the buildings. So while a church building may not be a Sunday mass site, so it will no longer have a weekend mass moving forward, the church building is not closed. It can still open for other services, experiences throughout the week, whether the faithful gather in just devotional prayer or of course things like weddings, funerals, other devotional prayers, opportunities for faith formation, opportunities for outreach. So we are not closing any of the buildings, right? They may not be at the Sunday mass site, but they can be used for other things throughout the week.”
The reorganization of the Archdiocese of Dubuque into 24 pastorates is set to begin in July, following the archbishop’s yearlong “Journey in Faith” process.
Link to the full pastorate plan can be found here
