Mergers rip through Conshohocken parishes

The Rev. Tom Heron calls it a task akin to walking on the Schuylkill.

For six months, the 62-year-old pastor of St. Matthew's Church in Conshohocken has been managing the merger of four parishes, all within about a mile of one another.

That means four buildings with four sets of parishioners, worship styles, and traditions. Only once since 2010, when the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia launched its latest round of closures, have four churches been forced to fold into one.

It just might be a miracle when it's over.

"To merge all these things, you have to call on the good angels of everybody," Heron said. "But no matter what you do, you're going to get a mixed review."

What's happening at St. Matthew reflects broader changes in the region. The influx of younger residents and new businesses to Conshohocken has given the Montgomery County borough a boost, but in the process diluted neighborhoods and traditions that helped define the parishes. At the same time, the archdiocese has struggled to find the resources - including priests - to keep individual churches afloat.

So the planning, at times ugly and rancorous, began over the fates of St. Matthew, St. Mary, St. Gertrude, and SS. Cosmas and Damian. For weeks, Heron watched and listened and absorbed as parish representatives engaged in sometimes fiery debate over pluses and minuses of each:

That sanctuary is too dark.

Those parishioners are cold and superior.

That one doesn't have holy water fonts at every entrance.

"We sort of wounded the guy," said Ernest Ramirez of Plymouth Township, who attended SS. Cosmas and Damian with his wife, Marian. "Perhaps we could have been a little more patient."

In less than five years, the archdiocese's reorganization has reduced the number of parishes in the five-county area from 266 to the current 219. And the reshuffling is not over.

More changes are expected to be announced this spring for the region's 1.4 million Catholics, in what archdiocese spokesman Ken Gavin describes as the effort to have "vibrant" and "sustainable" parishes.

"We are cognizant of the fact that parish mergers bring sadness and pain for people," Gavin said in a statement, but the changes are necessary to ensure a strong church for the future.

The contraction is neither new nor limited to Philadelphia. Most major dioceses have undergone similar mergers and closures, a trend that started in the Midwest in the 1970s. The number of U.S. parishes has declined from more than 19,000 in 2000 to 17,800 in 2009, according to the Changing Face of U.S. Catholic Parishes, a 2011 report by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.

Late last year, the Archdiocese of New York said it would consolidate 112 of its parishes - nearly a third overall - into 55 new parishes.

Charles Zech, director of the Center for Church Management and Business Ethics at Villanova University, said too many parishes with dwindling congregations cannot pay their bills and maintain their aging buildings.

A reorganization by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia in the 1990s did not go far enough, Zech said. Now church leaders have no choice.

"They are bleeding money," from the clergy sex-abuse scandal, day-to-day expenses, and maintaining its remaining facilities, he said.

Gavin, the archdiocese spokesman, said its finances are separate from parish treasuries and do not play a role in church mergers and closures.  "In the case of any merger, the assets of the former parishes are transferred to the newly-created parish. They are not transferred to the Archdiocese."

Still, the upshot has been mergers of communities that spent years forging individual identities within the church.

As in Conshohocken, they are communities that may have their own traditional street processions, or festivals in the parish parking lot. Members may have dipped their fingers in the same holy water font for nearly their entire lives.

For now, all the Conshohocken-area churches remain open for special services. There are no plans to sell them.

But the process of uniting a new community has still created a divide: parishioners who feel relieved that their churches have been spared, while others feel "uprooted and disenfranchised," as Heron puts it.

"I became an altar boy in 1939 when I was 9," said Deacon Armand Maresca, 84, a lifelong member of SS. Cosmas and Damian Church. "I gave my whole life to that church. I'm very hurt."

The news about the fate of his Italian American parish was part of the June announcement, when officials said they would close 16 churches and merge them with 13 neighboring parishes.

Also included in the Conshohocken consolidation was St. Mary, a Polish American parish near the Fayette Street bridge in the borough, and St. Gertrude, a small church across the bridge in West Conshohocken.

The churches are in boroughs on opposite sides of the bridge that are no longer the thriving manufacturing towns teeming with immigrant Catholic families that need parishes where the priest speaks their language, said Edward Pluciennik, 68, a lifelong resident of West Conshohocken and a member of St. Gertrude's.

St. Matthew, the one to absorb them all, sits prominently on Fayette Street, the borough's central and often busy artery where shops and restaurants have cropped up in recent years. It is the largest of the four and, unlike the others, had seen increases in both baptisms and marriages from 2008 to 2012.

Under the reconfiguration, weekly attendance at St. Matthew nearly doubled, from 1,086 in 2012 to 2,000 now. The parish still offers the same four Masses each weekend, though in January Heron launched a monthly Mass for young adults.

He did not get an army of new help. Before the merger, he had one priest living at the rectory to help with weekend services. Now he has two.

Msgr. Gerard Mesure, who served as pastor for St. Gertrude and St. Mary, was reassigned as pastor of St. Mathias in Bala Cynwyd. An assistant went with him.

Three of the churches had budget surpluses - two had more than $1 million in their treasuries - but one had a debt of more than $350,000. All the finances get melded.

The archdiocese provides pastors with an 80-page manual to guide them through the merger, and the priests are in frequent contact with members of the Archdiocesan Strategic Planning Commission, Gavin said.

In addition to an organizational framework for change, the manual tells priests to be prepared for the "emotional difficulty" that comes with parishioners who feel they are losing their church.

To prepare, Heron turned to the only other pastor in the region who had had a comparable experience: the Rev. Thomas Higgins, pastor of Holy Innocents Church in Philadelphia, which merged with three other parishes in 2013.

"It's difficult," Higgins said in an interview. "Some of these people have spent their whole life in the parish, and we come in and say, 'I'm sorry. You have to say goodbye to something you've loved.' "

To help smooth the transition at Holy Innocents, he said, two seminarians went door to door to parishioners' homes after the merger announcement in 2013. They offered comfort to members of the merging parishes and reinforced the invitation to make Holy Innocents their new home.

Still, one ultimately filed a protest to the Vatican, Higgins said.

At St. Matthew, a transition team of members from each parish began hammering out a compromise shortly after the official announcement, showing an emerging sense of collegiality, Heron said.

Italian and Polish festival traditions would be preserved, they decided. Six-foot statues of SS. Cosmas and Damian likely will be relocated to the new parish center. New lighting has been installed.

But the merged parish still lost some regulars.

Maresca and his wife, Theresa, of Whitemarsh Township, now attend church in nearby parishes in Norristown. Theresa Maresca describes the merger decision and its aftermath as the archdiocese telling grieving parishioners to "sit down and shut up."

Heron kept reiterating the welcome message. He planted a huge sign with that message on the church's front lawn. Parishioners from SS. Cosmas and Damian still had their September festival, which included a street procession with statues of their namesake saints.

And then, a funny thing happened around Thanksgiving.

Parishioners who had not been attending began showing up, perhaps moved by the holiday theme of family togetherness.

Perhaps, grieving just takes time.

"We've had a pleasant turnaround," Heron said.

Though change has been painful, said Edward Garbacz, a St. Mary parishioner and member of the transition team, the time was right.

"We are done wasting money, maintaining and heating churches with money that could be used to help the poor or senior citizens," said Garbacz, 68, of Conshohocken. "It doesn't matter where we worship, as long as we are together."

Editors' Note: The Archdiocese of Philadelphia does not draw from or depend on the treasuries of local parishes.  A previous version of this story did not include the distinction.