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Chronicles was made possible thanks to a community assist grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, Spring Hill Senior Living Support by the Department of Education, and the generous support of Thomas Bacon.

This is WQLN.

On the shores of Lake Erie by the Mennonite churches of Erie, Pennsylvania.

Some of these churches hold congregations that have been active for over 200 years.

Many of the buildings are beautifully detailed and the congregations they house work to serve the needs of the communities they inhabit.

The churches are very are facing a problem, though there are fewer people attending them.

Back in the day, you know, as a membership of 600 to 2000.

People, they had two or three two services a day to accommodate that.

And you would have on a Sunday morning probably 500 people.

On Christmas Eve.

We would have to put chairs in the back of was standing room only.

Church attendance today looks different.

Our attended 125.

130 on an on an average week.

Now, when I sat up here and looked at the out of the congregation and counted how many people are there, generally I come up with about the number of 30.

I think when we look at American religious community life, most people look at the post-World War Two era and see that as normal.

That's actually an.

Anomaly.

If you take pre pre-World War two demographics, you then have a huge bubble over the baby boom.

Our churches were full, our Catholic schools were full, our seminaries were packed and we had everything going.

We thought perfect and so we built all these churches, we built all these schools, and it all turned out to be short lived.

And now you're sort of back to almost where we were pre-war.

So I think we have to put a lot of it into that perspective.

While it doesn't surprise our religious leaders, it still causes concern.

So it's it's it's it's of concern for a number of reasons.

First, we want more people to be exposed to this this way of love that we we espouse.

But also because the work that we're doing in our communities and the impact that we're able to have is dependent upon the numbers of people who are in the orbit of the congregation.

And that's what's changing.

We've known it was going to happen.

We are in a post post-Christian era, and I'm okay with that because if you look at why everyone was going to church in 1960, it's because of McCarthy.

And you know, if you're not going church your economy and we're going to just hose you with every possible way we can.

And so people proved their Americanism by going to church.

Not to say that there wasn't real faith, but I think we've balanced out to where real faith is now showing itself the way it should have.

While this is true for many, there are some churches experiencing a different story.

It's a growing congregation.

I'm pretty excited about that.

Yes, sir.

There has been growth in black churches, Asian churches, and within those of the many new Americans.

The Muslim community, they are increasing here.

And I don't know how much they will increase more and more, but we expected more increasing.

But some people have suggested this growth stems from a need for sanctuary from the world they exist in.

Meanwhile, religious leadership is also in decline.

When I was confirmed many years ago, I'm sure there were about 30 of us in that class.

Now our confirmation groups might be one or two or three.

When I was in the doing my theology studies in Baltimore in the late 1960s, there were 550 of us in that seminary.

Today there are 70.

But once again, this is considered as a rebalancing.

We see if you look in the historical records, people aren't going into religious vocations.

You could have written that in 1890 we had Catholic leaders who wring their hands about the same thing.

So it is really the case that post-World War two 1950s and sixties is a real anomaly, and I think we are returning to a more historical baseline.

This decline in attendance appears to stem from a disconnect with the needs of a modern society.

When when these parishes were started, the congregation were usually illiterate.

The priest, who was the only literate person in the congregation.

There might have been a doctor or an attorney or something of the beyond that they weren't.

Today, our young people particularly are highly educated and they're sophisticated and if something doesn't hold their attention, the lack of pay any attention to it.

The liturgy itself is speaking to them.

It's not speaking to them.

Then how do we make it speak to them?

It is a new generation.

It is a new challenges, but it's a new education.

We have to think in a different way.

Everybody's busy today, whether you're in high school or whether you're retired.

Everybody's busy and everybody has lots of organizations or others that are clamoring for their attention or their resources.

I think people's attention spans today are very, very short.

And you can hold people's attention if you've got something of quality to say, but you're not going to hold them for 20 minutes.

But some disagree.

I think that football games and basketball games and soccer games on television are are pretty lengthy.

I have ADHD, so I know how to compete with short attention spans because I have one.

And at the same time, competition is the wrong word.

If you're trying to add more to their life, then life's already busy enough.

How do you add value without adding stuff?

How do you add quality without adding quantity?

Those are very challenging issues to deal with, and I don't know how we maintain or respond to some of that.

But we have to keep trying.

We just can't say, Oh, well, you know, we failed, so we'll just let them go.

We have to keep trying.

And will we be perfect in getting everyone in?

No, we haven't done that 2000 years.

You couldn't take a selfie with a rotary phone 40 years ago.

And things have changed a bit.

If we're still doing things the same as we did 40 years ago, we are failing our society around us.

We're failing our community.

I think there is a really a shift in the eighties where parents suddenly didn't want to shove down their kid's throat the faith they had shoved down their throat.

And so they said, Oh, let them decide.

And that's really where it started.

And now you have these same kids who are now parents not having something that they think is really a an important faith piece.

It's not important to me.

And Judaism is, I think, flexible in that sense of it being an experience that says, you know, you can come on Friday night if you want, you can come on Saturday morning, you can come just to learn, you can come just to participate, you can come just for the holidays.

It's fine.

And so I think that in lots of ways it's this openness to meeting people where they are, at least in our congregation, and allowing them to explore and experience Judaism in whatever way that makes sense and is comfortable for them and their families.

And we just have to accept the fact that if we're not going to meet the younger people today where they're at, then this is irrelevant to them.

And and that's our responsibility to do.

It's not their responsibility.

Come begging us.

It's our responsibility.

And I think we're failing miserably in that.

Aside from providing a place of worship.

Religious communities also meet other responsibilities.

This includes providing a sanctuary.

We have a huge humanitarian goal.

Take care of the others.

The church has a responsibility is to be there, to be the sentinel of protection, to be the refuge for the forgotten within our community.

It is the church.

I believe that with every fiber of my being during the civil rights movement, churches were packed.

Especially down south.

I mean, the rates of of anti-Semitic incidences have sky rocketed for for really inexplicable reasons.

Right.

We don't really understand why.

It's not like you had some major Jewish involvement with anything.

That's one of the.

Basic goals of the centers of the church or any religion institution.

People, they come here, they want to feel forth because everyone has problems.

So whether it's hatred against African-Americans or people of, you know, any other, you know, identifiable group, you know, the the intolerance is of what you don't know are primarily those that are just afraid of what they don't know.

And they end up doing these horrible acts, whether it's violence or threatening or persecution or horrible comments or whatever it might be.

I think that in many ways, you know, this is a place where the members of the Jewish community don't have to look over their shoulder.

Right.

You don't have to worry about what your you know what?

But somebody in the store or a coworker or somebody might be thinking or saying, all right, that you can simply be free to express your Judaism as you want and as you see fit without having to worry.

I think our teenagers especially deal with some of this.

And and so, you know, they've had to face lots of anti-Semitism when you're the only Jewish kid in your class or maybe you're the only Jewish kid in your school.

Often that means that you're also the target.

But with fewer people attending.

There's less money coming into the churches, putting strain on the ability to provide care in the community and maintain a place of sanctuary.

As far as helping people.

There are people who it is not about the money, it is about the money.

You got to keep the lights on.

You have to keep the water on and you have to be able to provide services.

You got to bring the elderly, the elderly, the lifeblood of the church.

You got to bring them to church.

It is about the money.

This strain is a big departure from the 1950s America.

All the meaningful things in life sort of happened in the church.

It was the hub of social interaction.

It was the hub of service in the community.

She needed help.

You went to the church, right?

And these church communities rose to meet the needs that they observed around them.

From the very beginning, the people who founded this church were concerned about the community around it.

In many ways, the church helped to fill in the gaps in the community.

And one of them at a particular time in the in the 1870s and eighties was health care and and the community.

And this congregation founded Hammett Hospital.

The relationship between religion and health care goes back centuries.

The same is true for education.

One name that was instrumental in bringing much of this needed infrastructure to Erie, Pennsylvania, was Bishop Canon.

I mean, John Mark Gannon was an incredible builder.

He built hospitals.

He built convents.

He built schools.

He built universities and colleges.

And this is perhaps the one thing that maybe my generation and younger ones misunderstand, that there are great things that can be done with capital.

There are great things that can be done when people sacrifice their own wealth to a larger cause, a greater cause.

And John Mark in and understood that.

He was able to inspire people to contribute to a vision, a vision that came to be embodied in hospitals, schools, churches and so forth.

These were administered to by those known as the religious followers of Christianity who have committed themselves to God.

More commonly referred to as monks or nuns.

Well, very early on, the religious were very important to the start up of the dioceses.

So we had the Sisters of Saint Joseph, the Benedictine sisters, the Sisters of Mercy.

And many of these communities ran hospitals.

In fact, Saint Vincent Hospital, the first hospital in the city, began under the leadership of the Sisters of Saint Joseph.

I was curious as to whether Erie's religious of today thought Erie's Catholic community would have been able to function without them.

Definitely not.

No question.

In my mind, definitely not.

The sisters have played a valuable role in Erie in a variety of ways.

Not even a.

Question from the religious women was central in the provision of health care.

And in the 1950s, one in five hospital beds in America was made possible through the work of numbers.

They were the first large network of female professionals in a time when employment opportunities for women were few and far between.

They made up 20% of nurses during the Civil War and their fearless work in the face of disease and battle marked the initial shift away from the widely held anti-Catholic sentiments of the time.

And in Erie, Pennsylvania, they were essential providers of education.

Most of the sisters at that time staffed all of our Catholic schools.

They also had Villa maria College, which two sisters of Saint Joseph started.

Mercyhurst University was started by the Sisters of Mercy.

So the religious women in this diocese were very important for the educational piece.

And they continued to be a crucial part of that framework for many decades.

We were mostly teachers in the beginning.

I taught for 17 years.

But then after that began to do.

Things emerge mainly because of.

Listening to the needs of the people.

Vatican two was a meeting of the Vatican Council in the 1960s, called by Pope John the 23rd, a significant rethinking of how the Catholic Church would engage with a society that was going through some drastic cultural shifts resulted in a new approach to religious leadership.

And churches have always been social service agencies.

And as much as the secular world likes to talk about taking care of one's brother, one sister, we're not really doing a particularly good job of that.

Churches always function out of a position of of of self gift, of giving, of of strengthening the community.

And I think that's even true today.

The church is still all of those things.

I think that government agencies alone aren't going to be able to solve all of the issues.

I mean, government is so tied into politics, which can be very partizan and can shift.

So I think that is, you know, definitely a reason and a need for for religious organizations, religious communities to be able to fill in some of those gaps.

And we don't have the expertise that a lot of the agencies in town have.

We don't know all the resources that are available.

So we really do our best to connect folks who come in, who are in need, folks come who look for food or clothing, which generally we can help with those folks who need have a lot greater needs than we can deal with.

And so we connect people with those agencies in town that can really best serve their needs.

No agency, no church, nobody can do everything.

But they remain driven to make themselves available to those in need.

However we set it.

We all have different ways of saying, but we're all saying the same thing.

We care about the poor, the those who were downtrodden and who need us the most.

And if we educate people through that, through what we have done over the years, we have helped them to see the importance of carrying that forward.

But it goes beyond this simple provision of services.

It's great to feed people who are hungry, but why are they hungry?

Why does this person not have a place to sleep or to live?

And I know the leaders of our ministries who work in these areas are part of groups that really want to address those bigger questions.

Right.

You can keep slapping a Band-Aid on this every week forever.

Okay.

So the person who is hungry is now fed.

But systemically, what's going on that this person is coming back again and again and again?

We as the church, you know, we feel like we're stepping in and doing a part to help this.

And that's great.

But what's the bigger question that needs to be asked?

And addressed in the midst of all this?

The goals tonight is to not have to open the doors in the wintertime, to not have to have the shelter.

That's those are the bigger questions that I really struggle with as we interact with other churches that are doing these ministries, as we have our own folks in leadership, in these ministries who know those people and are interacting with folks in county government and in city government.

Why can't we seem to get a handle on this?

Trying to help resolve these issues is much harder to do in the face of a shrinking congregation.

They're struggling to survive.

They're struggling to stay open.

And you're seeing some churches close or combine and the combined leadership because you also see fewer and fewer people going into the ministry.

So we're seeing some real significant losses for some of those communities and churches just closing.

Which nobody wants to close their doors.

These churches that merge together with one priest or one, they try to keep both buildings open because the the connection to the building means so much to people.

The building is nice, but if we didn't have the building, we'd find another way to worship God.

They found a way, if that's what they were looking for.

You know, when you have 110 year old building, you're bound to have maintenance problems constantly.

It takes a lot to maintain this church and it takes a lot of people power.

And of course, it requires financial resources and that has changed over over the years.

How much time and money go into maintaining the structure too much?

And that that's a that's a base reality.

For people somehow think we're loaded.

It seems like in the last several years we don't we can't balance the budget with just contributions that come in from the congregations.

That requires us to tap into these endowments.

And they're nice endowments, but they aren't going to last forever.

You know, we've got this huge structure that we continue to support and keep as nice as we can.

But how long does that going to happen to?

When when do you reach the point where you say, this really isn't a good use of our resources anymore?

And so it's going to be there's going to be a day of reckoning.

And I, I hope I'm not here to be part of it.

What you said.

We spoke with Bishop Persico about the consolidation of parishes and the closing of buildings that he implemented as a cost cutting measure in 2016.

It just didn't work anymore.

So a few years ago, after I talked to the parishioners, they were the parish was closed.

Just seven years later and one week before this episode's original air date in 2023.

And he has been forced to close yet more buildings.

Where we're rich in in land and buildings.

But poor in people.

It's very hard because we sometimes you have families in these churches for generations.

I am a member of Saint John's Lutheran Church by virtue of the fact that my parents brought me here.

They were married here.

My mother grew up in this neighborhood, and she was a part of this congregation in her childhood.

And then all the way through her life.

And these are where my friends are.

And they're the ones who helped my mother up the steps when she was singing in the choir.

And they were the ones who greeted my parents when they were too old to walk down to the pews and they sat in the back.

My parents would greet them on a Sunday, and it was a great idea for them to be out of the house and seeing people here.

So, you know, I can look at those blue chairs and still think of mom and dad sitting back there and my friends do to this is where our parents and our families were.

And I have a sense of history when I come in this building also.

It's it's old and traditional, but I've lived 70 years of my life in this building, too.

So it's as much my home as the one that my father built out on the end of Cherry Street.

Any time we have to close a church, any time we reach the point where we can't sustain the building or where we're no longer able to carry on in the way that works, it's it's heartbreaking.

It's challenging.

Is it?

Because as much as we say the church is is not the building, it's the people.

The building features prominently in that.

The memories, the way it looks, the way it smells the sounds in a in a building.

All of these are important to our faith formation and various aspects of our life made of buried a loved one baptized, challenged a joyous and sad occasions.

I asked Carolyn what it would mean to her if the doors of St John's ever had to close for the last time.

That makes me emotional because there have been so many generations here and it has been a place that's been meaningful to my family.

We are we are maintaining a legacy here, but we also look at the practicalities of things.

We know this is a large building and being the caretakers of a large building is difficult and trying to even supporting a staff, supporting the pastors and whatever.

Many churches lose those opportunities just just a couple of I'm going to stop.

Religion is not going anywhere.

What religion looks like, on the other hand, that's going to be the open question.

And the Internet certainly has changed how people see things now.

There are aspects of it that I think are that are probably positive of.

What we understand each other.

The quality of this nation will get better and better.

Chronicles was made possible thanks to a community assets grant provided by the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority, Spring Hill Senior Living Support by the Department of Education, and the generous support of Thomas Bacon.

We question.

And learn.