The pushback has begun against the Archdiocese of Cincinnati's plan to consolidate 208 parishes into 57 parish families. One dispute made it to the Vatican.
CINCINNATI — The moms of St. Martin are mobilizing.
Three months after the announced closure of St. Martin of Tours Catholic School in Cheviot, parishioners are gearing up for a fight against the Archdiocese of Cincinnati.
“I don’t want the church to shut down,” said Sam Folkert, who graduated from St. Martin and has two children there now. “There’s nothing we can do with the school. But that church? I will chain myself up to that church. I will protest that all day long.”
It’s one of many examples of a growing backlash against the Beacons of Light initiative, a church restructuring effort that assigned 208 Catholic parishes to 57 different parish families in 2022.
The Archdiocese is in the second of five phases for Beacons of Light, with all parishes expected to complete the process by 2027. But parish families aren't all moving at the same pace.
More than a dozen families have yet to give themselves a name. Others have already begun making painful choices about school closures, parish mergers and property sales.
A detailed look at four school closures and three parish restructuring decisions can be found at the end of this story. But here's a sample of parishioner pushback:
At St. Joseph Catholic School in the West End, parishioners protested a school closure announcement last July. They also challenged an Archdiocese claim that the school needed $2.5 million in repairs to address safety issues.
At St. Anthony of Padua School in Dayton, parishioners formed a Facebook group with 1,300 followers and launched a $100,000 fundraising campaign in October. They’re also challenging the $13 million cost of repairs the Archdiocese identified as justification for the closure.
Proposed parish mergers in the northernmost counties of the Archdiocese led to the creation of two groups that help parishioners contest mergers using the Roman Catholic legal system.
“By canon law, which is the Vatican’s rules essentially, they’re only supposed to (merge and close) churches that have a very just reason to do it,” said Chris Niekamp, a Minster, Ohio Catholic who launched Save Our Steeples with his wife, Becky. “These well-maintained churches are not under duress. They don’t fall under the category of really needing this significant change.”
Archbishop Schnurr: Don’t get “mired in the details”
The WCPO 9 I-Team has been looking into Beacons of Light because the process has moved from theory to action. Since last spring, the Archdiocese has authorized four school closures, seven parish mergers and two “relegation decrees,” in which merged churches are designated for a possible sale.
Some of the decisions have come with astonishing speed. St Matthias Catholic Church in Forest Park was merged and relegated on the same day in decrees issued by the Chancery of the Archdiocese. The same thing happened at St. Margaret of Cortona in Madisonville.
Several parishioners told the I-Team their pastor promised St. Margaret would not be sold when it held its last mass in August 2022. But it was the first church merged and relegated after Beacons of Light formally launched on July 1, 2022. A for sale sign was posted last summer.
“One of the reasons why we started Save Our Steeples is we saw so many cases we saw so many places where the pastor or the priest was not informing his own parish what was coming,” said Chris Niekamp. “We literally had a priest who would talk to individuals and try to get them not to hold meetings. And then they actually used the homily to suggest to the congregation not to attend meetings.”
The Niekamps said the Archdiocese has been deliberately vague about the standards and procedures used to decide when churches and schools will close.
“We love our Catholic faith, but it’s still run by humans,” Becky Niekamp added. “And humans err.”
The Archdiocese declined to participate in an interview but answered questions via email.
“Any decrees relative to a modification of a parish that will come out of the Chancery in the future will include just cause determined by the parish themselves,” Spokeswoman Jennifer Schack wrote. “Pastors and parishioners, working together and after extensive consultation, may propose modification of parishes by merger or amalgamation.”
Schack said the Archdiocese is making full disclosures about Beacons of Light with listening sessions, training sessions and a Beacons of Light website that has been viewed 1.2 million times by nearly 900,000 visitors since it was created. Newsletters like the Beacons Update have delivered more than 389,000 emails and Archbishop Dennis Schnurr has written more than a half dozen letters to local Catholics about the topic.
In his most recent letter on Jan. 24, Schnurr said his goal is to make merged parishes “strong, joyful communities of evangelization and service centered on the Eucharist, together with growing in faith and radiating the love of Christ into the world. We need to keep this vision in mind to avoid simply getting mired in the details.”
Do Catholics ‘have the right’ to challenge pastoral changes?
But the details are all that matter right now to Folkert and several other moms at St. Martin. They’ve printed maroon and white t-shirts with the slogan, “ST MARTINS VS EVERYBODY,” as they question every public disclosure made by their new pastor about why their school is closing.
“Over the last five years, St. Martin of Tours School has incurred a cumulative deficit of $1.9 million,” Fr. Matthew Robben wrote to parishioners in October 2023.
That shocked the moms of St. Martin, who quickly found a financial disclosure in a 2022 church bulletin that said the school’s revenue exceeded expenses by nearly $45,000 that year. They also questioned why they weren’t given a chance to save the school by raising money.
“There’s no welcoming right now. It’s my way. No way. You come. You don’t. Our numbers are dropped. You’re closed. That’s kind of just how you got to look at it. At least, that’s how we look at it,” said Kelli Mathis, a lifelong St. Martin parishioner whose first-grade son attends the school.
“I would love some transparency,” Folkert said. “As a parent, as a parishioner, like I would have loved a little bit more of, ‘Hey, this is what’s going on. We need this. Or this is what’s going to happen.’ Like a game plan. Give us a game plan.”
School closures have been more controversial than parish mergers in the southern part of the Archdiocese, with parishioners not only questioning their pastors’ facts but their motivations too.
“The parish council was not in agreement with the closure of the school,” said Vera Tangeman, grandmother of a student at St. Anthony in Dayton. “They wanted to fix the building.”
Tangeman is a frequent contributor to the Save St. Anthony Facebook group and helped to draft two letters to the Archdiocese. The first seeks an investigation of “the procedures and protocols” used by Pastor Satish Joseph. The second is signed by several members of the parish council who said they "did not have all the facts in hand" when they were asked to vote on the closure.
“We could be viable,” Tangeman said. “We had people that wanted to go there this year and they shut down the enrollment.”
The I-Team spoke to 17 Archdiocese parishioners about Beacons of Light restructuring decisions in the last month. Time and again, they said they were not aware of the massive changes taking place in their parish families until after decisions were made. Many weren’t sure what factors led to those decisions. None of the Southwest Ohio parishioners knew it was even possible to appeal a Beacons of Light decision.
Under canon law, “we have the right and often the duty to, I don’t want to say argue with the pastor, but to put your case forward that you don’t think what’s happening to you is fair,” said Mark Pettus, who belongs to the Sacred Heart of Jesus parish in McCartyville. “It’s all legal, there’s no reason to feel like you’re doing something against them.”
Pettus is the founder of Save Our Parishes, an advocacy group that posts information you won’t find on the Beacons of Light website, including how to appeal church restructuring decisions. He also serves as procurator for the archdiocese, which means he represents parishioners who’ve signed mandates to enable him to speak on their behalf.
Pettus established a relationship with a canon lawyer from Hopedale, Ohio. Philip Gray notched a win this month when the Dicastery of the Clergy at the Vatican agreed to hear his appeal of a Beacons of Light consolidation near Sydney, Ohio, which is about 90 minutes north of Cincinnati.
“The supreme law of the church is the salvation of souls,” Pettus said. “I don’t see how closing any parish helps save souls.”
Because he lives north of Dayton, most of the parishes Pettus is working with are in the northern reaches of the Archdiocese. But he’s willing to work with parishes in southwest Ohio. In fact, he’s been talking to the moms of St. Martin.
“Anybody in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati that would like help, they can contact me” at procuratordoc@gmail.com, Pettus said.
Here are summaries of the seven restructuring decisions made by the Archdiocese, starting with the most recent:
Editor's note: A previous version of this story erroneously reported the launch date of Beacons of Light.
Copyright 2024 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Sign up for the Breaking News Newsletter and receive up to date information.
now signed up to receive the Breaking News Newsletter.