Vatican Ruling Upholds Bishops' Right to Close Stable Parishes [CN-USA]

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CLEVELAND, Ohio – A Catholic bishop, acting on what he believes to be good for his entire diocese, can close any parish, even if the parish is financially stable and has a solid, active membership, the Vatican has ruled.

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Not surprising. Seems like a good ruling to me, although that won’t be any comfort to those in parishes being closed.
 
My understanding is that if you appeal to the Vatican, the closure is stalled. I’m guessing that this ruling is meant to permit bishops to proceed with closure before the appeal process has run its course (assuming there remains a basis for appeal). I’m no canon lawyer, so this is just a guess, of course.
 
Personally speaking I think the Vatican might need a lesson on economics. If parishes are stable and drawing in collections, then you shouldn’t close them. Its the ones that have few people and scant collections.

Furthermore, with the resistance of some Bishops to adopting the TLM in their diocese, they can use this as an end run to prevent the TLM from being promoted and said in their diocese.

I bet if this thread was in Traditional Catholic section, we would get a lot of different responses!!
 
Catholic_Press said:
CLEVELAND, Ohio – A Catholic bishop, acting on what he believes to be good for his entire diocese, can close any parish, even if the parish is financially stable and has a solid, active membership, the Vatican has ruled.

More…
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The Bishop is the sole owner of all Church property in his diocese and can close, merge, or sell any property at any time. This wouldn’t be such an issue if people didn’t get so attached to a certain parish that they forget that the Church does exist outside that parish.
 
canadianguy1143 said:
Personally speaking I think the Vatican might need a lesson on economics. If parishes are stable and drawing in collections, then you shouldn’t close them. Its the ones that have few people and scant collections.
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I don’t think the Vatican was encouraging bishops to close healthy parishes. And I doubt this occurs very often. However, in some cases the healthy parishes may be overcrowded, or lack the room for a parish school or similar facilities. Meanwhile, a roomier parish nearby, perhaps with available land next door, may be struggling. I could be sensible in that case to merge the two parishes at the roomier church, or simply close the first and suggest to the parishioners that they attend there.

It’s also sometimes the case that demographic shifts are obvious long before they imperil the health of a parish. If it’s clear that the parish will very likely have to be closed in 5 or 10 years, there may be reasons (such as I mentioned above) to push that event forward to the present.
 
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