Roman Catholic congregations have answer to fewer priests

The noise of chatting parishioners saturates the foyer after the five weekend Masses at St. Mark the Evangelist Catholic Church.

Busy parents empathize with one another. Children find new playmates. Singles meet other singles.

The tangle of conversations helps the church's 5,000 worshippers build a sense of community in a fast-growing congregation that decided five years ago to expand into a 1,500-seat sanctuary instead of splitting into two separate congregations.

The move was just one example of how Roman Catholic churches are joining their Protestant counterparts across the country in creating megachurches -- where thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of congregants worship together. But unlike the Protestant churches that use high-profile, evangelistic campaigns to grow, dioceses say too few priests and too many worshippers drive their expansion.

While the number of worshippers per parish nationwide has grown by nearly 35 percent in almost three decades, the number of priests dropped 26 percent, said Mary Gautier with the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, which tracks trends in the U.S. Catholic Church.

"That's the reality in the Catholic Church today: You don't want to build something that will be OK for now, when you know this large population is going to get bigger," Gautier said.

Dioceses in the South and West -- the hot spots for new jobs and suburban sprawl -- are primarily the ones building larger parishes; they're increasingly filled with Hispanic Catholics, many of whom are immigrants, Gautier said.

The Midwest and Northeast are generally consolidating, Gautier said, due largely to population shifts to other regions of the country.

Gautier said several dioceses, including the Archdiocese of San Antonio, seek at least 1,000 seats in design plans for new or expanded sanctuaries. Most sanctuaries used to be built with about 500 seats, she said.

In San Antonio, at least 15 sanctuaries have doubled or tripled to at least 1,000 seats in the past eight years.

"We didn't want to put two parishes in the same town because we just didn't have the priests to do it," said Monsignor Larry Stuebben, vicar general of the archdiocese.

Making a church bigger increases the need for financial commitments but it also drives down the average cost per church member, according to the Georgetown research group.

The research group estimates that it costs $444 per household nationwide for membership in churches with fewer than 800 parishioners, compared to $337 for those with more than 1,000.