Each weekend, the Rev. Marcin Pluciennik,a pastor, and the Rev. Matthew Collins, parochial vicar, must drive across town to celebrate Mass, eight services in all.
It’s a necessity for the Saint Teresa of Calcutta Parish, one of the largest in the Archdiocese of Hartford, which maintains four churches across Manchester. The four were merged into one parish in 2021.
“We are bucking national trends when it comes to Catholic attendance, and we’re actually growing year over year and have been since at least 2020,” said Robert Muirhead, communications leader for the parish.
“At our last count, we were about 1,600 people on an average weekend,” he said.
To respond to its growth, and because St. Teresa may have just one priest in the future, the parish has decided to build one large church, capable of holding 1,000 or more parishioners. That would require fewer Masses each weekend.
“We are a growing parish, and we are already a populous parish, and the reality that we’re facing is that there is a diminishing number of priests,” Muirhead said.
St. Teresa is fortunate in its growth but it faces a major challenge, as do many parishes across the nation: a priest shortage. In 2022, 3,215 U.S. parishes didn’t even have priests, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University. The average age of priests also is rising.
“The archdiocese under the new archbishop has asked us all, every parish, to look at the number of Masses that we are offering and plan for a future where there is only one priest in any given town,” Muirhead said. “Manchester at one time in its history, not that long ago, all things considered, had 11.”
“As with all our parishes, there is one pastor who, at our larger parishes, is usually assisted by one or more parochial vicars,” said David Elliott, spokesman for the archdiocese, in an email.
“It’s possible that as the years pass and more and more priests retire, that some parishes will have just the one pastor, as there may not be enough priests to provide parochial vicars to every parish. We are hopeful that through the efforts of our Vocations Office that the trend of a priest shortage will reverse and many more men will begin listening to God’s call to the priesthood.”
St. Teresa decided to be proactive and, after a feasibility study, hired Urbahn Architects of New York to assist with its Parish 2030 project.
“We asked them to get an objective view of everything that we have here in Manchester,” Muirhead said. “They took a significant amount of time and concluded that the best option for us as a community and to meet the needs of our growing parish … would be to build a new church that will be able to seat everyone that we need, with scalability for the future.”
While the plan is for a 1,000-seat church, “if things continue to grow and continue to escalate in the future, the current plan allows us to scale an additional 500 seats,” Muirhead said.
The new church would be built on the St. James property, 896 Main St., and the two schools would be consolidated at St. Bridget School, 74 Main St.
However, Parish 2030 is about more than combining the Masses, now scattered between St. James, St. Bridget, St. Bartholomew and Assumption churches, Muirhead said.
“The other part, and this goes to the spiritual nature of our community that Father Marcin really wanted to emphasize, is that we are one community. We’re trying to grow one community, and that becomes difficult when you are running all over town,” he said.
“After one Mass, I have immediately to run to go to a different Mass, a different place,” Pluciennik said. “There is no time for parishioners, for people. No time to talk to them or to be with our community. It’s hard. A priest needs to be part of a community, but we are not together.
“I am not doing this for me, but for the priest and the community that comes next, after 2030,” he said.
“The hope is that we are one community under one roof, that all of the people can spend time after Mass together and see how much we are growing together. A parish is a family, and a family cannot live in two houses. So for the priest, one building will be easier, like it used to be. But for the parish, it is that togetherness that is important.”
Muirhead said there has been little pushback from people who are emotionally tied to their churches, each of which have “different flavors.” While St. James Church would be connected to the new church and used perhaps as a community space, the future of the other three buildings has not been determined, he said.
“We recognize every step here that this is an emotional process for people, and so it’s always hard when you have to face the reality of the situation and go, OK, we need to do what’s best for the community,” Muirhead said.
“All that being said, I’ve been surprised at how enthusiastic people have been. Of course, people are emotional. Of course some people are trepidatious. But overwhelmingly we’ve actually had positive feedback so far about where this is headed and where this is going,” he said.
Ed Stannard can be reached at [email protected].
