[Night Hides Not]

The problem is that the Church has much less political influence than it used to before the abuse scandals. That, and only 1 in 6 Catholics go to mass.

Don't know where that statistic comes from, but I'm not going to doubt it. My family is a part of the community of a very active parish in North TX. It has grown from a few hundred families to over 6,000 in the course of the past 15 years.

Once our new church was finished, I ran the numbers. If every weekend Mass was full, which they weren't, an additional 5 masses would be needed for the rest of the community. So I guess we're doing better than the national average.

I am not a cradle Catholic, nor do I attend Mass every week (I miss 3-4 times a year). But I do wonder why attendance is so poor, when attending weekly Mass is so important.

[HostileTerritory]

The 1 in 6 number was in the Boston Globe a day or so ago. They're consolidating parishes here so actual attendance and not just membership is a factor. Always a tough thing to do but Massachusetts was so heavily Catholic and ethnically diverse a century ago that the Church is carrying an infrastructure too heavy for its back. We don't need quite as many Lithuanian and Polish parishes as made sense 80 years ago.