St Francis de Sales Church
From NOLA.com:
For sale: distinctive home or office space featuring stained-glass windows, flying buttresses, vaulted ceilings and a wide-open floor plan perfect for entertaining large crowds.
Interested? You might just be the buyer the Archdiocese of New Orleans is looking for.
Archbishop Gregory Aymond announced this week that the Catholic Church is selling or leasing 13 vacant properties, including seven churches. They are: Annunciation, Blessed Sacrament, Incarnate Word, St. Francis de Sales, St. Maurice and St. Simon Peter, all in New Orleans, and San Pedro Pescador on Florissant Highway in St. Bernard Parish.
The properties were either destroyed in Hurricane Katrina or closed during a post-storm reorganization in 2008, archdiocesan spokeswoman Sarah Comiskey McDonald said. But, unlike St. Henry's and Our Lady of Good Counsel, the properties for sale were not churches whose closings touched off angry protests, she said.
The Roman Catholic Church is not alone. Other congregations are having to sell their buildings, too. I'm glad St. Henry's and Our Lady of Good Counsel are not for sale. If you click the link above, you will see that the parishes appeared to be viable and were paying their way, and that it was rather the shortage of priests in the RCC which led to their closure.
I suppose it more favorable to close churches than to ordain women. How sad!
ReplyDeletewhiteycat, it's a sad story about the two churches, because the congregations met all the criteria to remain open, and the former archbishop closed them down anyway.
ReplyDeleteThat's how top-down governance works.
Oh yeah, and women priests would fill the gaps.
I wonder if TEC could purchase them, telling their current congregations that worship there would continue, in a 95% similar fashion?
ReplyDelete[Yeah, I know: "You may say, I'm a dreamer..."]
JCF, like an Episcopal ordinariate with a Roman flavor?
ReplyDelete