Diocese Not In Trouble (USA)

This Easter, the Catholic Diocese of Allentown will welcome more than 400 new faithful into the church — a typical number over the last few years and firm evidence, the diocese says, that the faith in this small corner of the Catholic world is as vigorous and attractive as ever.

For the diocese, it's an important point to stress in the wake of a report, published in the conservative Catholic journal ''Crisis,'' that found Allentown wanting in three key measures of vitality — the number of priests, the number of ordinations and the number of people annually entering the church.

While that last measure appears to be substantially skewed in the report because of a numerical error, the other factors cast the diocese, under the leadership of Bishop Edward Cullen, as a stagnant organization struggling to attract new clerical blood.

The five-county diocese, which serves nearly 274,000 Catholics, ranks 169th out of the 176 dioceses in the nation, according to the report by the Rev. Rodger Hunter-Hall, a faculty member at Virginia's Christendom College, and Steven Wagner, president of QEV Analytics, an opinion research firm.

The report was derived from 2005 statistics contained in the Official Catholic Directory, also known as the ''Kenedy directory'' after its publisher, P.J. Kenedy & Sons.Allentown ranked 132nd in the number of priests, with 166; 103rd in ordinations, with two; and 176th in receptions of adults into the church, though that ranking was derived from a mistake and will be recalculated.

Diocese spokesman Matt Kerr said the number in the report, 134, reflected only adult baptisms, not overall receptions, which totaled 494. That's 0.18 percent of the number of adherents to the faith in the diocese, rather than 0.05 percent as shown in the report, and would appear to pull Allentown out of the bottom 10 in that measure.

Margaret Cabaniss, managing editor of ''Crisis,'' said Allentown's ranking will be recalculated and a correction will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal.Kerr said the report gives an unfortunate and misleading impression of the diocese under Cullen's nine years of leadership.''I don't think you can take any three categories and extrapolate that into an overall picture of the health of a diocese,'' he said.

''The fact we have fewer priests, that's true, but part of that is a function of age and retirement.

As far as ordinations, ours actually put us in the middle third of the dioceses nationwide.

Obviously we want more, but that's not a bad place to be.''

Kerr also said the diocese has a vigorous lay community. The Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults, the program through which non-Catholics enter the church, is propelled largely by the laity.

And the recent diocesan synod, formed to study the financial health of parishes and other matters, attracted hundreds of lay participants and observers.

Co-author Wagner said the rankings should not be construed as condemnation or benediction. He acknowledged the study does not account for many factors — including an active laity, as in Allentown — that might indicate greater vitality.

And the measures can change significantly from year to year, so a diocese that fared poorly this year may do dramatically better next year. Wagner said the plan is to release the report annually, perhaps with the addition of other markers — for example, tracking how many children baptized as Catholics go on to receive the ensuing sacraments of Communion and Confirmation.

A dramatic fall-off might indicate weaknesses in diocesan faith formation.''It was not our purpose to criticize,'' Wagner said. ''Instead, we pointed out there were dioceses that were doing really well, and it should be an occasion for every diocese to take a look at the best practices in other places.''Those practices range from the ambitious, such as reaching out to other countries to bolster the clerical ranks, to the simple — say, tweaking a diocesan Web page to draw attention to important programs rather than the need for donations.

Broadly speaking, the report concludes that smaller dioceses — fewer than 100,000 adherents — tend to be more successful, and that the church is more active and successful in parts of the country historically inhospitable to it, such as the Protestant South.

That's because dioceses in those areas seem energized by the demands of evangelization.

Indeed, the top-ranked diocese is Knoxville, Tenn., headed by Bishop Joseph Kurtz, a Mahanoy City native and former priest of the Allentown diocese.''

Catholic dioceses seem to be most successful when they are self-consciously the pilgrim Church on earth,'' the report says.

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