You may remember a few weeks back I mentioned that the Boston archdiocese is going to undergo some "reconfiguration," including some parish closings. In an unprecedented step, the church released attendance figures for all churches in the area (apparently they collect figures during October and do a year to year snapshot) as a tool for use in each region. They also have numbers for the sacraments bestowed for what I think is the whole year. I'm not sure how they plan to proceed, but given that the statistics also show a decline in Mass attendance over time (compared to 2000), it's the odd vicariate that won't lose any parishes.

Here in the Natick vicariate, the church we've been going to, St. Paul in Wellesley, is one of the larger churches in the area, and isn't going anywhere. St. James the Great, where we used to go, has numbers that are 2 to 3 times lower than the other two Wellesley churches (although their confirmation number isn't that much lower than St. Paul's, which is interesting). The good news for St. James is that one of Natick's three churches, Sacred Heart, didn't report an attendance figure and has sacrament numbers lower still (and no confirmations in 2003).

Speaking of churches named Sacred Heart, my home church is one of the smallest in its vicariate. We didn't report attendance, and sacrament numbers are small compared to the churches in Gloucester and Beverly. However, those towns each have four churches, and the ones with the lowest numbers are equal to or lower than Manchester's lone Catholic church.

These numbers aren't the end all and be all to this discussion, of course. There are financial considerations (cost to run versus donations), location relative to other parishes, and how these numbers trend from year to year. It'll be interesting to see how transparent this discussion becomes.

It's been interesting looking at the numbers, but the parish names are fascinating in their own right. For example, you'd probably not expect to see a church Our Lady of Czestochowa in South Boston (Sarah actually works with a woman who grew up in Southie who says that there is a small but strong Polish community among all the Irish). There are also two churches called Immaculate Conception in Cambridge, which to me suggests a formatting error (though a quick check of the Yahoo yellow pages leads me to think there are actually two different churches).

And for those of you keeping count, there are:

36 St. Marys (Assumption, Immaculate Conception, Magdalen, and so on)
23 Sacred Hearts
17 St. Johns (mostly Evangelist and Baptist, with some being neither and one Chrysostum)
8 St. Patricks
7 St. Francises (de Sales, Assissi, and Xavier)
7 St. Peters
7 of the various St. Thomases
5 St. Pauls (I'm not counting St. Vincent de Paul in Southie)
5 using some version of the phrase "Star of the Sea"
Matthew, Mark, and Luke only have one each, Gospels or no