HomeNewsArchbishop confirms Pope’s visit in 2015

Archbishop confirms Pope’s visit in 2015

Arch­bish­op Charles Chaput

Philadelphia’s Roman Catholic archbishop last week confirmed that Pope Francis will come to Philadelphia for two or three days during the World Family Conference in September 2015.

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Archbishop Charles Chaput said the pontiff told him more than once that he would attend the conference. However, the pope’s visit won’t be officially announced until about six months before, the archbishop told members of the Greater Northeast Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce during an Oct. 31 luncheon at Knowlton Mansion.

While in the United States, Chaput said, the pope might visit Washington, D.C., and the United Nations in New York.

The pontiff calls a meeting of families every three years, the archbishop said. It was the previous pope, Benedict, who first told Chaput Philadelphia was being considered to host the weeklong event. The archbishop said he initially was not in favor of the idea, and suggested the conference be held somewhere else. But the pope wanted it here, and Chaput said he warmed to the idea.

The convention is not intended to be just for Catholics, the archbishop said.

“We want it to be an interfaith gathering,” Chaput said. “The family belongs to everybody.”

“It will be a wonderful blessing,” he said, for the church and the community.

The event will be a big draw. Chaput said he expected the first four days in the convention center to bring in 10,000 to 15,000 people. A Mass on the Parkway toward the end of the conference could attract in excess of 1 million, he added. The pope is expected to arrive on Friday.

Financially, the conference’s crowd will be a boon to Greater Philadelphia. Chaput said the gathering in the last week of September 2015 is expected to generate $400 million in revenues.

However, he said, it will be costly to the archdiocese. He cited a couple of examples of expenses involved. Portable toilets for the use by the thousands expected to attend the event in a city that has only 11,000 hotel rooms, Chaput said, will cost $1 million. The tab for cleaning up Center City will be about $8 million. Security costs also will be high, he said.

The archdiocese needs some financial help, Chaput said, adding a few very large donations already have been received. So, he joked, anybody who wants to donate $1 million should contact the archdiocese. Volunteers, too, are needed.

CHURCH NUMBERS

Chaput last week also talked about church attendance, archdiocesan finances and Catholic schools.

Over the years, there has been a huge dropoff in church attendance, he said. “We do a census every year,” the archbishop explained, “we see a drop every year.”

Fifty years ago, he said, 75 percent of the nation’s Catholics attended church. Now, the national average is 31 percent, and Philly’s church attendance is lower than that.

People jump to the sex scandal in the Catholic Church as a reason for the decrease, Chaput said, but the slide in attendance goes back 50 or 60 years. The decline seems more acute now, he said, because the generation of practicing Catholics is dying out.

“No one is taking our places,” the 70-year-old archbishop said.

There is more than one force emptying the pews, Chaput explained. He cited a few: traditional ideas of marriage are changing, society’s secularization is increasing, people feel they can make up their own minds about moral issues, easy divorce, and the emphasis is not on society but on the individual.

Talking about finances, Chaput said he expected the archdiocese’s deficit to be “taken care of” by next year. He said it had been running at $17 million annually.

That debt is the main reason he has been closing schools and churches. It is not because of sexual abuse cases. It’s because the church had been keeping open places that really shouldn’t still be open.

“I hope my judgments are good ones in the end,” he said.

The archdiocese has 122 elementary schools with 45,000 pupils. That enrollment figure is about a fifth of what it was in the 1960s, he said. Tuition charged changes from parish to parish, he said, but he could tell chamber members what it costs to go to a Catholic high school. Tuition is about $8,000 per year. The actual cost is more like $11,000 annually, he said. The difference is made up by alumni and funds generated by some government programs that allow tax credits for donations.

Catholic high schools are seeing enrollment decreases slow, he said.

Enrollment in the archdiocese’s secondary schools had been dropping 4 to 12 percent annually, Chaput said. This last year, it decreased only 1 percent, he said. The smaller classes are graduating out, he said, making ninthgrade classes the largest in the system.

“We have stemmed the tide,” the archbishop said.••

Pope Francis

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