Catholic tripping point

"Hundreds of people, most of them Catholic", a "mostly older crowd", attended Austrian priest the Rev. Helmut Schuller's presentation at a Unitarian church in Dedham, Massachusetts, Fred Thys reports at WBUR. The move to a Unitarian church came after Rev. Schuller was banned from Catholic facilities by Boston's Cardinal Archbishop Sean O'Malley. The gist of Rev. Schuller's ""Catholic Tipping Point" tour might be summarized with his statement,

“We don’t agree with the plans of our bishops to come there and to close the parishes and to say to the people, 'You can go to the next village, there you will get your communion,' Schuller said. 'Like a supermarket, you can buy something there.'"

As the size and demographics of his audience indicate, though, closings reflect not the decades of decline in the number of priests, but the decline in the number of participating lay people.

(via Rocco Palmo Twitter feed)