Ark of the Lost Angels

Shrine of the Sacred Heart in Mount Washington, Baltimore, MD _{(Credit: Shrine of the Sacred Heart)}

In recent weeks, several Catholic parishes in Baltimore have closed and consolidated. This speaks to the city’s woes, and raises questions for its future.

Twenty years later, Baltimore is fighting to overcome the legacy of ‘The Wire’ which depicted Maryland’s largest city’s institutional issues plaguing from policing to politics to schooling. The stereotype of Baltimore today involves drugs, murder, an overworked police force, urban blight, and casts the city as a once-respectable town sitting just this side of a post-apocalyptic hellscape.

While that’s not entirely the truth, as the city has rebounded as a major port able to weather the storm of the Francis Scott Key Bridge’s collapse earlier this year, it’s undeniable that the city has lost a little something.

Earlier this year, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore announced a plan to close a large number of parishes in the area. This week, that plan’s implementation was finished, with longstanding parishes closing down and consolidating in a marked downsizing of the city’s Catholic population.

Baltimore has had a long-standing reputation as a very Catholic city. Not quite as much as Boston, due to the major Irish population for which Boston is famous, but Baltimore used to be a very Catholic city. In fact, the very first diocese in America was the Archdiocese of Baltimore. In recent years, the city and surrounding areas have lost a lot of that tradition, and new changes are showing it more and more.

Before we go any further, a disclaimer is required. This is not meant to be a religious debate. This is not going to discuss the ins and outs of Catholic beliefs or try to push a narrative. In the spirit of transparency, the author did grow up Catholic, and went to Catholic school through high school, but left the Church and its practices behind around fourteen years old. This will be a discussion of the presence of Catholic parishes and schools in the Baltimore area and the changes they’ve undergone in recent years.

What Happened

The Catholic Church has an intimate connection with Baltimore, as the first diocese in what would become the United States was given the designation of diocese in 1789 and encompassed the whole country. Maryland as a state was founded with the idea of giving Catholics a colony in the New World, and the area concentrated many of America’s Catholics as years bore on.

Baltimore’s Catholic tradition would grow to include a number of private schools founded long ago, such as Calvert Hall College in 1845, Loyola Blakefield and Mount De Sales Academy both in 1852, Notre Dame Prep in 1873, Mount Saint Joseph in 1876, to more recent establishments like Maryvale Prep in 1945, Mercy High School in 1960. Several others have closed, such as the Institute of Notre Dame (alma mater of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi) which was founded in 1847 and ceased operations in 2020, Cardinal Gibbons which was founded in 1962 and closed in 2010, and its sister school, Seton Keough which was founded by the consolidation of Seton and Archbishop Keough in 1988 and gained infamy through the 2017 Netflix documentary series The Keepers which examined the unsolved murder of a nun at Archbishop Keough in 1969 after several students had reported sexual abuse committed by a priest also at the school.

This brings to light the uncomfortable and unfortunate realities of the widespread misconduct prevalent throughout the Catholic Church which was prominent within the Archdiocese of Baltimore. Generally speaking, religion in America has been declining in recent years. The decline across the country is due to a multitude of factors, including the politicization of the clergy, and the scandals which have brought increased scrutiny to many religious organizations. The Archdiocese of Baltimore is no stranger to controversy throughout its history, especially in recent years.

The Archdiocese of Baltimore knowingly covered up the sexual abuse of children by clergymen for years. The Archdiocese filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2023. Roughly 1000 people filed claims as part of the bankruptcy proceedings alleging that they were abused. This is corroborated somewhat by state findings. The Maryland Attorney General’s office released a report which found 600 people were sexually abused by the Catholic Church dating back to the 1940s. Such a horrific scandal hitting so close to home may be accelerating the departure of religion for many. The Archdiocese claims that this consolidation plan is not related to the bankruptcy hearing, but rather by the lack of parishioners giving money and being present to build a community at these parishes. In practical terms, people leaving religion in general or the Catholic religion specifically means that these parishes don’t have enough members to continue operating in their current form.

However, it is undeniable that the community aspect is something the city will sorely miss.

The Closures

In the years leading up to this reorganization of local parishes, several local Catholic high schools have closed. The Catholic schools in the Baltimore area have been a staple of the area for generations. Calvert Hall College and Loyola Blakefield have been playing an annual football game on Thanksgiving for over 100 years. In a similar vein, up until its closure in 2020 amidst the pandemic, the Institute of Notre Dame faced off against local rival Mercy in The Game. Seton Keough was brought into national attention at the time of its closure with the 2017 Netflix documentary The Keepers. Other schools had less fanfare around their closings, but still were around for close to, if not longer, than a century. For example, Cardinal Gibbons holds its place in local history as the alma mater of Babe Ruth despite closing in 2010.

At the beginning of the year, there were 61 parishes in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, and that number will drop to 30 locations organized into 23 parishes under the Archdioceses’ ‘Seek the City’ plan. WBAL reported the plan’s breakdown of parishes during initial reporting in May.

On a pragmatic level, these churches were gathering points for their local communities, and indeed had outreach involved. Saint Pius X had a garden which grew vegetables for those in need. Also notable is St. Vincent De Paul, which was a center of local outreach to the homeless population and had resources available for those in need.

On a sentimental level, it’s difficult to see pillars of the local community St. Anne’s in East Baltimore is also one of the shuttered churches, having been around for 150 years. St Mary Star of the Sea held a beacon on its spire in honor of the sailors which would come through Baltimore as a symbolic way of guiding them safely back to land. Many of these churches have stood for over a century as centerpieces of their local communities. They became integrated into the lives of the city’s citizens, and to have so many closing at once out of necessity highlights a changing era for Baltimore City.

All of these closings come with their own little pieces of local community which vanish with them.

What It All Means

The dominantly notable thing coming out of Catholicism’s flight from Baltimore is that the Archdiocese needs to chart a new path through an uncertain future. With religion becoming less important to younger generations, the Church needs to find ways to reach out if these closures and consolidations are to remain a singular event and not the first in a long series of downsizing for the once-predominant religious organizations in the area.

The closing both of these parishes and of longstanding schools such as IND highlights the other problems facing Baltimore. Simply put, running schools is expensive, and Baltimore City has a higher poverty level than in eras past. With concerns over the city’s tax base not bringing in enough to properly handle the public schools, which are provided at no cost for families to attend, the fact that are too many expensive schools and not enough families who could afford to pay should come as no surprise. A financial situation that dire necessitates pragmatic decision making which unfortunately results in casualties. IND was one of those casualties.

In a city still struggling to rebuild itself and become a thriving town as it was in the days of steel production, Baltimore simply doesn’t have the population which can sustain such expensive habits. With the cost of living on the rise nationwide, it should come as no surprise that sending kids to expensive private schools or being able to donate to the local parish are lower on the list of priorities than putting food on the table and a roof over it.

IND also highlights the loss of tradition and connection with past generations. Baltimore has always had a quirkiness to it that people asking, “Where did you go to school?” refers to high school, not college. Generations of families would attend Calvert Hall or IND or so on and so forth. In many cases, it’s hard to see schools which saw generations of the family graduate not have that same tradition and connection with the next generation.

Baltimore’s traditional identity as a working class city meant that most people topped out at high school, meaning asking where someone went to high school as a standard question was because quite a lot of people didn’t go much further. In the same way, many of these parishes were tied into the local identities and could help one understand who someone was in a quick fashion.

This will also force Baltimore as a whole to look at the possibility of life without the Catholic Church. In spite of all its misdeeds, the Church still plays a vital role in the city and the local culture. Many of the parishes served to facilitate the Church’s outreach programs to the less fortunate. These programs, donating food or offering shelter, are still sorely needed in Baltimore. The loss of those programs if the Church were to lose its foothold in the area would be another push towards a darker path for Charm City.

Not everything lost is meant to last forever. Time marches on and the world changes with it. The forest must burn for new growth to occur. However, it is permissible to recognize a major loss when it occurs, and to take a few moments to grieve and ponder. Baltimore still stands, and the community in the area will remain. But such a dramatic change in one of the city’s oldest demographics is worthwhile paying attention to.

The decline of these organizations may be more pragmatic than a tectonic shift away from religion itself. They could be another in a long line of symptoms of the illness striking the city in the form of ineffective governance, crime, wealth inequality, and lack of mobility for disenfranchised people. It’s up for the people of Baltimore to invest in Baltimore.

The decline of yesterday’s Baltimore doesn’t mean tomorrow’s Baltimore is guaranteed to be bleak.

Thoughts From The Author

On a personal note, this affair has led to some complicated emotions for me. Years ago, I chose to walk away from the Catholic Church for my own reasons. I stand by my decision. However, I know that religion is a source of comfort, strength, and stability for many people, and it does pain me to see my city suffer like this. I attended one of the high schools mentioned in this article. I had friends or acquaintances who went to all of the ones in the area still open and many of the ones which closed. I had friends and family members who attended many of the parishes that are now closing down and being consolidated.

There’s a level of loss I feel seeing these closures, because I know these places were still sources of local community, aid, and comfort to many people. There was generational history in these places, and that link to the past is now lost. The church where my parents were married, and I was baptized was one of the ones which closed. While I don’t think I’ll ever return to religion, there is a part of me that is upset that I’ll never get the chance to walk my future children into that room and tell them, “This is where their grandparents got married.”

I think writing this article and highlighting this is a way to honor and recognize what this loss means to Baltimore and the community at large, even if it’s a natural conclusion to the misdeeds perpetrated and covered up by the Catholic Church. This is a blow to the community, the sense of generational continuity, and is a symptom of the struggles hurting people here in Baltimore.

I don’t necessarily think this turn of events is wholly bad or wholly good, but I do think it’s a complicated problem. It makes sense to put resources where they can be effective, but there is something to be said about such a major part of the city’s history being dramatically less prominent. I think it’s lamentable that the bad seems to outweigh the good in this area, and the faithful of the city are feeling the results of that. One of the great freedoms of our country is the freedom of religion, in that everyone should be guaranteed to worship whichever deity they choose the way they see fit. So, it’s a little tragic to see an important part of that in a relatively important American city suffer so much. Even if I think it’s earned. Even if I have serious personal issues with the Catholic Church, I still think this is not something to gloat over.

So, I will be sad for my Catholic friends who have lost their second home. I will be sad for the historic churches which will now go up for sale, potentially to be knocked down despite their artistry. I will be sad for a piece of my own history which has come to its end.

But I will not despair for my city. Baltimore still has a bright future ahead.