Note: The following article was first published in The Lumen, newspaper of the Diocese of Sioux City, Iowa. It is reprinted with permission.
By Dawn Prosser
“The Church really wants to not just survive but it wants to thrive,” Benedictine Father Matthew Luft of St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville reflected.
The priest, who serves as pastor of four parishes that comprise the Centered on Christ Area Catholic Community in the Diocese of St. Cloud, explained he is learning that the “whole pastoral planning process of doing these formation linkages, these groupings and creating these Catholic communities are really helping us focus once again on this notion of what we are about and what our primary task is.”
To worship, to evangelize and care for the poor are the three primary tasks of the Church according to Pope Benedict XVI, the priest said.
Father Luft is on a sabbatical from his pastoral assignment after receiving a Pastoral Study Project Grant from the Louisville Institute funded by the Lilly Foundation to study pastoral planning “to better minister to, and with, the people of God entrusted to my care,” and share that information with his brother priests.
He has temporarily relocated to his hometown of Des Moines to study the pastoral planning processes in the four dioceses of Iowa, including the Diocese of Sioux City.
Why Iowa?
The priest said he has “practical reasons” for studying pastoral planning in the Catholic Church in Iowa.
“Right now, in the state of Iowa’s four dioceses, there’s a little bit of everything happening,” he explained. The “Sioux City (Diocese) in many ways is on the forefront of pastoral planning in terms of looking at canonical mergers. Whenever I’m reading about it, people often reference the Sioux City plan.”
He noted that the Archdiocese of Dubuque provides a historical, long-term perspective due to its 30- to 40-year history of planning, which has included merging and closing parishes in some cases.
In his home diocese of Des Moines, the priest said some groupings have existed for decades and that many of the diocese’s rural parishes are now in groupings.
“In the city of Des Moines, a lot of parishes still have two to three priests. For the most part in the city itself, things have not changed since the mid-1980s,” he said.
Father Luft is in the process of reaching out to the pastoral planning office in Davenport to begin studying planning and demographics there.
The Diocese of St. Cloud has initiated several waves of planning efforts, and Father Luft recently found himself in the middle of planning, trying to discern how to best navigate the waters as he pastors his parishes. He also serves on the diocesan Planning Council.
The priest was named pastor of St. Boniface Parish in Cold Spring in 2013. Four years later, the abbey was working through a “configuration planning,” which resulted in Father Luft receiving two additional parishes.
Soon thereafter, the Diocese of St. Cloud began a new pastoral planning process, and 29 Area Catholic Communities were created. This process led to Father Luft receiving his fourth parish — Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Rockville — in July 2020. In addition to that parish and St. Boniface, he is also pastor of St. James in Jacobs Prairie and Sts. Peter and Paul in Richmond.
“That parish (Rockville), because they have had so many configurations in the past, has been pretty good at grieving and knew how to form a new grouping,” Father Luft reflected.
However, some transitions were more difficult. One of the parishes the priest received in 2017 was previously grouped with another parish and the “severing of that linkage was a really difficult process.”
“That’s where I learned I didn’t know how to lead that grieving process for them,” he said.
Father Luft’s experiences pointed out that other pastors need help to work through planning in this era of fewer faithful in the pews and fewer active priests.
“For most of us (priests), we have been learning as we go in this process,” he said.
He said every time a parish is added to a grouping, responsibilities multiply, especially administrative tasks, including finance council, school board and other meetings. The administrative tasks can leave little time for ministry.
“In the last five years, I found my level of actually doing ministry from visiting the homebound, going to the hospital and nursing homes and being able to interact with the faith formation groups … all of the sudden plummeted,” the priest explained. “My own sense of ministry itself was just diminishing.”
Supporting pastors
Demographic changes and pastoral planning are not unique to Midwestern dioceses. Father Luft gave the example of the Diocese of Haarlem-Amsterdam in the Netherlands, which plans to close 99 of its 164 churches in the next five years.
“It’s the reality that it’s not just Iowa, not just Minnesota, not just the U.S.; it’s what the Church as a whole is going through,” he said. “It’s hard to see places we’ve known and loved change in shape and form.”
Researching the Diocese of Sioux City, the priest said he was intrigued by the “coordinated efforts” in the northwest Iowa Catholic Church, designed to support pastors and parishes through the planning process.
“I was impressed because one of the first things that happens after a pastoral planning meeting is that the Office of Evangelization meets with the pastor…,” he said, noting other diocesan offices also provide support. “It’s not just the planning office and the parish trying to figure it out.”
For the next three months, Father Luft said he plans to interview planning directors and pastors and document their experiences — good and bad — for the project.
“Pastors are in a tough place right now … I want to find ways to be able to share what I’m learning in ways that will benefit the Church in the person of the pastor,” he said.
As pastors and laity worldwide are facing or will face pastoral planning and all the associated challenges, Father Luft said he wants Catholics to have hope for the future of the Church in this “unprecedented time in the life of the Church.”
“We have this great opportunity to be able to create our future and pass on our faith and really live this mission,” Father Luft pointed out.
Dawn Prosser is director of communications for the Diocese of Sioux City, Iowa.