Demographics and the Steubenville test case

What can be learned from the saga of Steubenville?

According to the bishop responsible for its care, the Diocese of Steubenville has enough money and enough priests to continue its mission.

Veterans Memorial Bridge spans the Ohio River, to connect Steubenville, Ohio, left, and Weirton, West Virginia. Credit: wikimedia/CC BY SA 3.0

Bishop Ed Lohse of Kalamazoo, who is apostolic administrator of the Ohio diocese, issued his verdict on the financial and ministerial health of the local Church in a report published Tuesday. Lohse likely expected it would be taken as good news.

In fact, it would seem to many observers more than could be reasonably hoped for, to find that a small diocese which has been plagued by financial scandal is in the black “at least modestly,” and doing well in terms of priest numbers, despite sizable demographic headwinds..

But despite that broadly positive assessment, Lohse kept open the door to an eventual merger with the neighboring Diocese of Columbus — a prospect which has been highly controversial among local Catholics since it was first mooted in 2022.

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“The most significant issue facing the Diocese of Steubenville in the next 5 to 10 years, and indeed in the next 30 years, is the projected decrease in population,” Lohse reported this week.

“The general population has declined noticeably, and the Catholic population even more so, with no reversal of this trend in sight. This reality is troubling and the challenge it will present to the future viability of the diocese will be significant,” Lohse wrote.

On the numbers, Lohse is not wrong. The population demographics of Appalachia point steadily downward, and there’s a case to consider, as Lohse said, about whether a merger would possibly help “the faith to flourish in southeastern Ohio,” and even how long the diocese could remain viable.

But considering that case is complicated.

The general trend across western countries, most notably in Italy and Ireland, has been to respond to shrinking numbers with the merger of dioceses — even historic ones — first in the person of a bishop and only later fully and institutionally.

The arguments in favor are, in many cases, obvious: economies of scale, the ability to federate large parochial footprints and better deploy combined rosters of clerics to meet local needs in changing circumstances.

But the arguments don’t always recommend themselves to every situation. As the Church learned Monday, neither money nor priests are especially scarce in Steubenville. Rather, what is lacking — and likely to lack more — is people.

To that issue, critics of merger proposals — including the diocese’s own priests — have insisted that bigger, bolder, more explicitly evangelical thinking is needed, about how to reorient diocesan ministry to meet the needs of an evermore obviously mission territory.

Anything less, at least according to some, isn’t so much a maximization of stretched resources as an ecclesiology of managed decline.

There is, perhaps reasonably, a certain emotional resonance to the opponents of any plan to merge the Diocese of Steubenville. Pope Francis has, for more than a decade, insisted on a Church that remakes itself into one that goes out to the peripheries, rather than one which appears to shirk in on itself.

And the data doesn’t all point to smaller dioceses being unsustainable. On the contrary, recent studies suggest that the smaller a diocese is, in terms of population, the better it may actually fare in terms of attracting vocations and animating local Catholic life.

Between 2013 and 2023, not a single diocese serving more than 750,000 Catholics had enough ordinations to maintain its current level of priests.

Meanwhile, the dioceses consistently ordaining priests at a rate above demographic attrition are those centered around smaller cities like Wichita, Nashville, Springfield, and Little Rock. Those same cities tend to see the kinds of overall general population trends experienced by Steubenville.

Nevertheless, for a bishop like Lohse to look at the numbers and conclude any differently than he did, that an economically and demographically struggling territory poses real questions about the generational viability of the diocese, could be reasonably argued to be grinning in the face of hard truths, at best.

In the end, there is probably no provable technocratic “right way” to address the challenges facing the Diocese of Steubenville, and any option carries with it the risk of frustrated hopes and real disappointment for local Catholics.

The most bankable solution, in all likelihood, is one that unites the local Church in the common endeavor of the Gospel — whatever solution that may be.

And that conversation, perhaps more than any other factor, has been an issue in Steubenville.

Lohse himself concluded this week that a critical issue in Steubenville has been a sense of defeat among Catholics about the diocese, and about their local Church.

“Many people believed from the announcement of a proposed merger that it had already been decided, even though in truth no decision had actually been made,” he said — unsurprising, given the way the merger plans were initially conveyed to priests.

“The prospect of the diocese itself being merged into another is seen by some [local Catholics] as one more institution now abandoning them as well,” the bishop added.

In that context, it would take an extraordinary act of leadership to win over at least some local Catholics — including clergy — to any positive view of a possible merger, however soundly the case for it could be made.

And most notably, what Steubenville has lacked over the last three years is stable leadership.

The last bishop proper of the diocese, Bishop Jeff Monforton, left to become an auxiliary bishop in Detroit in 2023, amid Vos estis investigations into his leadership. He was replaced by the retired Bishop Paul Bradley, formerly of Kalamazoo, as apostolic administrator.

Bradley was widely liked in the diocese, and trusted by diocesan clergy. He was also outspoken about his belief in the viability of the diocese.

But Bradely was taken out of his retirement gig last year and replaced by Lohse. And, according to both reporting on the event and the sense among local priests, Bradley was removed from the diocese because he had become a vocal skeptic of an inevitable merger.

Lohse — however clear-eyed his report’s conclusions, and no matter how transparently and pastorally sympathetic he may have framed them — is seen by many in the diocese as an outsider looking in and pricing up what he sees, something like an ecclesiastical management consultant.

Meanwhile, local Catholics say they are asking for a bishop who will be one of them — a smell-of-the-sheep pastor in the Pope Francis mold — whom they can learn to trust.

The risk for the Vatican, or rather more specifically the apostolic nunciature in Washington, is that appointing such a man could risk that he becomes convinced by local sentiment for his diocese, and thereby jeopardizes the viability of a merger project once widely viewed as a template for other small dioceses across the country.

Indeed, once viewed as a template, Steubenville has now become a test case for the future of American dioceses in similar circumstances.

The nunciature has already learned that American dioceses apparently cannot or will not be merged without consultation, at least not as compliantly as they might be in Europe.

But is there an appetite to allow someone to see what can be done with a clergy apparently willing to fight the demographic tide, and see what the results could be?

And perhaps the more basic question: Could a bishop be found who was willing to give it a try?