Like many US dioceses, the Archdiocese of Detroit is going through a parish consolidation process.
In the preparation, the archdiocese has posted a detailed set of presentations (one for each parish in the archdiocese) providing the data diocesan leaders are assessing as they make these decisions about the closure or merger of parishes.
The documents provide interesting insights into some hard realities of Catholic life in the Archdiocese of Detroit — much of which is likely similar to the circumstances in other U.S. dioceses, especially in traditional heartlands of American Catholicism.
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Detroit’s archdiocesan parish presentations note that “our diocese is growing older, not younger,” pointing to the fact that funerals are now more common than baptisms in the archdiocese.
Detroit’s reputation for post-industrial urban flight might seem to suggest that the archdiocese’s situation is uniquely dire, and connected to total population decline in the region.
But the facts don’t quite bear that out.
In terms of total population, the population of the Archdiocese of Detroit has actually slightly grown from 2000 to 2024, from 4.3 million residents to 4.4 million.
At the same time, the number of parochially registered Catholics has declined, from 1.4 mlilion in 2000 to currently about 900,000, according to the archdiocesan date.
The ratio of funerals to baptisms is often taken as a measure of the demographic health of a local church, with churches that have more funerals than baptisms seen as in decline. The Archdiocese of Detroit had 1.2 funerals for each infant baptism in 2019 — showing an archdiocese in demographic decline.
But in that respect, Detroit is actually only one of 58 dioceses in the US where funerals outnumbered infant baptisms in 2019, the most recent year for which consistent data was available.
Within the Archdiocese of Detroit itself, there is a great deal of parish variation on the baptism-to-funeral ratio.
Of the 209 parishes in the archdiocese, 75 had more baptisms than funerals in 2024.
In those 75 parishes, average weekly Mass attendance was 917, while for the other 127 parishes the average weekly Mass attendance was 569.
Forty-seven archdiocesan parishes had more than three funerals per baptism, and those parishes trended even lower in Mass attendance, averaging just 408 Catholics in the pews each Sunday.
Seven parishes had no baptisms at all, and those averaged only 102 Catholics in attendance at Mass each week.
Mass attendance data is collected in near every U.S. diocese, but seldom published or made available to the public. Instead,most published data about how often Catholics actually attend Mass is derived from surveys. The problem with such survey data, many researchers suspect, is that respondents are thought likely to overestimate how frequently they actually go to church — telling researchers how often they intend to go or how often they would like to go rather, than how frequently they actually attend.
Still, recent surveys have shown that about 30% of US Catholics say that they attend Mass at least once a week.
But collected archdiocesan data suggests that actual numbers in the Archdiocese of Detroit are much lower.
In the presentations on the demographics of the archdiocese, Mass attendance data shows that the number of Catholics attending Mass in a given week is equal to 14% to 17% of the number of registered Catholics in the archdiocese.
Mass attendance as a percentage of registered Catholics in the archdiocese is not falling over time, but the number of registered Catholics has been steadily declining, and that is reflected in a decreasing number of Catholics in pews each week.
That decline leaves the archdioceses’ pews mostly empty. Given the number of seats available in churches, and the number of Masses celebrated each weekend, the archdiocese could currently accommodate just under half a million Mass-goers. With only 139,088 of Catholics showing up on an average Sunday, that’s a lot of empty seats.
But of course, it’s not the seats themselves that become a problem. The true constraint is the number of priests available to celebrate Mass. Since 2010, Detroit has averaged about four ordinations per year.
That number is well below the required replacement rate of ordinations in the diocese needed to keep pace with retirements. And although the archdiocese currently has 224 active diocesan priests, only 116 – slightly more than half – are under the age of 60.
The archdiocese projects that by 2034, the number of active diocesan priests will fall to 134.
Presently, there are 639 Masses being celebrated in the archdiocese each weekend — almost three Masses per diocesan priest. Though some Masses are celebrated by members of religious orders, the demands for priests incardinated in the diocese are obviously increasing.
In fact, without a reduction in the number of Masses being celebrated, most Detroit priests would be in 10 years celebrating about five Masses a weekend.
With fewer than 30% of seats currently full, and the number of Mass attendees continuing to fall by 4% per year, it’s clear why the archdiocese sees a need to cut down on the number of Masses offered, and even the number of parishes within its boundaries.
There’s also a financial burden to maintaining a larger number of sparsely attended parishes. The average parish with fewer than 250 weekly Mass-goers had expenses in the 2024/2025 fiscal year amounting to $3442 per Mass-goer.
For parishes with more than 1,000 people attending a Sunday Mass on an average weekend, the parish expenses per Mass-goer are significantly lower — $2447.
People who attend small parishes do make up the difference, in part, by contributing more to their parishes, financially. In the parishes with fewer than 250 Mass-goers on the average weekend, annual collections per Mass-goer were $1,342. For parishes with more than 1,000 attendees each weekend, annual collections were only $921 per Mass-goer.
But the higher contribution amount in smaller parishes is not enough to cover the greater expenses.
Even after the other sources of income which parishes use to fill the gap (such as renting out buildings, fundraising, and school/religious ed tuition) the average parish with fewer than 250 weekly attendees ran at a $10,297 deficit in the 2024/2025 fiscal year.
Parishes with 250 to 999 attendees averaged $65,625 in positive annual cash flow and those with 1,000+ averaged $189k.
For parishes with aging buildings requiring preventative maintenance, positive cashflow on at operational basis is often essential to keeping a roof, literally, overhead.
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The problems Detroit faces are not unique to Detroit: declining numbers of priests, larger numbers of aging and increasingly empty church buildings, and the community and financial difficulties of merging parishes with many years of history behind them.
The Detroit data indicates the scope of ecclesiastical challenges typical in the Northeast and Midwest today: evangelizing the 85% of Catholics not typically attending Sunday Mass, and doing so with less: fewer church buildings, fewer priests, and less money.