St. Stephens Parish to Merge into St. Joseph Parish in Oil City

Chris Rossetti

Chris Rossetti

Published November 17, 2019 5:45 am
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OIL CITY, Pa. (EYT) — The anticipated merger of Saint Stephens Parish with Saint Joseph Parish in Oil City is now official following a decree issued by Erie Bishop Lawrence Persico on Friday and read at the 4:00 p.m. Saturday Mass at St. Joseph.

(St. Joseph Church, Oil City. Courtesy of Timothy Rudisille Photography.)

View the full decree

The parishes will become one at Saint Joseph effective January 1, 2020.

“After some preliminary discussions, an ad hoc planning committee was formed in May of 2019 to look at the present situation of the parishes, the buildings, and the future of the Catholic community in Oil City as a whole,” Persico wrote in the decree.

“The question was: How can the Catholic community of Oil City position itself to build a foundation for the future?

“The committee met with the combined pastoral council of both parishes and with other parishioners, studied the available data, and then obtained the approval of the combined pastoral council to publicized a proposed plan for Oil City. The committee then asked parishioners for feedback. Parishioners were able to provide feedback for one month, at the end of which the committee reviewed.

“Numerous concerns and suggestions were made and taken into consideration. In the end, the committee believed that the majority of these suggestions and concerns could be satisfactorily met with the original proposal, and they re-proposed the plan essentially unchanged. The pastoral council reviewed it again and then voted in favor of recommending to the pastor that he send a proposal to the Bishop to merge Saint Stephen Parish into Saint Joseph Parish. As a result, on October 23, 2019, Father John Miller, as pastor of both Saint Joseph Parish and St. Stephen Parish, wrote to me as Diocesan Bishop asking that I merge St. Stephen Parish into Saint Joseph Parish.

“I brought the matter of the proposed merger before the Presbyteral Council on November 7, 2019. I asked the council members for their advice on the aforementioned proposal. The council discussed the precipitous decline in the census of the two parishes, the deteriorating condition of both Saint Joseph Church and Saint Stephen Church, and the nature and extent of the repairs needed at each, the estimated costs of repairing each, the various financial reserves available to the two parishes, and the advisability of depleting significant amounts of those reserves on emergency repairs – effectively leaving little for pastoral activities.

“The council members also discussed the process that had taken place in Oil City for arriving at the proposal, together with an overview of the feedback received from parishioners. After considerable discussion and the weighing of several options, the members of the Presbyteral Council expressed their unanimous support for the proposal to merge Saint Stephen Parish into Saint Joseph Parish, with Saint Joseph Church retaining its status as the parochial church.”

As the decree stated, in late October, the pastoral council voted 8-4 to recommend the merger of the parishes at which point it went to Persico for his final decision, which he handed down via the decree on Friday.

The plan to merge the two Oil City parishes took a step forward in July of 2019 after the above mentioned ad-hoc committee consisting of four members elected from the pastoral council (two from each parish), two members elected from the finance committee (one per parish); and four at-large members (two from each parish) recommended the idea.

Rev. Ian McElrath, Parochial Vicar for St. Stephen and St. Joseph Parishes, told exploreVenango in October the merger had been a topic of discussion since August of 2018.

“That was really when things started to kick into high gear,” McElrath said.

In the October interview with exploreVenango, McElrath said the merger became a serious consideration after serious structural issues were discovered in the towers at St. Stephen Church. That, along with the decrease Catholic population, declining offertory, increasing age of parishioners (7 percent over the age of 50), the declining number of families (minus 500 families since 2010), and a projected continued demographic decline, all fueled the decision.

“There’s no easy way around this,” McElrath said in October. “No one wants to experience a loss, but our hope for the plan is that instead of managing decline, we can hopefully get our feet under us and begin to build.

“Our intention isn’t about downsizing, it’s about rightsizing, so we can build from something instead of simply managing decline.”

In his decree, Persico mentioned many of the same factors.

“In August 2018, it was discovered that the towers of St. Stephen Church needed emergency repair work when stones fell from the towers,” Persico wrote. “Temporary emergency measures were put in place to prevent other stones from dislodging. It had become obvious, however, that major decisions would soon need to be made regarding the building’s deteriorating condition.”

In the decree, it was revealed that, when taking into account adjustments for households merged into these parishes in 2017, parish census figures show an annual decrease of 4.4 percent at Saint Joseph Parish, and 5.5 percent at Saint Stephen Parish.

“Currently, Saint Joseph Parish lists 335 households while Saint Stephen Parish lists 398 households,” the decree said. “At the current pace, Saint Joseph will soon be the larger of the two parishes. The Catholic community of Oil City now numbers fewer than 750 households. Part of this dramatic change in parishioner statistics is due to improved census figures which more accurately reflect true parish membership, but it cannot be denied that there is an actual steep decline in the number of parishioners. Simply put, younger generations of Catholics in Oil City are not replacing older generations. Whereas there were 323 baptisms in Oil City in 1950, in 2018 there were only 14, nearly a 96 percent decrease.”

According to the decree, under the merger, the receiving parish shall continue to be Saint Joseph Parish. It shall be territorial in nature, with the parish retaining all of the territory which it now possesses, and to it will be added all of the territory of Saint Stephen Parish.

All sacramental records from Saint Stephen Parish shall be retained at the parish offices of Saint Joseph Parish.

In accord with the norm of law (cf. can. 121), all of the assets, responsibilities, and liabilities of Saint Stephen Parish shall be transferred to Saint Joseph Parish.

The parish church shall be Saint Joseph Church. Saint Stephen Church shall become a secondary church – without mission status – of Saint Joseph Parish.

Saint Stephen Church is to remain open to the faithful at least occasionally for sacred worship, whether public or private (cf. can. 1214), but in accord with diocesan law, Masses are not to be celebrated there on Sundays or holy days of obligation or the evenings preceding them. As required by law, Mass is to be celebrated in Saint Stephen Church every year on the solemnity of the church’s title (December 26), in accord with current liturgical norms (cf. cann. 1167 §2 and 1168 of the former Code of Canon Law, and can. 2 of the present Code). If such an observance is impeded by another date of higher rank according to the Roman calendar, the impeded solemnity is to be transferred to the first available date thereafter.

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