Churches fight to stay open as attendance dwindles
During the final Mass at the All Saints Parish in Buffalo, New York, on a warm Sunday in July, the priests encouraged the few parishioners who came to take comfort in holy scripture.
"For everything, there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven," the passage read.
On Earth, many parishes are accepting that it's time to sell their properties. As the person leading renewal and development for the Diocese of Buffalo, Father Bryan Zielenieski is one of many religious leaders across America who have closed houses of worship in recent years.
"We essentially went to half of what we used to back in the early 2000s," he told ABC News. "We lost about 100 parishes."
Zielenieski expects he'll need to shut down another 70 churches in what the Diocese is calling its "road to renewal." It's a very biblical name for the challenge facing churches: People just aren't going as much as they used to.
On average, more than half of the diocese's churches today are baptizing fewer than one person a month, and 59% of them are spending more than they take in, Zielenieski noted.
In the late 1940s, nearly 80% of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue, mosque or temple, according to Gallup. Today, just 45% say the same, the analytics company noted, and only 32% say that they worship God in a house of prayer once a week.
tl;dr, Church attendance in the US is down and churches are closing and getting turned into businesses or condos/apartments. Catholic Church in particular getting hammered over priest molestation scandals.