Churches

Fayette County is not happy about the numerous church closures in the county--understandably so--and have appealed to the Vatican.

Full disclosure: I was raised Catholic, went to Catholic school until I went to college, and now no longer consider myself a practicing Catholic, mostly because some of the church's teachings don't mesh well with me.

However, good friends of mine are still good Catholics, including my boyfriend, and my grandparents were quite devout. I've seen the benefits of churches--specifically, their sense of community--and so even though I don't really agree with or like a lot, I do understand and respect others' beliefs and what the churches mean.

And they mean a lot, because people are not happy. If you go to church, you probably know this and have probably heard firsthand people complaining about their church closing. Fayette County isn't exactly handling this gracefully. In fact, when a Mt. Washington church had to temporarily close, my boyfriend and I saw people on the news saying, "The church isn't the building, it's the people," and we were like, "Wait, what? People react calmly to church closings?"

That said, the closings bring up to other issues.

Some, like St. Procopius in New Salem, just underwent renovation projects that parishioners donated money to have done. Just a few months after renovations were finished, St. Procopius closed. Kind of seems like a waste of money, doesn't it?

The second is logistics. Okay, fine, some churches had to go and combining them in central locations does make sense, but the problem is that one of the new churches--St. Thomas--though really pretty, has no air conditioning, has a huge flight of stairs to get into it which is problematic for the elderly and basically anyone in winter, and is on a hill. Some argue--quite reasonably--that it would've made sense to keep the big, flat church in Cardale open instead.

Meanwhile, what happens to all the closed churches now?