Mass growth

By Christina Littlefield (contact)

Friday, Dec. 19, 2003 | 4:56 a.m.

The Rev. Bede Wevita has a problem other Roman Catholic priests would love to have.

His parish, St. John Neumann's in North Las Vegas, dedicated its first permanent building last week, but the church's four weekend Masses are already at capacity in the new multipurpose room used as a 600-seat sanctuary.

By January, the 5-year-old parish may have to add services to accommodate the ever-growing congregation, Wevita said. And with all of the new housing developments going up near the parish's Ann Road and Simmons Avenue location, the number of parishioners is expected to triple within two years -- before it has even begun construction on an actual church building.

Other Las Vegas Valley parishes have similar growth pains.

"No other diocese in this country has experienced such growth," Wevita said. "It's mind-boggling."

The Rev. James J. Bevan, pastor of St. Joseph, Husband of Mary Catholic Church on West Sahara Avenue, said there are other pastors and bishops "who would die to have this problem."

"In other parts of the country, as the demographics shift, they are closing churches," he said. "Our problem is that we can't open them fast enough."

Priests and construction funds are scarce, and the faithful are plentiful as the Las Vegas Diocese tries to keep up with the growing numbers of Roman Catholics in Clark County -- the largest religious group in the valley with almost half a million members, according to the diocese, in 26 churches.

At least five parishes are bursting at the seams. Priests are, on average, outnumbered by their parishioners 18,000 to 1. Some parishes have more than 30,000 members and two priests.

Other churches are growing as well, as Clark County adds more than 6,100 new residents a month.

It's hard to draw comparisons because there is no single body that tracks church size. But Central Christian Church, one of the largest Protestant, nondenominational churches in the Las Vegas Valley, draws 6,000 to 9,000 people to weekend services, senior pastor Mike Bodine said.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has 143,000 members in the Las Vegas Valley, keeps its 279 congregations smaller, with an average of 500 people, spokesman John Hanks said.

Catholic churches in the area don't have the ability to do that, Bevan said. Each church needs a priest, and finding priests and the resources to run a church is difficult, especially given the influx of people into the valley. "No matter what you do there are more coming," Bevan said. "It's a never-ending process."

About 70,000, or 14 percent, of Catholics in Clark County attend Mass on an average weekend, diocesan officials estimate. On major holidays, such as Christmas and Easter, the numbers swell, and parishes have to add several services to accommodate everyone.

"Sundays we have under control, but Christmas will be bananas," said the Rev. Kevin McAuliffe, pastor of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church in Summerlin. That parish has about 30,000 registered members.

If all registered Catholics in Clark County went to church every week, "we would have to have Mass in the parking lot," Bevan said.

Diocesan officials say they are trying to serve the rising tide of Roman Catholicism in the valley by forming new parishes.

A third parish in Henderson is opening on Christmas Eve, and the diocese is working on several projects to enlarge existing campuses, as well as shopping for affordable land for future parishes. Part of the future construction will include both elementary- and adult-education centers and a new campus for Bishop Gorman High School that will be west of the Las Vegas Beltway off Russell Road.

That kind of growth takes money, land and priests, as well as time to gather a new religious community together, Vicar General and Chancellor Bob Stoeckig said. Money for construction also takes fund-raising efforts above and beyond normal church donations.

It took Wevita's parish five years and a loan of approximately $3 million to complete the first phase of its building plans. It will take a few years and another $6 million before the church will be built and even longer for the proposed education center.

Since its founding in 1998, St. John Neumann has grown from 19 families meeting in Wevita's suburban rectory to more than 1,800 families as of Thanksgiving when the parish celebrated its first Mass in the 28,000-square-foot center.

Paying for all the expansion has been a constant issue.

The Las Vegas Diocese promotes good stewardship of all resources -- time, talent and money -- in giving toward the church and does not require parishioners to give a specific percentage or tithe, according to Wevita, who is also the communication director for the diocese. Weekly collections, in fact, do not usually cover normal operational costs, he said.

For instance, St. John Neumann takes in about $600,000 in collections, but has an operational budget of $1 million. To balance the budget, Wevita said the parish relies on a few larger private donors and on special fund-raisers. Collections for the ministries of the Las Vegas Diocese and other Catholic causes, as well as buildings and other projects, are taken separately at different times during the year -- giving parishioners the choice of whether to give their money to a particular cause, he said.

While diocesan officials work on starting more new parishes, existing churches are finding ways to overcome the logistical problems of serving thousands of parishioners, Stoeckig said. Parishes are recruiting more lay leaders, nonordained employees and volunteers who have received religious training to deal creatively with issues such as parking and trying to maintain good relationships with surrounding community members.

"We could do better with more locations and more priests but, given what we have, we reach a lot of people in a given week," Stoeckig said.

At least four parishes -- St. Elizabeth, St. Joseph, Husband of Mary, Christ the King on Torrey Pines Drive and Tropicana Avenue and St. Thomas More on Pecos Road in Henderson -- are suffering from "terrible overcrowding" Stoeckig said.

St. Bridget's on 14th Street is also overcrowded, but mainly because the 1945-era church seats only 300 people, Stoeckig said.

All five weekend Masses at St. Bridget's, one of the most diverse parishes in the area, are full and worshippers are constantly in a chapel open 24 hours for prayer, parish secretary Joanna Pollard said.

The parish bought the entire block surrounding the old church and has begun demolition to build a new campus with a sanctuary three to four times larger than the current space.

A new Henderson parish, St. Francis of Assisi, is expected to take at least half of St. Thomas More's congregation, Stoeckig said, but the new parish will be limited until it is able to build its new facilities on a 20-acre site at Green Valley and Horizon Ridge parkways. The parish will begin meeting in the multipurpose room of Neil Twitchell Elementary School, Stoeckig said.

Meanwhile, priests at the overcrowded churches say they do their best to keep up.

St. Elizabeth's is by far the largest, with more than 9,000 registered families, which translates to more than 30,000 people. About 7,000 people attend the eight services offered each weekend, McAuliffe said. The church even offers a double Mass at 10 a.m. when more than 300 people overflow into the school auditorium next to the 1,250-seat church, with a priest in each location.

All that's with only a little more than 20 percent of his registered parishioners attending.

Parking is another problem priests say they have to deal with. McAuliffe's church uses all of the adjacent elementary school's parking on Sundays and still worked to get the Las Vegas City Council to allow more parking on surrounding Summerlin streets.

St. Joseph's trades parking spaces with nearby car dealerships on Sahara Avenue, allowing their employees to park in the church lot during weekdays so that church members can park in the car lots on Sundays.

St. Thomas' parishioners alleviate the strain by parking in a nearby shopping center, much to the annoyance of some of the shopkeepers, the Rev. Patrick Render, its pastor, said.

The hurdles of these logistical issues, however, have little effect on the quality of Mass, Render said. In some ways a large group can be even more manageable.

"I can be just as effective with a group of 1,200 as I could for 400 people," Render said. "They are going to get the same Mass and the same liturgy and the same Scriptures."

Large churches are also able to do more community outreach because of their numbers, priests said.

What becomes tricky is meeting the needs of individuals.

"Just the sheer number of marriages and funerals and baptisms and calls to be with the dying puts a great strain on us," Render said. "Obviously we can't do it all."

Masses associated with these types of rites can add sometimes nine services a week, Bevan said, and Mass can be celebrated only by an ordained priest.

Even the largest churches have at most two ordained priests. One additional priest will be ordained to serve in Las Vegas in 2004, and two more in 2005, but more are needed, officials said.

Because of this shortage, priests say they have come to rely on lay leadership to run most outreach and educational programs, employing 900 lay people full or part time diocesewide. Also helping are countless volunteers, ranging from youth religious education teachers to ushers to extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist, who help serve Holy Communion.

"Certainly the ministries of the church could never happen without the lay people taking an active role," Render said.

This trend, instigated partly by need and partly by a mandate by the Second Vatican Council, gives parishioners full responsibility for the life of their parish.

"The lay people should take the lead," Wevita said. "It's their parish."

Even with that help, though, the large parishes feel a loss of neighborhood community, the pastors agreed. Ideally parishes should serve only a three-mile radius, but many parishes in the outskirts of Las Vegas are serving at least twice that and the geographical boundaries between parishes are fading, they said.

"There is a core group of people, but many of the people you just don't know, you can't possibly know on a first-name basis," Bevan said. "And that loses something, an intimacy is lost."

The churches try to make up for that loss by offering programs for almost every age group, marital status or special need imaginable. They also focus on welcoming new families into the church and greeting visitors at the door, priests said.

Several churches also reach out to parishioners who may have language barriers, Stoeckig said. St. Christopher's, St. Anne's, St. Francis de Sales, Holy Family and Prince of Peace all offer Mass in Spanish, while St. Paul Jung-Ha-Sang offers services in Korean and the just-dedicated Our Lady of Lavong offers services in Vietnamese. Several churches, such as St. Bridget's, also make special efforts to accommodate Filipino parishioners.

They keep trying to create the spiritual community, the pastors said, because that's what is drawing the faithful into church: The parish is the first place many people will turn when they move to a new place.

"We are trying to develop a community where everybody is connected and feels a part of a community based on spiritual values," Render said. "If you don't know other people, the church is the one place that can try to provide that. But when you reach a certain point when a parish grows too big, people just fall through the cracks."