Sunday, Nov. 20, 2005 | 7:16 a.m.
On any given Sunday at Neil Twitchell Elementary School in Henderson, it can be standing room only -- not for students doing some extra-credit work on the weekend, but for parishioners of St. Francis of Assisi.
The Roman Catholic parish -- which celebrated its first Mass on Christmas Eve 2003 with 800 people in attendance -- sees 2,500 people every weekend over the course of five Masses.
Latecomers often are relegated to seats in the hallway once the 450-seat makeshift sanctuary in the elementary school's multipurpose room is filled, the Rev. Gregory Gordon said.
"It was overcrowded from the beginning," Gordon said.
The space crunch, far from being confined to St. Francis, reverberates throughout parishes in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Las Vegas.
As the diocese this weekend celebrates its 10th anniversary with a special service at Green Valley Ranch Station, the chief concern among both the clergy and the laity is how to create "a spirit of life" in a desert diocese desperately in need of more parishes, said Bishop Joseph Pepe.
Clark County's exponential growth has the diocese -- which is short of money, short of land and, most importantly, short of priests -- struggling to keep pace.
What the diocese is not short of is the faithful, who continue to pack into valley churches despite often having to struggle to find parking spaces and then often having to stand through Mass.
That leaves many priests struggling with how to inspire community in their parishes when people have trouble getting through the door.
"Right now, many of the parishes are just meeting demands," Pepe said. "But the goal is to help people have a personal and intimate relationship with Jesus. How do you effectively do that?"
The diocese has more than doubled in the decade since Southern Nevada was granted its own diocese.
In 1995, when the Diocese of Las Vegas was separated from Reno, there were 250,000 Catholics in the new diocese, which included White Pine, Esmeralda, Nye, Lincoln and Clark counties. At the time, Catholics made up about 23 percent of the area's nearly 1.1 million population.
Today, using demographic estimates supplied by UNLV and their own statistics, the diocese estimates that it has 657,000 Catholics, representing 37 percent of the area's 1.7 million population.
About 300,000 are registered in the diocese's 34 parishes, missions or shrines, with about 100,000 attending Mass on any given Sunday, Pepe said. Churches such as St. Thomas More, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton and St. Joseph Husband of Mary typically see 6,000 to 7,000 worshipers on a weekend over five to six Masses -- numbers that swell during holidays such as Christmas and Easter.
Parishes in Henderson, southwest Las Vegas, Summerlin and North Las Vegas are all "standing-room only," Pepe said.
To buy land for new parishes in those areas, the diocese is working to raise $20 million over the next 18 months. Diocesan officials hope to purchase four or five 10-acre parcels for new churches that would allow Catholics to attend services in their own neighborhoods.
Many local Catholics now have to make Sunday pilgrimmages to find a place to worship. People living in the Southern Highlands area, for instance, are about 10 miles away from the nearest churches, St. Thomas More or Christ the King. And both of those churches already are severely overcrowded, said Rthe ev. Patrick Render of St. Thomas More.
An estimated one-third of the 6,000 new residents moving into the Las Vegas Valley each month are Catholic, many of them people of Hispanic or Asian descent who are looking for Masses in their own language, Pepe said. And while there are churches that offer Mass in Vietnamese, Korean, Tagalog and Spanish, there are not nearly enough, priests say.
As part of its 10-year anniversary, the diocese celebrated its diversity in a service Friday night at Green Valley Ranch by incorporating cultural dances and prayers in multiple languages.
Today, the diocese will offer several courses at the hotel designed to encourage and develop the spiritual knowledge of volunteers, with workshops on everything from child rearing to why someone should be a practicing Catholic, said Sister Patricia McGinley, conference coordinator.
To accommodate a small part of its rapid growth, the diocese since 1995 has started new parishes: St. John Neumann in North Las Vegas, which serves about 3,000 people each weekend, and St. Francis of Assisi. The diocese also opened the Shrine of Our Lady of La Vang near Tropicana Avenue and Pecos Road in 2003 to cater to the region's growing Vietnamese community.
St. John Neumann opened two years ago to full crowds, and likely will have to start having double Masses in January to avoid turning away people, said the Rev. Bede Wevita, the church's pastor. Wevita said he worries about how many people the church -- which holds services in its own multipurpose building -- is losing when people have to stand through Mass.
"They don't complain, but they probably don't come back again," Wevita said. "They go to a church where they can find a seat."
To make room for its growing congregation, St. Francis -- which now essentially is a church without a church, operating out of a school building -- will break ground Nov. 27 on a $7.5-million multipurpose center, classroom and office building on its planned campus near Carnegie and Annet streets. But it will be another year before the facilities will be ready, Gordon said.
The church has raised $2.5 million so far for the facility, the first of three phases that will eventually include a sanctuary and a school.
The permanent facilities will allow the parish to double in size, helping to alleviate overcrowding at neighboring St. Thomas More and St. Peter the Apostle.
Now, St. Francis cannot do more than "to help in scratching the surface ... in alleviating their growing pains, which are more extreme than ours," Gordon said.
With an average of 18,000 parishioners to every priest, local parishes rely on volunteers to handle basic operations and to offer most of the religious education, diocesan officials said. Volunteers are the life of the church and service opportunities are the best way to help foster community, priests said.
Priests also try to develop their parishes' "family" atmosphere by offering special brunches for newcomers or by placing people into small Bible study groups.
"The struggle is trying to make people feel at home, to make them feel like there is a real community rather than anonymous people attending Mass and then leaving," said Render of St. Thomas More.
"So many people move into this community from somewhere else -- they don't have families, they don't have friends, they don't have roots. So the parish is one of the places where they look to find kindred spirits, people who share the same values and same faith."
The planned new parishes are key to keeping the current faith communities both manageable from an operational standpoint and relevant to local Catholics' needs, priests said.
Parishes will participate in the fundraising effort in three waves, said Richard Facciolo, the diocese's chancellor and chief administrative officer. He described the campaign as a "grass-roots" effort with volunteers at each church soliciting donors rather than holding collections at Mass.
The campaign is in addition to the normal church collections, Facciolo said.
"We're asking them all to take a look at the larger picture," he said.
Christina Littlefield can be reached at (702) 259-8813 or at clittle@ lasvegassun.com.
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