What do these three things have in common? It sounds like the kind of joke that would walk into a bar. But it’s the arc of parish life in Mount Carmel, Illinois. Think about it, then check this link to see if your instinct for the punch line is right.
Hope abounds:
We feel if we can get through to the pope, we’ll get it cleared up. He’s got a lot of problems everywhere in the world (but) we know he would help us if he knew.
Meanwhile that sucking sound is not a sinkhole proximate to the Mississippi River. It is the dulcet tone of Sunday Mass attendance dropping from a few hundred to a few dozen. Question: when the parish closes, will they all end up at the local Lutheran church? Follow-up: Since nobody at the chancery seems to care, is that tacit approval of the antigospel?
Catholic Sensibility 
I have a friend who grew up in that parish, knows the priest… A sad situation indeed.
It is indeed a “God thing,” Todd, that you shed light on this likely one of dozens/hundreds of material breakdowns in chancery and local infrastructures of the church concrete and abstract.
What I ponder: are we, who are faithful laborers and denizens within and without that infrastructure, called to pass onto our prelates these accounts, so that they may be forewarned or otherwise prepared that real souls and real lives hang in the balance of whatever processes our clerics choose to administer their offices?
“The truth shall set you free.”
How long, O Lord, how long?