Church census may change how El Pasoans go to Mass

The El Paso Diocese is running a census this weekend to see how many people are going to church and where.

The El Paso Diocese hasn’t had a census since 2008, and a lot has changed in the local churches since. It’s these numbers that may decide if priests need to be shuffled around or even if some Masses need to be added or cut.

“It’ll help us to determine how many priests we might to serve in a parish,” said Bishop Mark Seitz from the El Paso diocese.

Priests are a scarce resource and El Paso doesn’t have many of them, something the census may help manage.

“We only ordained one priest this year, and next year we have one or two coming up, so we don’t have that many priests being ordained,” explained Monsignor David Fierro from St. Matthew’s.

While church attendance may have fallen at some parishes that’s not the story across all the diocese, and that only makes the priest shortage a bigger problem

“Mass attendance has grown,. We’ve had new families come into the parish, that’s why we’re building a new church to accommodate the new families,” said Monsignor Fierro.

Catholic priests are only allowed to celebrate three Masses a day; St. Matthews holds five every Sunday, they have to borrow [priests from other churches to fill the demand. A bigger church would mean fewer Masses and a smaller shortage, something the diocese says is a reason to keep a closer eye on attendance numbers.

“We’ll try to do it annually so we can really track those kinds of changes,” Bishop Seitz said.

The numbers from the diocese census won’t be available for several more weeks.