The group trying to save St. Michael’s/St. Katharine Drexel Catholic Church from extinction has made the right decision not to try to buy and rehabilitate the once-vibrant and spectacular edifice whose spire looms over Lansford.

It is a painful, but inevitable, ending to the good intentions of many former parishioners who loved their church and hoped against hope to be able to come up with a workable plan to restore it to its former grandeur.

But the Diocese of Allentown sealed the church’s fate when it moved out the religious and sacramental relics, including the breathtakingly beautiful stained glass windows.

What is left is the shell of a building in need of major repairs. At a distance, it might look similar to the St. Michael’s of old, but it has lost its heart and soul.

The diocese gave the members of the Coal Region Catholics for Change the right of first refusal to buy the building for $50,000. After finally being able to get inside to inspect the building, what the group had feared became real: This was a bad deal. The building, stripped of the trappings that made it a church, were gone, and the deterioration that had occurred in the several years of virtual abandonment had taken a terrible toll.

With the group’s refusal, the diocese has the church on the market looking for a buyer who is willing to take on the significant demolition costs or to try to rehabilitate the building to some useful purpose. I consider the chances of the latter happening to be remote.

The group didn’t just give the diocese a terse “no.” It crafted a written response to the diocese’s offer in which the members expressed their unhappiness with the way this sorry episode was handled and unfolded and even accused diocesan officials of intentionally letting conditions in the building deteriorate, which the diocese denies.

“The building was purposely allowed to deteriorate. We are talking about desecration of the House of God,” the response read. “We will not be trapped by your grievous mistake of choosing St. Michael’s for destruction, and we will not, in any way, relieve the diocese of the cost of demolition. It can no longer serve the purpose for which the miners labored; therefore, it is a fallacy for you to publish that you are offering us the church for sale.”

They are right. The diocese is offering a building, no longer a church, for sale, and it would be left to the former parishioners to devise a prohibitively costly and almost impossible plan to salvage it from oblivion.

What has been happening in Lansford has been playing out all over the five-county Times News region of Carbon, Schuylkill, Lehigh, Northampton and Monroe counties and beyond.

Mired in a major sex-abuse scandal that has ensnared thousands of priests worldwide, the Catholic Church has been losing membership at a record pace. On top of that, some dioceses are laying off staff in order to come up with payments to victims of the sex-abuse allegations.

Communities that once had multiple Catholic churches now have one, if any at all. All of the churches in the Panther Valley communities of Coaldale, Lansford, Nesquehoning and Summit Hill, for example, have been consolidated into St. Joseph’s Parish of the Panther Valley in Summit Hill, whose stated mission is “To build a dynamic Roman Catholic family of faith that seeks to encounter Jesus through the spiritual, Sacramental, catechetical and social life of the Church. We strive to be the beacon of the light of Christ to all through joyful service and mission.”

These noble and high-sounding words ring hollow in the face of reality. Men, women and children who loved the churches where they were baptized, received first Holy Communion, confirmation and where they were married and worshipped must now reconcile themselves to the jarring truth that their beloved churches are no more, and they are being asked to embrace a new reality, even a new community. It will take a lot of time for these wounds to heal.

The diocese has a major public relations problem in communicating effectively with its flock and needs to understand the depth of this rift. I see little effort on the part of the diocese to try to heal these wounds.

Diocesan leaders need to leave Allentown and come into affected communities to listen, face-to-face, to the faithful whose numbers are dwindling dramatically.

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com