With the end of the school year last week came another difficult closure for Catholics in the Biddeford-Saco area, as the Notre Dame de Lourdes elementary school shut its doors for good. Students and their families, as well as staff and friends of the school, had mixed emotions as they gathered for a barbecue to share their memories of the school’s past 80 years in service.

Though Notre Dame families are doing their best to look forward to a new era of sending their children to nearby St. James School in Biddeford, the transition does not come easily. The school has been a constant element in the life of their church community, a place close to home where they could send their children for an education, knowing that the values of their faith would be prominent in the school day.

The school’s closure is another in a list of the Catholic church’s recently shuttered buildings. No longer do the bells of St. Mary’s or St. Andre’s in Biddeford call worshippers to services, and no longer can believers marvel at the shrine to the Virgin Mary inset in the wall at Saco’s Notre Dame de Lourdes church. The closures have come fast and hit hard as the church undergoes a restructuring to deal with declining membership and increased financial stress.

Catholics still make up 24 percent of Americans, according to a 2007 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey, but Catholicism has experienced the greatest net losses among major religions as a result of affiliation changes. While nearly one-in-three Americans (31 percent) were raised in the Catholic faith, today fewer than one-in-four (24 percent) describe themselves as Catholic. If not for an influx of immigrants who are Catholic, the drop would be more dramatic, according to Pew.

Participation in the Catholic church has dropped off in recent years as issues the church opposes ”“ such as homosexuality, birth control and church leadership equality for women ”“ have become more widely accepted by American society. Survey results show that some Catholics have left faith behind, while others have moved to more liberal denominations of Christianity. The church leaders’ inadequate, and arguably criminal, lack of action on the numerous cases of abuse by clergy worldwide has also undoubtedly driven away many members who are otherwise devout.

On top of all that, today’s young adults are generally less interested in church attendance and traditional religion ”“ according to a Pew survey, one-in-four members of the millennial generation, born after 1980 and who began to come of age around the year 2000, are unaffiliated with any particular faith.

These realities all result in dwindling attendance, which means church coffers are shrinking. And so it is that the Portland diocese has little choice but to close Notre Dame if it wants to keep local Catholic education affordable and high quality.

At the peak of Catholicism’s popularity, as immigrants flooded in from Canada and Ireland to work in the mills here, nearly every Catholic church stood alone as its own parish and had its own school. Today, the church buildings that remain are clustered into parishes and share the services of the few priests who remain.

Enrollments have declined significantly from the days when nearly all Catholic children were sent to the parish school to today, when only 59 students attended Notre Dame this past year. At St. James, 156 filled the classrooms.

With the current circumstances, it is not surprising that the church is tightening its belt by consolidating its parishes and schools. And while it may be heart-wrenching for families who have attended Notre Dame for generations, it seems to be the right choice for Biddeford-Saco Catholic students to attend St. James. The Biddeford school has an endowment to help it along and also boasts more space, more advanced computer labs, and is close to St. James Hall for school events.

Even those whose ties are deep with Notre Dame know that it is not bricks and mortar that make a school. It’s the people, the curriculum, the resources ”“ and in the case of a parochial school, the faith. Notre Dame students will find the best of all of those things at St. James as the church is able to focus its resources on better serving them instead of maintaining a sparsely filled building.

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Questions? Comments? Contact Managing Editor Kristen Schulze Muszynski by calling 282-1535, Ext. 322, or via e-mail at kristenm@journaltribune.com.