The current archbishop of Osaka (Cardinal Thomas Aquino Manyo Maeda) is the new archdiocese's first archbishop; the bishop of Takamatsu retired last September.

The Archdiocese of Osaka was founded in 1904 and elevated to an archdiocese in 1969. The Diocese of Takamatsu was founded in 1963.

The number of diocesan and religious priests serving in Osaka fell from 229 to 142 between 1970 and 2021. The number of diocesan and religious priests serving in Takamatsu fell from 43 to 16 between 1980 and 2020.

Since 2020, the Pope has merged dioceses in Canada, Alaska, and Italy.

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Priests of the diocese pushed back on the plan, arguing that they had not been consulted, and eventually, a planned USCCB vote on the prospective merger was scrapped.

But the possibility that Steubenville will be merged into Columbus is still real, and the diocese is now facing an audit meant to gauge its financial viability.

Some of Steubenville's diocesan challenges are specific to its recent financial history.

During the summer of 2020, both former diocesan comptroller David Franklin and former diocesan vicar general Monsignor Kurt Kemo admitted in court that they had embezzled large sums from the financially struggling diocese.

But Steubenville is a small diocese with a declining population and limited resources. It faces demographic and financial challenges that a number of small dioceses in the Midwest and Northeast will face in the coming decades.

Some priests of the Steubenville diocese have urged that the diocese could have a positive future — they point to its vocations numbers and the prospect of both stabilized finances and growth by a renewed focus on evangelization.

But other analysts have argued that the diocese is too small to remain sustainable despite those positive points.

If that's true, it raises questions about other U.S. dioceses.

Steubenville is not the smallest diocese in the country. If a merger is going to happen there, what other U.S. dioceses might be candidates for the same future? And where does Steubenville stand among them?

Dioceses great and small

Since the early Church, the Catholic diocese has been the local geographical expression of the Church's nature as a hierarchical and sacramental communion.

A diocese has set geographical boundaries that usually align with civil governmental boundaries.

In the U.S., most diocesan boundaries follow the borders of counties and states.

The Holy See has generally tried to see that the geographic territory of a diocese is not so large that a bishop can't effectively govern the entirety or travel to all parts within reasonable amounts of time.

But the Vatican has also been attentive to population: When the Catholic population of a region grows, dioceses sometimes need to split if they become just too populous to be governed by a single bishop.

In fact, the Diocese of Steubenville is the product of one such split — it was carved from the Diocese of Columbus in 1944.

When those dioceses were split, both local churches were of relatively similar size, and both were growing.

In 1950 the Steubenville diocese contained 62,000 Catholics, while the Columbus diocese contained 106,000.

But since then, the Diocese of Columbus has grown to almost 300,000 Catholics while the Diocese of Steubenville has shrunk to 30,000.

Of course, the Holy See does not apply consistent standards around the globe about the "right" size of dioceses, either in terms of Catholic population or geographic area. And mergers and splits are often initiated by local bishops, who sense that particular situations have become unmanageable. Continue reading

At the same time, O'Toole has also been named the Bishop of Menevia, the neighbouring Welsh diocese, which has had no bishop since 2019.

The pope united the sees in persona episcopi, unifying them in the person of the bishop who oversees them both, even while they remain juridically separate.

While the move is historically unusual, it has become increasingly common under Pope Francis, and could signal the eventual merger of dioceses in countries across the West, including the United States, in the face of declining numbers of clergy and Mass-going Catholics.

Francis announced in February that the Irish dioceses of Clonfert and Galway and Kilmacduagh would now share a bishop in Michael Duignan.

In November last year, the Vatican announced the union in persona Episcopi of the Italian sees of Turin and Susa.

Before those announcements, the Canadian Diocese of Alexandria-Cornwall shared a bishop with the Archdiocese of Ottawa from December 2018 until 2020, when the two sees were formally combined into the Archdiocese of Ottawa-Cornwall.

A little further north, that same year Pope Francis reunified the Alaskan Archdiocese of Anchorage and the Diocese of Juneau.

The prospect of merging dioceses in the many countries with shrinking Catholic populations has long been discussed as a possibility among Church-watchers. And while in personaunions have yet to be made between dioceses in the United States, the numbers suggest it may be a question of when, not if, such appointments come.

As many bishops confront sharp declines in parish Mass attendance over recent decades, or (often and) a drop in the number of priests in active ministry, many have undertaken sweeping reviews of their parish footprints, often combining the governance of several parishes under a single pastor as a first step towards formal mergers.

The same trends apply upstream — where the same solutions could soon be tried.

As parish closures and mergers result in more consolidated diocesan footprints, diocesan bishops are ageing as fast as their clergy, and there is a shrinking pool of qualified and willing clergy from which to draw replacements:

While no official data is released on how many priests say "no" when the Vatican calls, or why, it's not unusual to hear officials complain that as many as one in three potential bishops-elect politely decline. Many are said to cite the challenges of managing a shrinking institutional footprint among their reasons.

The merger of parishes at the local level, even in urban or suburban areas where the communities already live in close proximity, is often emotionally sensitive for congregations, and logistically difficult to manage at the administrative and legal levels.

At the pastoral level, communities often have very different characters, liturgical preferences, and approaches to evangelization and ministry to the wider community.

Often the first step towards bringing two such parishes together is the appointment of a single pastor who can, through his personal ministry, begin to fashion a common culture ahead of a formal union.

The prospect of combining dioceses, especially those with large territorial footprints but very decentralized communities, would present these same challenges on a larger scale. Continue reading

• Ed Condon is a co-founder and editor of The Pillar.