单选题 The Catholic Church is changing in America at its most visible point: the parish church where believers pray, sing and clasp hands across pews to share the peace of God. Today there are fewer parishes and fewer priests than in 1990 and fewer of the nation's 65 million Catholics in those pews. And there's no sign of return.
Some blame the explosive 2002 clergy sexual abuse scandal and its financial price tag. But a study of 176 Roman Catholic dioceses shows no statistically significant link between the decline in priests and parishes and the $ 772 million the church has spent to date on dealing with the scandal.
Rather, the changes are driven by a constellation of factors:
·Catholics are moving from cities in the Northeast and Midwest to the suburbs, South and Southwest.
·For decades, so few men have become priests that one in five dioceses now can't put a priest in every parish.
·Mass attendance has fallen as each generation has become less religiously observant.
·Bishops--trained to bless, not to budget--lack the managerial skills to govern multimillion-dollar institutions.
All these trends had begun years before the scandal piled on financial pressures to cover settlements, legal costs, care and counseling for victims and abusers. The Archdiocese of Boston, epicenter of the crisis, sold chancery property to cover $ 85 million in settlements last year, and this year will close 67 churches and recast 16 others as new parishes or worship sites without a full-time priest. Archbishop Sean O'Malley has said the crisis and the reconfiguration plan are "in no way" related. He cites demographic shifts, the priest shortage and aging, crumbling buildings too costly to keep up. Fargo, N. D. , which spent $ 821,000 on the abuse crisis, will close 23 parishes, but it's because the diocese is short of more than 50 priests for its 158 parishes, some with fewer than a dozen families attending Mass.
They know how this ~eels in Milwaukee. That archdiocese shuttered about one in five parishes from 1995 to 2003. The city consolidations "gave some people who had been driving back into the city from new homes in the suburbs a chance to say they had no loyalty to a new parish and begin going to one near their home,' says Noreen Welte, director of parish planning for the Milwaukee Archdiocese. "It gave some people who already were mad at the church for one reason or another an excuse to stop going altogether. /

单选题 Which of the following reflects the change of Catholic Church?
【正确答案】 A
【答案解析】[解析] 这是一道细节题。依据第一段可以确定，数千万的天主教徒中，越来越少的人去教堂长椅上祈祷了，显然答案为A。C“美国的天主教徒少了”，文章中末提，选择该选项的考生没能完全理解相关部分的文义。
单选题 The relationship between the first two paragraphs can be described as
【正确答案】 B
【答案解析】[解析] 本题涉及段落之间的语义逻辑。文章第一段揭示天主教所面临的问题，第二段试图对此进行解释，所以答案为B。A“过去的天主教与今天的天主教进行比较”；C“天主教的改革之赞同和反对”；D“介绍并谴责天主教的行为”，均不符文义，排除。
单选题 Attendance of the Church has declined because
【正确答案】 C
【答案解析】[解析] 这是一道细节题。问去教堂人数下降的原因，题干中的关键词“attendance”将答案锁定在第三段中所列的第三个因素(参看译文)，故答案为C。B“很少有天主教徒遵守宗教规范”，与原文不符。
单选题 The "reconfiguration plan"(Par
【正确答案】
【答案解析】[解析] 这是一道词义题。“改造计划”前有定冠词the，回指上文，说明所谓的计划上文提到过。根据上文内容，尤其是将来时所在句“and this year will...”(将来时态与题干中 plan一词呼应)的内容，可以确定答案为C。其它选项是已做过的事情，不可能是 plan一词的内容。
单选题 Noreen Welte seems to suggest that some people
【正确答案】 D
【答案解析】[解析] 本题询问Welte所持看法。根据文章末段Welte所言可知(尤其是gave some people....a chance to say...；gave some people...an excuse to stop...)，有些人以城区整合作为自己不想去教堂的借口，可见答案为D(有些人想躲避去教堂)。选项 A、B均是某些人不去教堂的托词，非Welte的看法，答非所问。