Continued from page 6 and parishioners at Catholic churches and schools. In the past few decades, many parishes have been consolidated and the diocese has had to fi gure out what to do with empty buildings left behind. Still, the infl uence of the Catholic church in the region remains, with the Catholic Diocese of Toledo currently encompassing 8,222 square miles across 19 counties in Northwest Ohio. It operates a network of schools that, in the 2023-2024 school year alone, educated 15,863 students from prekindergarten to grade 12. Each year, the diocese does an “October count” where they count the people in the pews each week to fi gure out the average Mass attendance, and in 2023, an average of 52,840 people attended Mass weekly across the 122 parishes in the Toledo diocese. Stalets started attending Mass after fi nding resonance with some of the theological aspects of Catholicism, such as the encouragement to not focus on the self, but rather on serving others. “I feel like I have approached life in the past fi ve years with more of the self-care aspect,” he said. “And what I really admired about what I kept fi nding as I dove deeper with Catholicism is the living outward aspect, and having little to no regard for the self, but more for the people outside of you. The community.” Working with Toledo Streets, Stalets has seen people of faith doing the work of serving people in need in Toledo, and that began to soften him toward the idea of church. He said a lot of people in his life “say a lot of really kind stuff about the people we should be helping and the things we should be doing, but so often the people who are actually doing the things are through a church organization, and that blew my mind.” In the Catholic church specifi cally, Catholic Charities operates 13 different ministries in the Diocese of Toledo. According to their 2024 annual report, in that year the organization provided 10,988 shelter bed nights, assisted 9,991 households through their Our Choice Food Pantries and served 62,182 meals to people in need, among other services. It is this emphasis on community that drives Stalets to attend Mass regularly. He noted the current “epidemic of loneliness,” and the fact that people are missing having the “third space” that churches provided for previous generations. “Our generation is really hyper-fi xated on this idea of being unique and lone wolf,” he said. “And I just don’t feel like there is as much joy and happiness that I have personally experienced from Page 7 trying to be unique and a lone wolf all the time.” When he goes to church now, the pews are not full, Stalets said. “Sometimes I get a whole pew to myself.” But he still has begun to fi nd community there. “I go there and I can breathe and see and smell. It is another social thing to do,” he explained. “I shake people’s hands. I talk to people. I have started to meet people, and now I recognize people . . . I walk away from it happy that I went.” Ben Stalets Photo courtesy of Ben
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