San Antonio, USA - The noise of chatting parishioners saturates the foyer after the five weekend Masses at St. Mark the Evangelist Catholic Church.
Busy parents sympathize with one another. Kids find new playmates. And singles meet other singles.
The foyer helps the 5,000 worshippers each weekend preserve their sense of community. The fast-growing congregation decided five years ago to expand into a 1,500-seat sanctuary instead of splitting into two separate congregations and search for an available priest among a shrinking pool.
Catholic churches are joining their Protestant counterparts across the country in creating megachurches - where thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of parishioners worship together. But unlike the Protestant churches that use high-profile, evangelistic campaigns to grow, dioceses say it is too few priests and too many worshippers that drives their expansion.
While the number of worshippers per parish nationwide has grown by nearly 35 percent in almost three decades, the number of priests dropped 26 percent, said Mary Gautier with the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.
"That's the reality in the Catholic Church today: You don't want to build something that will be OK for now, when you know this large population is going to get bigger," Gautier said.
Dioceses in the South and West - the hot spots for new jobs and suburban sprawl - are primarily the ones building larger parishes that are increasingly filled with Hispanic Catholics, many of whom are immigrants.
The Midwest and Northeast are generally consolidating, Gautier said, due largely to population shifts to other regions of the country.
Gautier said several dioceses, including the Archdiocese of San Antonio, seek at least 1,000 seats in design plans for new or expanded sanctuaries. Most sanctuaries used to be built with about 500 seats, she said.
In the San Antonio archdiocese, at least 15 sanctuaries have doubled or tripled to at least 1,000 seats in the past eight years.
"We didn't want to put two parishes in the same town because we just didn't have the priests to do it," said Monsignor Larry Stuebben, vicar general of the archdiocese.
Making a church bigger also drives down the average cost per church member, according to the Georgetown University research group.
The research group estimates that it costs $444 per household nationwide for memberships in churches with fewer than 800 members compared to $337 for those with more than 1,000. The savings helps pay for more paid lay staff, who are increasingly picking up administrative duties to free priests for pastoral and sacramental duties, said the Rev. Larry Christian, rector of Assumption Seminary in San Antonio.
"You have to have a large enough economic base to make that happen," he said.
The 65 million-member U.S. Catholic Church has generally tried to avoid the "megachurch" model, like Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church in Houston that took over the former arena for the Houston Rockets NBA team and fills it each week with more than 30,000 congregants.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops advises parishes to avoid "any semblance of a theater or an arena" in worship settings.
While new Catholic churches are designed with a larger seating capacity, the pews are curved around the altar so people don't lose a sense of intimacy during worship, said Jim Moroney, head of liturgy for the Catholic bishops conference.
"The challenges are indeed significant," Moroney said. "But we want to create sight lines to see the whites in someone's eyes when we're preaching to them."