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New Hampshire's Catholic Diocese has announced that three Roman Catholic parishes in Portsmouth have merged.

Saint James Church, Immaculate Conception, and Saint Catherine of Siena are now known as Corpus Christi parish.

All three churches will stay open for now, with Sunday Masses at all three.

This recent development is just the latest in a series of mergers across the Diocese.

Last Month, several churches in the Monadnock region announced they would merge, and earlier this spring three parishes in the Plymouth area decided to join together.

All this consolidation is the result of a planning process that organized the state's 117 Catholic parishes into 31 clusters.

Priests and lay people within those clusters were then given the task of deciding the best way for their churches to meet the church's goals.

Father Robert Gorski is Director of the Diocese Long Range Planning Commission.

He described the diocese situation to NHPR's Mark Bevis.