No Closure

Catholic Practice and Boston's Parish Shutdowns

John C. Seitz

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780674053021
• eBook ISBN: 9780674975248
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

In 2004 the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston announced plans to close or merge more than eighty parish churches. Scores of Catholics—28,000, by the archdiocese's count—would be asked to leave their parishes. The closures came just two years after the first major revelations of clergy sexual abuse and its cover up. Wounds from this profound betrayal of trust had not healed.

In the months that followed, distraught parishioners occupied several churches in opposition to the closure decrees. Why did these accidental activists resist the parish closures, and what do their actions and reactions tell us about modern American Catholicism? Drawing on extensive fieldwork and with careful attention to Boston's Catholic history, Seitz tells the stories of resisting Catholics in their own words, and illuminates how they were drawn to reconsider the past and its meanings. We hear them reflect on their parishes and the sacred objects and memories they hold, on the way their personal histories connect with the history of their neighborhood churches, and on the structures of authority in Catholicism.

Resisters describe how they took their parishes and religious lives into their own hands, and how they struggled with everyday theological questions of respect and memory; with relationships among religion, community, place, and comfort; and with the meaning of the local church. No Closure is a story of local drama and pathos, but also a path of inquiry into broader questions of tradition and change as they shape Catholics' ability to make sense of their lives in a secular world.

1

The Pasts Living in People

The Church of Boston has a great history forged in persecution and sacrifice. We will have a great future if we do not flee from the cross. Reach out to one another in prayerful support. Let our love for our faith help us overcome our pain and help us focus on our mission.

—Most Reverend Seán P. O’Malley, O.F.M. Cap., “Remarks of Archbishop Seán O’Malley on Parish Reconfiguration,” May 25, 2004.

In our country today, so much about history has sort of been blotted out.

—Ralph, businessman and parishioner of Sacred Heart Parish, North End, Boston. August 24, 2004.

“People kept saying, ‘We own the church! We own the church!’” Ralph explained. “But what the hell were they talking about?” In 2004, Ralph, a middle-aged businessman and lifelong parishioner of Boston’s Sacred Heart parish, seized on this enticing but vague piece of parish oral history as a spur to the effort of resisting its closure. At first there seemed to be very little reason for hope. Like many Boston-area parishes, Sacred Heart had lost much of its previous luster. Mass attendance was down, the number of marriages and baptisms had dropped off, some of the parish clubs had ceased functioning, and most of the regulars were older, their children and grandchildren having stopped attending mass or left the old neighborhood for the suburbs. It also appeared that the Scalabrinian Fathers, who had served the parish since its beginnings in 1890, were ready to leave for other missionary fields. The Scalabrinis’ special charism to serve migrants meant that this North End parish of second-, third-, and fourth-generation Italians no longer fit their specific missionary model. Like East Boston’s Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Sacred Heart was an Italian national or ethnic parish, meaning it had no particular territorial boundary. In the parish’s early years, there were more than enough neighborhood residents to fill the church and help it grow. In later years, it relied on attracting parishioners from across the archdiocese with Italian-language masses and devotions. Italian Catholics from around Boston, and even those dispersed in other parts of the country, still returned to the North End for the tremendous summer saint’s feasts and processions. Some also came back to receive their sacraments at Sacred Heart. But as families who had left the city for the suburbs had their own children, the strength and number of bonds back to the mother parish decreased.¹

The neighborhood around Sacred Heart was changing, too. Instead of multi-generation Italian families taking up residence in rented flats or entire buildings, many of the North End’s densely packed three- and fourstory residences had been condo-ized or transformed into “luxury” apartments. Real estate in this formerly poor and working-class neighborhood had boomed over recent decades, the higher rents supported by young professionals who were attracted to the North End’s charming narrow blocks, its lively Italian restaurants and cafés, and its easy access to the waterfront and downtown Boston.² With these changes and the reconfiguration mandate in mind, the cluster group recommended that Archbishop O’Malley close Sacred Heart. He complied, leaving the one-square-mile territory of the North End with one parish, St. Leonard of Port Maurice. With East Boston’s Our Lady of Mount Carmel also on the list of parishes to be shuttered, the proposal completed the slow demise of Italian national parishes in the City of Boston.³

The refrain Ralph heard among his fellow parishioners in the North End in 2004—“We own the church!”—would be repeated among parishioners in closing parishes across the archdiocese. In ethnic and territorial churches, in suburban and urban locales, people were finding ways to articulate an immutable claim on their churches. Inevitably, these claims rested on resisters’ urgent and purposeful turn to the past. As the archbishop’s comments implied, parish shutdowns were an invitation to just this kind of reflection. In particular, they were an invitation to the histories of “persecution and sacrifice” that he suggested sat at the center of the making of Boston Catholicism. But the meanings of these pasts could not be taken for granted. In his comments explaining the shutdowns, the archbishop argued that Catholics should replicate the selfless perseverance of their forebears in the pursuit of a “great future,” a future to be inaugurated in this case by the painful process of shutting down parishes. Your ancestors did not put themselves first, the archbishop averred, and neither should you.

As resisters accepted this invitation to the past, they uncovered and reanimated histories that were much more complex than this model implied. The story behind the North Enders’ claim to own Sacred Heart church offers one powerful example. Upon hearing of the closure, Ralph, along with his business partner and brother, Phillip, and the parish business manager Carla, faced a dilemma. They felt that closing Sacred Heart was wrong, and they worried about the losses that would accompany the closing. They knew, for example, that priests from Sacred Heart had long been committed to offering weekly mass during Boston’s cold weather months at a nearby home for seniors. They had heard the residents’ plaintive questions about who would “wear the vestments” the priests stored there for the occasion. They also worried about subtle matters of access that could easily be overlooked in the transition to a new parish. “A huge percentage of our parishioners are elderly,” Carla reminded me as we talked in a café across from the church in North Square. Even if they could walk the few blocks to St. Leonard’s (and this was not a given), once they got there the place was not easy to navigate. The only bathrooms, Carla noted, were located in the basement, down a treacherous set of stairs.

Practical concerns about accessibility hinted at more fundamental disorientations entailed in the upheaval. Carla recalled listening to a parishioner wonder about the fate of a beloved statue at Sacred Heart. For years this woman had tended to the statue, changing its clothes to match the seasons of the church calendar. There was no way the new parish could accommodate the many statues that filled the uniquely dense devotional environment of Sacred Heart’s upper and lower churches. Some of the devotions that thrived at Sacred Heart would not make the transition to a new church. Ralph worried about the group of elderly parishioners who gathered each evening to recite the rosary in the lower church before the seven o’clock mass. “You take this away from them, you’re taking away part of their lives,” Ralph asserted. He meant this quite literally, and interpreted the daily gathering as a chance for these neighborhood old-timers to check up on one another. The people of this informal group, Ralph said, structured their existence with the evening rosary in mind: “They wait for this every night.” If a regular didn’t make it one night, they were sure to get a call making sure everything was OK.

The weight of these kinds of parish stories pressed upon people like Ralph, Phillip, and Carla as the closure approached. As middle-aged parishioners in an aging parish, they felt that they had a responsibility, along with the resources and energy, to actively oppose the closure plan. But they did not think of themselves as agitators. The brothers described themselves as “shy,” and Ralph said that they had never “stepped out in front” on anything like this before. Ralph and Phillip were clearly active, however, in neighborhood issues and had even co-written political opinion pieces for the Post-Gazette, an Italian-American weekly based in the North End. So despite their worry about shouldering the community’s expectations, they were in command of important details and well positioned to take action. Carla’s job deep inside the church’s organization made her lack of compliance a more momentous personal reorientation. It also put future prospects for parish work in jeopardy. After an initial period confirming that they would have wide support and adequate funding from the community, the trio put aside their hesitations and set about the task of undoing the shutdown plan.

Histories of Division

Sacred Heart parishioners’ puzzling claim about church ownership sent Ralph, Phillip, and Carla into parish and neighborhood history. They sought to furnish details that would clarify this murky picture of the church’s origins. If it was somehow true that someone other than the archbishop actually had a legal claim to the church building, then they could hope that appeals to civil authorities might disrupt or even prevent Sacred Heart’s shutdown. Ralph and Phillip had a sense of where they might turn for the answer. Sacred Heart, they knew, had an unusual relationship with a lay organization called the San Marco Society, a men’s charitable group they had themselves joined years ago. Parishioners knew that the group had played a crucial role in the founding of the parish, but beyond this information, details were vague. Moreover, since parish archives had been destroyed in a mid-twentieth-century fire, records of this organization’s past were not easy to come by. While old-timers in the group insisted that the society held some ancient legal rights to the church, no one really knew what this piece of memory really meant. A trip to the county archives, where Ralph and Phillip dug through piles of real-estate records, unearthed a startling document which resisters would herald as the key to their winning case against closure.⁴

The complex story of this document and its emotional and legal power begins in the particular religious, ethnic, and class histories of the North End. But the broader lessons extend beyond North End Catholicism, Italian-American Catholicism, or even urban Catholicism. The story shines a light on the historical meanings and power of parishes for lay and clerical Catholics and on the significance of Catholic parishes in American religious history. More specifically, it shows that the rules of parish life—in this case who could say mass there, what kinds of people would be welcomed there, who would control its finances, devotions, and rites—were established with intention and discipline. It demonstrates the complex motives and meanings of Catholic sacrifice, and the mutable lines of division between local parishes and the church. The story also establishes the groundwork for an understanding of parishes as sites of Catholic distinctiveness in America. As such, it offers a fitting beginning to the effort to understand the meanings of resistance to parish shutdowns as a part of modern U.S. Catholicism.

The document Ralph and Phillip held in their hands at the county archives was the deed for the land on which Sacred Heart stood. Its power in the present day rested on the late-nineteenth-century struggle behind its creation. As Italians began to arrive in Boston in numbers in this period, the North End became the regional center of Italian Catholicism.⁵ With Irish Catholics fitfully making their way into the upper reaches of city and state government (the first Catholic mayor of Boston, an Irish-American, was elected in 1884, the first Catholic governor of the commonwealth, also of Irish descent, in 1913), the newer Italian-American Catholics were often regarded with unease and even disdain.⁶ Middle-class Irish Bostonians fretted that their hard-won gains within the city’s Protestant establishment were vulnerable to nativist notions of Catholic unreliability.⁷ Well into the twentieth century, Boston’s Irish Catholic leaders felt a need to demonstrate and affirm their political and religious maturity to a shrinking but still powerful Yankee elite.

Like the Irish before them, Boston’s Italian immigrants were considered superstitious, religiously fickle, and overly emotional. Moreover, in their relative lack of means they were seen as a threat to Irish Catholic aspirations for respectability.⁸ Because of the overwhelming Irish majority among Boston-area Catholics by the time southern Europeans began to arrive, ethnic mixing and equal opportunity among Catholic nationalities proceeded more slowly in Boston than it did in places like New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago.⁹ Boston’s Italian immigrants adapted the practices of their homelands and developed religious and social networks alongside those of their Irish counterparts. This included clustering in places like the North End, and later, East Boston. Italian-language parishes were established in these areas, and intimate communities of commerce and religion began to thrive in a world at some remove from the centers of ecclesial, economic, and political power.

As in other urban centers across the country, Italian Catholics in Boston had an early and persistent interest in maintaining distinctly Italian places and traditions. Ethnic mixing, of course, was never wholly avoidable or undesired, but as their numbers grew, Boston’s Italians could command and support relatively independent social and religious structures.¹⁰ Originally sharing a parish with a Portuguese congregation, the North End’s growing Italian population soon ventured out on its own, supporting a Franciscan priest in buying land and building St. Leonard of Port Maurice Parish.¹¹ St. Leonard’s was the first Italian parish in New England. After it was dedicated in 1876, this parish grew rapidly and became an attractive worship site not just for Italians but also for a number of Irish Catholics who, according to Franciscan accounts, appreciated the distinct devotional practices encouraged by the friars.¹² Even though many of these Irish participants were no more than occasional visitors, the parish grew crowded.¹³ This growth, the pastor’s wide responsibilities (he was asked to care for Italians across the archdiocese), and conflict both between ethnic groups and among Italians from different regions of Italy contributed to tensions between a group of northern Italians and the pastor. Archbishop Williams asked the pastor to hear confessions only in English, which may also have enhanced tensions.¹⁴ When the pastor refused to support this minority group seeking to establish a new parish in the North End, the group broke off from St. Leonard’s and began collecting money from its members for a new church.¹⁵

The group, calling itself the Societa Cattolica Italiana di San Marco, immediately posed a challenge to the Franciscans and to Archbishop Williams. After purchasing a Seaman’s Bethel a few blocks away from St. Leonard’s the group added an Italianate sloping roof façade to the plain square meeting house and began to fix it up to host religious services. In 1885 they asked the archbishop to dedicate it as a church. National (ethnic) parishes were becoming a staple of Catholic growth in Boston, so Archbishop Williams was not wholly unwilling.¹⁶ In these years ethnic churches were not considered ideal: they were “tolerated” in Boston and elsewhere in the U.S. as a way to retain Catholicity among recent immigrants. Ethnic difference would gradually fade, bishops reasoned, making room for the emergence of a more uniform, and perhaps more American, Catholicism in this country.¹⁷ But if ethnic parishes like the one the San Marco Society proposed were an acceptable compromise, the idea that they would be independent of diocesan control stretched the case too far. The San Marco Society’s proposal—they would start a Roman Catholic parish while keeping the deed to the property in the name of their organization—seemed unworkable from the beginning. By this time American Catholic bishops had established a tradition of insisting that church titles rest in the name of the local bishop or archbishop. This policy eventually became civil law in Massachusetts in 1897, when the Archbishop of Boston gained official designation as a corporation sole. Lacking the legal compulsion that would come later, the San Marco Society had some justification in resisting this arrangement in the 1880s.

Their resistance echoed battles over church ownership and management that were common in this country in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Tracking this history establishes one important ground for making sense of the conflicts over shutdowns, and in particular the civil and canon law arguments they stimulated in contemporary Boston. Labeled the “tensions of trusteeism” by historian Patrick Carey, the struggles crystallized the difficulty of adapting Catholicism to a country where legal precedents presumed a Protestant or congregational structure and where the royal patrons who had funded new churches in the old world did not exist.¹⁸ Lacking support of this kind and fearing the power of anti-Catholic laws to prohibit Catholic institutional ownership, colonial-era church leaders, including (with reservations) the first U.S. bishop John Carroll, began to endorse a form of collective patronage—under the legal title of trusteeship—for new churches. Under this system, a group of lay Catholic benefactors would hold parish property in their names, under the proviso that they would hold it in trust for the good of the local church. The arrangement protected property from seizure under anti-Catholic laws and enabled Catholic expansion in the years before the church could afford to shed its reliance on the wealthy few. Soon, advocates of lay trusteeship began to make the case that the practice could promote a more successful Catholic integration into this country; after all, the trustee system resembled a kind of church democratization, including lay management of parishes’ temporal affairs. What had begun as a way to protect and preserve Catholicism in an anti-Catholic cou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Closings
• 1: The Pasts Living in People
• 2: Divergent Histories: Change and the Making of Resistors, 1950–2004
• 3: “What do we have?” Locales and Objects in the Hands of the People of God
• 4: “This is unrest territory”: Orthodoxy and Opposition in Resistors’ Practice of the Parish
• 5: Openings
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index