REGINA: Most Catholics in America have no idea about this wave of church closings.
BRODY: Growing up, I had no idea that a church could in fact close. The idea was truly foreign to me, as I suspect it is for most Roman Catholics until they are forced to confront it. I came face to face with this reality on Sunday, June 8, 2003. After mass, a meeting was held to discuss the possible closure of the church my family had helped build in 1882 and attended ever since, St. Francis of Assisi in Lee, Massachusetts. After the shock at the idea of the church being closed wore off, I began to consider the implications of such
a decision.
REGINA: How so?
BRODY: I thought about my great-great grandparents, Irish immigrants who had labored to build St. Francis Church in 1882. I doubted that they put the nickels and dimes they set aside from their meager wages earned from work in the local paper mills toward building a church they expected to only stand for a little more than 100 years.
I thought of how my late grandfather had chosen to pray in the church before he left for service in World War II, service that included action in Iwo Jima, that he had thanked God by praying in its walls when he had returned, and that he had married his high school sweetheart in the church and buried her from it after she died shortly after giving birth to the last of their nine children. It was St. Francis Church he chose to enter at each of these defining moments of his life, not some other random structure.
I also realized my grandfather was but one of countless individuals who had done the same thing during the course of the church’s history. Even though I knew nothing about canon law that Sunday morning as all of these thoughts went through my mind as I listened to talk of the church’s potential closure, I felt that the peace I consistently experienced while inside of St. Francis of Assisi Church was due to its sacred role.
REGINA: So, your grandfather’s church was threatened.
BRODY: While discussion of closing St. Francis of Assisi Church was tabled in June of 2003 owing to considerable resistance on the part of parishioners at the time, it did not take me long to see the effects of liquidating a parish and a church. In college, I lived close to Sacred Heart Church in Medford, MA. Sacred Heart was solvent in the spring of 2004, and reasonably well attended based on my observations. In spite of this, it became the first of dozens of parishes and churches to close within the Boston Archdiocese as a result of Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley’s “parish reconfiguration program.”
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