By Mark Guydish
Times-Leader
August 30, 2009
http://www.timesleader.com/news/W-B_group_considers_a_vigil_to_save_church_08-30-2009.html
WILKES-BARRE – The man at the top who started the struggle may be leaving, but the people opposing his decisions remain.
As news leaked Friday that Diocese of Scranton Bishop Joseph Martino is expected to resign this week, a group of those determined to save Sacred Heart Church gathered outside the building Martino ordered closed by July 2010.
They posed in front of scaffolding the diocese insists protects from a crumbling fa?ade, a claim they call bogus.
And while they hope a new bishop will meet with them and similar groups trying to save seven other churches to re-evaluate those closings, they note the unexpected change in leadership will not change their resolve.
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| From left, triplets Sean, Scott and Christian Arnold, 11, play cards with Veronica Tutunjian the morning after the boys spent a night in vigil at St. Francis X. Cabrini Church in Scituate, near Boston. They have joined their parents in vigil almost every week since they were 6, when the church was ordered closed in October 2004. Parishioners have occupied the building 24 hours a day, seven days a week to prevent closure. Photo by Mark Guydish |
"We will do whatever it takes to save this church," said Noreen Foti, who, along with her husband has spearheaded a drive to keep Sacred Heart active. "I will not rule out anything."
"Anything" includes maintaining a permanent, physical presence in the building to prevent the diocese from locking them out once the last Mass is celebrated. It is called holding "vigil," a tactic used for nearly five years in the Archdiocese of Boston, where the Fotis lived early in their marriage.
In fact, the couple work closely with Peter Borre, the man who has overseen the Boston vigils. At their peak, in late 2004 through spring 2005, there were nine churches occupied. Four have since been re-opened by the diocese. Five others are, as Borre put it, "canonically closed and occupied. In October, four of those will have been in vigil for five years.
"I think it's quite remarkable," Borre said, "It's a spectrum of churches. Some are inner city, blue collar; three are in the suburbs ranging from middle income and up." And, he says, people in vigil are not "crazy radicals. Actually, they are mainstream Catholics."
How does a vigil work, and what kind of people does it draw? The Times Leader visited two Boston churches to find out.
Routines established
It's Saturday morning and Sean, Scott and Christian Arnold play cards in the vestibule of St Francis X. Cabrini in Scituate, a quiet town on the Massachusetts' coast, just north of where the Atlantic curls into Cape Cod. The 11-year-old triplets sport T-shirts, shorts or pajama bottoms, and have no problem getting their picture taken for yet another media outlet.
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| Scared Heart Foundation board of directors members stand outside the church on North Main Street, Wilkes-Barre. Shown are Margaret Chupka, Mary Chupha, Theresa Chupka, Noreen W. Foti, Magdalen Iskra, Michael Horvath, Martha Iskra, Anthony Foti, Mary Jean Tarantini, Mary Ann Petrenchak, David Tarantini. Photo by Clark Van Orden |
They've been caught in this pose for TV and newspapers – including The New York Times – for years.
"I've seen these kids grow up," says Jon Rogers, one of the leaders of the vigil here. Along with one of their parents, the Arnold triplets have routinely spent two nights a week here in vigil since they were 6 years old.
To hear Rogers describe it, the start of this vigil demonstrates an important lesson to others: Don't assume you know the last day the church will be open. At St. Francis, a final Friday Mass had been promised, and the building was to be available for a "town hall meeting" before it was locked for good. The Tuesday before that final Mass, Rogers said, "the locks were changed, the place was closed."
Workers removed most items from the church the night before, but missed something on their way out. "This is the miracle bungee cord," he says, pointing to a rubber strip with a hook on each end. To keep a side door from automatically locking, movers wrapped the cord around the latch bar that opens the door from inside, hooking the both ends of the cord to an eyelet screwed into the door. When they left, they forgot to remove the cord.
A parishioner arrived the following day and tried opening every door. When this one worked, she saw one statue remaining in the stripped Church, and, angry at the unexpected stripping of her church, grabbed it. Then she spotted a paper announcing the town hall meeting and called the number on it. Rogers answered, and said the meeting had been canceled because the church was already closed.
"But I'm in the church," she told him.
Thus the vigil began, not by forethought but by accident.
Now, a core group of about 100 people, and about 300 more who help less often, keep the church open. The "reconciliation room" once used to confess sins, is a single bedroom, and the sacristy where priests prepared for services is a family bedroom. They hold lay services that include Eucharistic wafers, which the Church teaches is bread transubstantiated into the Body of Christ when a priest consecrates it during Mass. Rogers said the consecrated hosts come courtesy of sympathetic priests.
A recent Christmas service brought in about 800, Rogers estimated. Fundraisers for the vigil are successful, and the community is growing.
In fact, Rogers believes the diocese closed the church because of its location. He claims the 60-year-old building is in good shape and the parish had surplus funds. It sits on 33 acres of wooded land in a shore community near one of the state's premiere tourist attractions, and likely could be sold for millions.
The archdiocese did not return a call seeking comment, but literature posted on its Web site says it tries to work with those in vigil to resolve differences. Here and in most vigil churches, the archdiocese has kept heat, water and electricity on and paid those bills, though the vigil keepers suspect that is to avoid legal questions about ownership.
Except for a few aborted attempts to get police to remove people in the early days of the vigils, there has been no effort to oust them. Other dioceses, notably New Orleans, have been more aggressive in ending vigils through eviction.
These people do not see themselves as renegades or defiant. They argue that there is an appeals process that begins with the local bishop and ends with several lengthy steps in Rome, and that the local bishop should leave the church open until appeals are exhausted. In the Diocese of Scranton, Noreen Foti said eight parishes have joined to fight closure, six have filed local appeals and several have filed in Rome.
Rogers said the St. Francis vigil has been "a journey of a thousand riches" that brought parishioners closer together.
"We've been called the revolution of the faith," he said. "I truly believe what we are doing here will change the Catholic Church in America.
"As the church runs out of priests, who do you want on your team? Don't you want people like us, willing to stay 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for five years?"
Church life
At St. Jeremiah in Framingham, a group of elderly women gather to pray the evening Rosary, then join Jackie Lemmerhirt to talk of their commitment to the vigil cause.
"I just moved into the area six months after this church was built," Fran Leach says. That was 51 years ago. Gray-haired and soft spoken, she joined the vigil and agreed to spend nights, often alone, to keep the place open when the archdiocese ordered it closed in May 2005.
Wasn't it a little odd sleeping alone in a church at night?
"It was wonderful. I had the Lord with me all the time. I didn't need anyone else."
"It is peaceful to stay at night," agreed Ceil Wohler. "You feel inspired."
"We look at this as our church," Irene Colonna says wistfully. "It is part of our lives."
While most overnight vigil keepers use bedding stowed away in the old confessionals, one man made himself a bit more at home, setting up a bed in the balcony, complete with night table and lamp.
Like St. Francis in Scituate, parishioners at St. Jeremiah were told they would get to say goodbye, but Lemmerhirt said the archdiocese tried to close the place earlier than promised. The group planning a vigil had anticipated the move, and started the vigil early. The archdiocese tried to get the police to remove them, but Lemmerhirt said they had a savvy lawyer staying in the church while they notified police and others that forced eviction would result in lawsuits. The police chief refused to take action unless the bishop came in person and asked him to arrest those in vigil. The archdiocese backed down, providing another important lesson to those contemplating vigils: Be sure you have a good attorney.
Unlike the group at St. Francis, these people won the right to have a priest at their church several months after the vigil began. Initially, the archdiocese agreed to let a sympathetic retired priest celebrate Mass. In May 2008, they made a more permanent arrangement.
A group of priests and worshipers belonging to the Syro Malabar Church – a kin to Eastern Orthodox Catholics but "in Communion" with the Roman Catholic Church – was looking for a home. The archdiocese rents the church and rectory to them, and the two groups share the building. The priests have agreed to hold a traditional western-style Mass weekly for the vigil participants.
"They are an extremely young group," Lemmerhirt said, "very-well educated. They have about 200 people on Sundays." The vigil keepers have a core group of 180, and Christmas services have drawn as many as 300.
The group also started holding weekly religious classes that draw more than 100 children, and they let community groups like Girl Scouts use the building.
Like Rogers at St. Francis, Lemmerhirt sees divine intervention in the success at St. Jeremiah. "There is no doubt the Holy Spirit is at work here," she said. "Everyone is a whole lot closer than we were before the closing,"
"Back then, we didn't know people by name," Colonna added. "We knew their faces, but we didn't know them."
Local parallels
There is no way to know if such vigils will pop up locally, particularly with the looming departure of Bishop Joseph Martino, but there are some strong parallels. In both cases, the bishops conducted an extensive process before announcing the closing of numerous churches, and parishioners in many balked, believing it was too many buildings shuttered too quickly, resulting in the closure of viable parishes. Some fought back through the appeals process, and in Boston that fight ultimately included vigils.
While acknowledging that appeals to Rome have rarely, if ever, succeeded in reversing a closure, Noreen Foti believes the appeal to save Sacred Heart will succeed, thus avoiding a vigil. She now has additional reason to hope as a new bishop is expected. Martino developed a reputation of sticking to his final decisions and weathering any criticism.
But the groups fighting closure locally are closely following the blueprint Borre has worked out for the Boston churches, and that blueprint includes vigils when necessary.
Foti said she has talked to those leading vigils in Boston, who are more than willing to share the lessons they learned.
"We have strong support for whatever we choose to do," she said, including the concept of holding vigil.
"It's been discussed. I can tell you that."
Contact: mguydish@timesleader.com
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