Opinion: Times have changed - or have they?

By Arthur Mccaffrey
MetroWest Daily News
August 15, 2020

https://www.metrowestdailynews.com/news/20200815/column-times-have-changed---or-have-they

We are in the midst of a global pandemic which has changed everybody’s lives, perhaps for ever. And yet here we have a Vatican pronouncement that things have not changed, that the priest is still the parish boss, that we should all get back to playing our traditional passive PPO (‘pray, pay, obey’) roles.

Columns share an author’s personal perspective and are often based on facts in the newspaper’s reporting.

Between 2004 and 2016, dozens of parishes and hundreds of parishioners in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston (RCAB) protested Archbishop Sean O’Malley’s (SOM) attempts to close and sell off their parish churches in order to pay off a huge pile of debt incurred from paying out financial settlements to victims of clergy abuse.

In 2004, the newly arrived Archbishop slated over 80 diocesan parishes for closure, including many that were vibrant, viable, financially and religiously sound communities of faith. In response, a grassroots resistance movement spontaneously erupted. Many parishes actively challenged O’Malley’s decision, and several (including my own) went into full-time vigil, occupying their churches 24/7, so as not to be locked out. These became known as “Vigil” parishes, quickly spawning imitators all around the country as other bishops and other parishes disagreed about how best to honor heritage and keep their beloved churches open.

The reasons offered by the RCAB in 2004 were a shortage of priests, financial hardship and changing demographics. O’Malley’s “Reconfiguration” strategy proved to be a big mistake and his office acknowleged as much several years later when his henchmen confessed that Reconfiguration was a failure — the closings did not solve priest shortages, dwindling Mass attendance, or financial troubles facing many parishes: “Closing parishes didn’t work... When a parish closed, people just went away. The numbers worshiping didn’t improve. We were not better off afterward.”

Fast forward to July 20, 2020, and we now read in National Catholic Reporter (NCR) that the Vatican Congregation for Clergy (CFC) have just issued an “instruction” (which, to my jaded eyes, reads like a HR policy statement in a large corporation) assuring priests that they will still have a job as boss of their parishes, regardless of calls for increased roles for laity in the running of their local churches.

Given the history of Cardinal O’Malley’s mistaken policies in Boston, it is very illuminating to read the interpretation of the new document by Msgr. Andrea Ripa, undersecretary for CFC. Ripa’s comments read like an indictment of everything that O’Malley did wrong in 2004. Here are five glaring, egregious mistakes SOM made, according to CFC:

Ripa said: “Dropping plans upon the people of God from above, without their involvement, should be avoided” .... So much for SOM’s unilateral decision-making about Reconfiguration, without any input or consultation from parishioners whatsoever.

2. Ripa made it clear that certain reasons were not sufficient for suppressing a parish, including “the scarcity of diocesan clergy, the general financial situation of a diocese” or other situations that are temporary or reversible. Strike 2!— those were exactly the reasons that SOM gave when ordering the closings of 80-plus parishes in 2004!

3. Further, Ripa stated that legitimate reasons for the deconsecration and sale of places of worship could not include “the lack of clergy, demographic decline or the grave financial state of the diocese.” Strike 3!—again, SOM is guilty of faulty rationale at odds with company policy.

4. Addressing the question about how bishops can best merge or suppress parishes, the CFC instruction urged prelates to make such decisions “with flexibility and gradualism...recognizing that people often have sentimental attachments to their communities and even to church buildings.” So much for the pat-on-the-head platitudes we received for our complaints in 2004, being told derisively that we were “too attached to bricks and mortar.”

5. The CFC instruction also reminds bishops that “in order to suppress a parish they must issue a formal decree, and should not suppress more than one parish in the same decree.”— SOM violated even this rule by suppressing dozens of parishes with one stroke of a pen!

So, in hindsight, we can count at least five serious errors that SOM made in suppressing all those Boston parishes in 2004. But yet we have never heard any apologies from this papal confidante, who has left a trail of destruction of parish life in his wake during his tenure in the RCAB. Too bad that SOM’s bad policies and decision-making can’t be brought into some kind of Vatican court so that his abuses of parish life get the proper scrutiny they deserve (and it’s funny, too, how the Vatican Signatura court who heard and dismissed all our appeals didn’t seem to know about CFC’s policies either.)

It is also unfortunate that CFC’s “instructions” are six years too late to prevent SOM from selling my home parish of St James the Great in Wellelsey to the Town of Wellesley in 2014, which the Town immediately tore down to make way for new athletic fields. We were a young, financially viable parish full of young families and active CCD programs, and had paid off the mortgage on the church built on eight acres donated freely by a local family in the 1960s. That acreage was obviously a very attractive “cash cow” for RCAB. Our story was replicated all around the diocese, as longtime legacy parishes which had seen generations of Catholics receive all the sacraments from birth to death were closed and sold off unceremoniously. And our sad treatment was echoed from Boston to Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and all across the country.

The NCR article correctly noted that Canon Law (as cited by Pope Francis) does make provision for the pastoral care of a parish to be undertaken by non-clergy persons, or a “community of persons,” when there is a lack of priests — but that application should have been extended to cases like ours and our self-governance should have been acknowledged and approved as a viable solution; instead our Archbishop willfully refused to heed our requests for occasional visits by any available priest. No matter—our parish united in wonderful solidarity to run regular Sunday liturgies in which women played a major role. Everyone one of our vigilers agreed that their resistance movement was one of the most spiritually uplifting experiences of their Catholic lives.

The Roman Catholic Church is fond of speaking about “lapsed” Catholics who it claims have fallen away from the church — we had the unique experience of a lapsed diocese which fell away from its parishioners. And now, 16 years after our vigils began, we hear from the Vatican CFC that everything that SOM did in 2004 was wrong, ill-advised, ill-considered, and against Vatican policy. In the aftermath of SOM’s brutal treatment of viable parishes, we now have a Catholic diaspora in Eastern Massachusetts, as uprooted parishioners dispersed to other parishes, other religions, or no parish at all. One faithful parishioner told me that she now calls herself a “cafeteria Catholic” of no fixed abode.

One thing that stands out from our experience is the vital distinction we learned to make between the Church as “Governance & Administration” vs. the Church as “Faith & Morals.” Most of us rejected the former while still trying to hold true to the latter. For those of us Vigilers who were blessed to experience a smaller, more authentic parish community life during our dozen years of lay revolt, we truly felt we were emulating the gatherings of early, pre-formal Christian communities 2,000 years ago.

Now, in 2020, we hear another paternalistic, pastoral “instruction” from the Vatican which jars our new found sensibilities, and further confirms our skepticism that RCC still doesn’t get it when it comes to G&A; it forgets the message of Vatican II that the church is us, “The People of God,” while priests and bishops are our servants.

We are in the midst of a global pandemic which has changed everybody’s lives, perhaps for ever. The media are overflowing with stories about how the nature of work, and jobs, and traditional roles will never be the same again. And yet here we have a Vatican pronouncement that things have not changed, that the priest is still the parish boss, that we should all get back to playing our traditional passive PPO (‘pray, pay, obey’) roles.

Maybe, despite the title I chose for this article, things haven’t changed at all.