BOSTON (MA)
Washington Post

By G. Jeffrey Macdonald| Religion News Service,

Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley on Thursday (Nov. 15) launched an ambitious, five-year plan to consolidate local parish leadership and reinvigorate an archdiocese rocked by scandal, declining Mass attendance and a chronic shortage of priests.

Starting with a first phase in January, O’Malley’s “Disciples in Mission” initiative will reorganize the archdiocese’s 288 parishes into 135 “collaboratives,” or clusters of two or three parishes headed by a single pastor. Assistant pastors and other staff from local parishes will be reoriented to serve entire collaboratives. By 2016, every parish will be part of a collaborative.

The shift marks the latest major change for the 1.8 million Catholics in and around Boston, who grieved 69 parish closures in the wake of the clergy sexual abuse crisis. Clustering parishes under shared leadership is now crucial, organizers say, in order to carry out the…