MASSACHUSETTS
MetroWest Daily News
By Arthur McCaffrey
Guest Columnist
Posted May. 11, 2014
We don’t wear a stiff white collar, or dress up in fancy robes. We don’t drink expensive whisky and smoke cigars. We don’t fly the expensive seats to Rome. We are not obsessed with sexuality, and, for the most part, lead healthy, balanced lives. By geography, occupation, socioeconomic status, we are a diverse group in Massachusetts: from Lowell, Lawrence, Everett, and East Boston, to Quincy, Scituate, Wellesley, and Framingham, we are plumbers, landscapers, teachers, lawyers, doctors, academics.
Who are we? We are the accidental activists, parishioners of Vigil Parishes all around the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston (RCAB), like our own local parish, St. James in Wellesley. When ill-conceived diocesan policies threatened our religious patrimony and rich heritage of faith in 2004, we were forced to reconfigure our traditionally passive roles inside the Church. Long before there was Occupy Boston, we have been occupying our local churches for the last 10 years in vigils of protest against the misguided efforts of Cardinal O’Malley to close us. Our grass roots resistance movement is the first of its kind in the 200-year history of the diocese. You couldn’t find a less radical group of populist activists – we are middle-aged and elderly, predominantly women, with very few youth in our midst. When a criminal Church lost it moral authority, it lost a whole generation of young people for whom Rome no longer has credibility. When we go, we leave empty pews behind us.
So who are we and what are we up to? We are the Pope’s dirty dozen! In his recent, first apostolic document (“Joy of the Gospels”), Pope Francis said that he prefers “…. a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.” Well, we’ve been there, done that; not so much doing missionary work to spread the good news of the gospels out in the world as leading by example, through actively bearing witness to our faith and foundational beliefs by maintaining an evangelizing presence inside our threatened parishes. A visiting Jesuit called our vigiling a “charism of the Holy Spirit”. The public witness we began in Boston in 2004 has now spread around the country. A Fordham professor has even written a book about us.
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