FRAMINGHAM (MA)
MetroWest Daily News
Oct. 13, 2019
By Arthur McCaffrey
This fall marks the 15th anniversary of the start of the grassroots Parish Vigil Resistance Movement (PVRM) which began in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston (RCAB) during September-October in 2004. This Occupy movement — unique in the 200 year history of the archdiocese — saw parishes organize 24/7 vigils inside their churches to protest Archbishop O’Malley’s plans to close over 80 diocesan parishes in 2004. While the newly arrived bishop claimed he was only responding to changing demographics in his diocese, we knew better.
After the mess left behind by his fugitive predecessor, Cardinal Law, who escaped to Rome, O’Malley was faced with a very large bill for paying financial settlements to abuse victims. So he targeted for closure a broad swathe of both weak and strong parishes as revenue generators, like my own in Wellesley, St. James the Great, which was both financially and religiously viable, with a strong, vibrant congregation, including young families with children in CCD classes, and money in the bank— not to mention eight very attractive acres along Rte. 9.
O’Malley sent out his dreaded Fedex letters in the summer of 2004, notifying which parishes were getting the axe. In response, 24 parishes grouped together to challenge O’Malley’s decision, using legitimate canon law appeals to both the archdiocese and the Vatican. In an act of spontaneous combustion, about a dozen of us went one step further by going into full-time vigil to prevent a lockout in our parish churches.
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