Render Unto Rome (16 page)

Three days before Christmas, in words aimed at the 552 victims and their attorneys, Lennon announced he was surveying church properties to put on the market “as soon as possible, so we can show our commitment” to resolve the lawsuits; liability coverage by insurers Kemper and Travelers would cover a substantial portion, according to the
Globe.
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With all that liability coverage
, wondered Peter Borré,
why sell property?

Bowers wondered how the struggling parish he had come to love would fare in Lennon’s plan. He asked for a meeting with Lennon, to no avail.

RECONFIGURATION DAYS

The son of a suburban deputy fire chief, Dick Lennon was six foot two; he had grown up a sports-loving kid but with a stutter so severe he rarely spoke in class, fearing humiliation. He entered Boston College, majoring in math. In 1967, after his sophomore year, he entered St. John, the diocesan seminary next door to BC in Brighton. Social protests that jolted campuses in 1968 hit St. John, too. Some seminarians clamored for direct involvement with the ghetto in Roxbury; others wanted the traditional path of enclosed study. Liberals clashed with Cardinal Cushing; half the seminarians soon left. Coming out of those years, Dick Lennon fell in love with canon law. He pursued it the hard way, teaching himself avocation-ally, from his studies in theology and the master’s he would earn in church history. He read voluminously in church law, amassing a library of three hundred books. Dick Lennon lacked the stylized polish of clerics educated in Rome, but having conquered his stutter, he could take whatever life threw in his way. In 1998, after a decade of parish work, the autodidactic canonist was plucked by Cardinal Law to be his canonical adviser. In 1999 Law named him seminary rector. In 2001 he became an auxiliary bishop. Within the priestly society he was known for his cold candor.
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Determined to salvage his parish, Bowers put out feelers to rent some
of the unused space in the large rectory. A law firm said yes. A cell phone company approached him about installing a tower behind the steeple. Bowers was thrilled! Let the private sector subsidize the school! Build an endowment, offer scholarships to worthy children. But then he hit a wall. The chancery told pastors to make no new contractual agreements until Bishop Lennon’s parish Reconfiguration was done. No law firm rental, no cell tower revenue.

Faced with the hard demographic realities of Charlestown—three parishes with reduced populations, school-age children at parishes up the hill eschewing the neighborhood school—Bowers and the principal reluctantly made spring 2003 the last semester for Charlestown Catholic Elementary School, the one Cardinal Law had told him to save.

During Law’s seventeen years in Boston, he had reduced the archdiocese from 402 to 357 parishes, without great protest. But Bishop Lennon entered a minefield. The Cardinal’s Appeal had raised only $8 million of the needed $17 million for archdiocesan operating expenses. Through the winter of 2003, as lawyers wrangled over the victims’ settlement, Lennon surveyed the topography of Catholic Boston—a church infrastructure in the city and outlying towns crisscrossed with map lines of money. What could be closed could be sold. The proceeds from sales would allow the church to regain its financial footing.

In a city with neighborhoods steeped in tribal loyalties, closing a given church cut deep into social cloth. In “Southie,” as South Boston is called, St. Augustine Elementary School was a bedrock for families of cops, firemen, and blue-collar and city workers. St. Augustine’s Cemetery, with a Greek Revival chapel, was the city’s oldest Catholic graveyard. A Southie pol once quipped he would be buried there because “I want to remain politically active.”
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But as older people who had raised large families died off, many of their children moved away, and Southie, like Charlestown, had a shrinking core of old Irish mixed with poor people in projects and the incursion of upscale couples, some without children, who were renovating buildings, laying on a patina of gentrification. “Sixty-one percent of South Boston residents have lived here less than five years,” reflected Brian Wallace, Southie’s representative in the statehouse. “The majority of them have no children … and the number of students going to Catholic schools is rapidly declining.”
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St. Augustine’s, with 158 students in grades K through 8,
relied on a $100,000 subsidy from the archdiocese. The pastor, Monsignor Tom McDonnell, was a Southie institution, and he had good ties with the cardinal. Law had forgiven a $328,000 parish debt on its unpaid assessments in 2000.

Three years later, in May, as Bishop Lennon remapped the infrastructure, students went home with notes to their parents: St. Augustine Elementary was closing. “This was a decision that came out of the parish,” a priest-spokesman for the archdiocese stated. Because of declining enrollment and rising repair costs, “the parish didn’t believe it could go on any further.”

Not so, said one of the parents, Anne Spence. The archdiocese “kept vehemently denying that the school was closing. Then, all of a sudden, here’s a letter—the school’s closed, goodbye, don’t bother coming back next year.”
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In the bitter protests that followed, parishioners screamed at the aging pastor, Monsignor McDonnell, for selling them out. Parish leaders plunged into emergency fund-raising; two city council members and a state senator met with a poker-faced Lennon to pitch a turnaround plan. Brian Wallace went separately to the chancery with a colleague to meet Lennon. Wallace knew the church had a money crisis, but Lennon’s closure on an unsuspecting pastor had hung McDonnell out to dry. In the chancery Wallace took his seat opposite the Apostolic Administrator. Lennon glanced at his watch. “You have five minutes.”

“Five minutes?”
snapped Wallace. “Here’s
five seconds
!” And with that the state representative walked out.

Whatever honeymoon Lennon had had with Catholic Boston soured in the media coverage over the St. Augustine closure. Bitterness over Law’s betrayal spilled out in cascades at Lennon.

When Seán O’Malley settled in as archbishop in the summer of 2003, Bishop Lennon retreated from the spotlight. O’Malley, with his white beard, serene demeanor, and soothing tones, had the persona of a peacemaker. He met with abuse survivors to advance the healing. The archdiocese agreed to the $85 million legal settlement for the 542 abuse survivors; the threat of bankruptcy receded as the archdiocese and Boston College moved toward the sale of the cardinal’s estate. But O’Malley minced few words of his own on the depth of the financial crisis. On February 13, 2004, Lennon wrote to Boston priests explaining that Archbishop
O’Malley “has deliberately chosen the canonical procedure of suppression, rather than merger.” A suppressed church would close, its assets going to the archdiocese. The assets of a church that merged with another parish would follow parishioners to the new church. Lennon’s letter asserting that the archbishop had “deliberately chosen … suppression” suggested that O’Malley was a joint designer of the Reconfiguration blueprint. The archbishop set a March 8 deadline for leaders from eighty regional clusters to recommend which churches in their groupings should close.

Peter Borré, who had seen his share of layoffs in the corporate world, was struck by the icy logic of Reconfiguration. The order bore the archbishop’s signature, but everyone knew it was Lennon telling parish groups to vote on whose church took the bullet. In corporate downsizing, you never asked people to vote on who kept their job. “Suppression”—a canon law term evocative of the Inquisition—meant you were evicted from your spiritual home, and all the money you and your people had put into that sacred space back through time went down to prop up a debt-ridden chancery.
This is going to blow up on them
, Borré told himself.

Bowers secured an appointment with Archbishop O’Malley.

The new prelate in his friar’s robe sat at the end of a long table. Seán O’Malley was visibly subdued. He spoke slowly, in a voice so low Bowers sat forward to hear, explaining that the church faced hard decisions about consolidating parishes. Bowers delivered an upbeat account of his parish, the diversity of people, rich allied with poor, a financial curve bending their way. O’Malley as a young deacon had done missionary work with Indians on Easter Island, far off the coast of Chile. The prelate who had read Spanish literature in graduate school would surely warm to the picture of brown folk from Puerto Rico making a spiritual home at St. Catherine of Siena. Or so thought Father Bowers. But as he spoke of his parish’s resilience, O’Malley seemed drained. “We are facing tough decisions,” he reiterated. Bowers wanted O’Malley to see the parish. Would he come to St. Catherine of Siena and say Mass?
Yes
, replied O’Malley stiffly.

O’Malley seemed sad and listless as Bowers left.

As Peter Borré suspected, the cluster meetings threw many people into bitter standoffs with neighboring parishes over whose should close. On March 12, 2004, the study group Bowers had worked with sent a “Minority Report” by lead author Val Mulcahy to Bishop Lennon. In a dispassionate economic analysis, the document provided Lennon the blueprint to
reverse the financial decay and revitalize the area. Politically speaking, it gave Lennon cover.

Where Mass attendance in generations past had been 45,000 a week, Charlestown had only 1,500 people per Sunday at the three churches. Charlestown could do with one church. Two parishes would cost $250,000 yearly in extra debt-servicing costs. “The luxury of retaining two parishes means that the community forgoes an annual surplus of $155,000,” the report stated.

The three struggling parishes could not maintain a school that gave parents confidence, because it was poorly funded. The cycle fed upon itself, poor funding begot low enrollment, which drained the funding, worsening the facilities even more. A prosperous parish might possibly reprime that pump and support a successful school. There is the demand for a good school but not a hand-to-mouth school.
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As parishioners from rooted families died or moved away, the demographics posed tough choices. “Newcomers see more value in a financially secure and culturally vibrant parish rather than in the preservation of historic buildings,” the document stated. And then, the report hit dead-on what the Boston archdiocese—and the American church writ large—now faced:

The trend is away from large households of Catholic families and is towards a lower density, diverse population. There will be an accelerating trend towards both poorer families in the projects and a transitory population of single and young married folks passing through [Charlestown] on their way to middle-aged suburban homes and families. If there is an upsurge in Catholic participation it will be at this new end of the spectrum. That end of the spectrum is not traditionally the source of generous offertory giving. They cannot be because they do not have as much to give. There will be no future wave of financial bounty that will buoy up two struggling parishes.

We don’t need to get sad about this. These groups are full of new energy, the young will get older (for sure), the poor will get
richer (God willing) and contribute elsewhere. While in Charlestown they will keep the faith alive and creative.

Closing one parish in Charlestown does not achieve guaranteed financial security. Closing two parishes would almost certainly provide that security. One Catholic community would be a stronger pastoral presence in the town.
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The report left open just how the phaseout would be handled, though a transition via facilitators was written between the lines.

Lennon never replied to the plan.

Two months later, on May 25, the chancery sent letters to eighty-three pastors by Federal Express, a rather lavish expenditure in light of the financial crisis and availability of e-mail. But with reporters and TV cameras huddled in the rectory, waiting to gauge how Bowers and his small staff and volunteers, mostly women, would react to the news, the coming of the FedEx trucks was a moment of high drama. Bowers’s voice choked as he read the letter from O’Malley—the parish must close. Each parish had the option of appealing the decision to Archbishop O’Malley, and if he said no, to the Vatican. But the chances of the Congregation for the Clergy reversing an archbishop were remote, as Bowers knew. The priest was crying on TV news. The next morning’s
Globe
carried parallel photographs on page one: O’Malley reading a statement, Bowers in anguish.

The archdiocese had spared the other two parishes in Charlestown. Lennon and O’Malley had ignored the research by the study group that had pinpointed $1.73 million in deferred maintenance. Closing one parish would not reduce the debt building at the other two. The smartest remedy was a single consolidated parish. In selecting two parishes at the expense of one, reconfiguration had flouted the hard research of the Charlestown group’s report.

“Numerous parishes targeted for closing held prayer vigils last night,” reported Michael Paulson, the
Globe
’s astute religion correspondent. Paulson sized up the territory:

O’Malley said the closings are necessary because the Catholic population has been moving to the suburbs and because attendance at Mass is declining. Other reasons, he said, include financial problems, the poor state of repair of many parish buildings,
and a dwindling number of priests. He said that more than one-third of all parishes are operating at a deficit and that 130 of the archdiocese’s pastors are over 70.

The archdiocese has hired a real estate specialist to help sell off the property associated with the closing parishes, many of which own churches, rectories, convents, schools, other buildings, and, in some cases, open space. The archdiocese has not said how many properties it plans to sell, but it is sure to be significant.
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