No Closure: Catholic Practice and Boston’s Parish Shutdowns PDF
Preview No Closure: Catholic Practice and Boston’s Parish Shutdowns
No Closure No Closure CATHOLIC PRACTICE AND BOSTON’S PARISH SHUTDOWNS John C. Seitz Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 2011 Copyright © 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Seitz, John C. No closure : Catholic practice and Boston’s parish shutdowns / John C. Seitz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-674-05302-1 (alk. paper) 1. Church closures—Massachusetts—Boston—History—21st century. 2. Catholic Church. Archdiocese of Boston (Mass.)—History. 3. Parishes— Massachusetts—Boston—History. 4. Boston (Mass.)—Church history. I. Title. BX1417.B6S45 2011 254'.02—dc22 2010041632 Contents Introduction: Closings 1 1 The Pasts Living in People 40 2 Divergent Histories: Change and the Making of Resistors, 1950–2004 81 3 “What do we have?” Locales and Objects in the Hands of the People of God 131 4 “This is unrest territory”: Orthodoxy and Opposition in Resistors’ Practice of the Parish 174 5 Openings 213 Epilogue 234 Notes 251 Acknowledgments 305 Index 309 No Closure Introduction: Closings A New Scandal Like many Catholics of her generation, Susana lived life deeply connected with her parish. Sometimes her home seemed like an extension of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, which she could see just down the street from her tall brick row house in East Boston’s Jeffries Point neighborhood. Her deep connection went beyond the sightlines. For one thing, vital sup- plies shuttled back and forth between home and church with regularity. In the years before she helped raise funds to install a new kitchen in the church basement, Susana used to cook great batches of macaroni and gravy in her own basement kitchen, running them across the street, with help from the church’s young men, for the parish’s many benefi t suppers. Church came into her home, too. She routinely entertained and fed priests, nuns, brothers, bishops, and, once, Boston Archbishop Bernard Law at her kitchen table. After the parish’s nuns had left the parish in the late 1970s, Susana and her husband David seriously considered buying their former convent and turning its upper fl oors into their home. The lower fl oors, they imagined, could house a public shrine to Padre Pio, the twentieth-century Italian stigmatic to whom they had a devotion. The chan- cery never responded to their inquiry and they dropped the matter, opting instead to refurbish their own home. The integration of church and home extended to business and economic survival. For a time, Susana and David owned a funeral home near Our Lady of Mount Carmel, and the community centered there was one impor- tant foundation for the business. With this business, and their involvement 1
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