Deliver Us from Evil

Bernard Law’s worst nightmare is now reality.

The most massive wave of parish closings in US history began last week as pastors handed over keys to the first of more than 70 Boston-area parishes designated for “suppression” before the end of 2004. And at St. Albert the Great parish in Weymouth, parishioners moved in their sleeping bags and basic supplies to begin their “permanent vigil”—an indefinite occupation of their own church.

What’s that line about people who ignore history being condemned to repeat it? Except that Bernard Law didn’t exactly ignore the history—he just ignored its lessons.

In 1990, the Archdiocese of Detroit announced the sudden suppression of 34 parishes. The uproar was traumatic. John C. Nienstedt, now bishop of New Ulm, was rector of the Detroit seminary at the time, and in 2003 his recall was still vivid:

Even though the handwriting had been on the wall for years and a task force had been sending warnings for months, this news took everyone by surprise. The pain that ensued was intense and its residual effects continue thirteen years later. I would not want to see us experience a similar trauma. I know there must be a better way to plan for our future.

Bishops across the US were thus forewarned of the pitfalls of parish suppression. Yet only two years later, Bishop Timothy Harrington of Worcester moved to suppress St. Joseph, a Franco-Canadian parish in downtown Worcester, Massachusetts. His plan was to merge the parish with another Franco-Canadian parish less than a mile away, but parishioners had other ideas. This led to what diocesan historian Owen J. Murphy, Jr. termed the “darkest day,” June 23, 1993:

When Worcester police unenthusiastically enforced an eviction order obtained by Bishop Harrington in Massachusetts Superior Court and escorted from the church the last 49 members of a group who had taken control of the edifice just prior to its closing—and occupied it for 13 months.

It took three years, a new bishop, and the re-opening of St. Joseph to heal the wounds—but the shocking TV images of a bishop calling the police on his own people had immediate impact across the nation.

Bernard Law had to be haunted by these images unfolding less the 20 miles from his own diocese. He knew the Archdiocese of Boston would eventually face shortages of priests and finances, but he hoped to avoid conflict over closings. So in 1992 he ordered three clusters of parishes to begin discussing their common futures, including the possibility of ”restructuring” or “reconfiguration.” I served as consultant to two of these clusters. In 1995, Cardinal Law extended the clustering process to all parishes in the diocese, and my consulting expanded. When, in 2004, the Archdiocese announced plans to close “a substantial number” of parishes, several more clusters invited my help. In all, I worked in 15 clusters, totaling 77 parishes.

Sooner or later, in all these places, I found myself invoking the image of the Worcester occupiers. Throughout the 1990s many people, including many pastors, declared themselves skeptics about any long-term cluster planning. “Our fate is not in our hands,” they said. “The Cardinal has a plan for us all worked out. We’re wasting our time, because no matter what we say or do he will do what he wants to do.”

Trying to persuade people they were not wasting their time, I would always remind them of Worcester. “The Cardinal’s worst nightmare,” I would say, “has got to be the image of those people being dragged from their church on TV. You think he wants to risk that here in Boston? He may know that parishes will need to close, but he doesn’t want to take the rap for the decisions. He’d rather have you make your own decisions.”

My logic often convinced people to go ahead with planning, but it seldom led to decisions to close parishes. The directions from above were never clear enough to break through people’s natural impulse for self-preservation. If a cluster was told they needed to plan for a future with two fewer pastors in the cluster, the breakthrough might come—but the mandate was rarely that clear.

Even today, the Archdiocese of Boston has not given concrete criteria for closing individual parishes. St. Albert’s people complained their parish meets none of the criteria for closing—low sacramental numbers, financial difficulties, deteriorating buildings—but in fact these were never criteria for individual parishes. These were the conditions that, combined with the growing shortage of priests and the (mostly unmentioned) diocesan policy prohibiting keeping parishes open under a lay administrator, made a massive diocesan downsizing inevitable. And since Bernard Law failed to lead during the clustering of the 1990s, more than ten years was lost as the situation declined still further.

By the time Sean O’Malley became Boston’s new archbishop, the required downsizing had to be not only massive but also sudden. My guess is that, behind the abrupt brutality of this process lurked the belief that the only alternative, at this point, was bankruptcy.

The sad fact for places like St. Albert’s is that, even if the diocese closed every single parish with low numbers and bad conditions, it would not be enough. The diocese had reached the desperate point where it did not have enough priests even to maintain all its solvent, thriving parishes,

For years I predicted to my client clusters that Boston's priest shortage would level off at 250 active-duty diocesan priests. My constant refrain was simple: “How can the diocese operate 350 parishes with 250 priests?” People got the message, and some acted before it was too late.

The disaster in Worcester showed that people cling desperately to their spiritual homes. The lesson was obvious: closing any parish can lead to a pastoral and PR disaster unless someone leads people to a general consensus about what needs to be done. But leading people to that point requires an institutional transparency where those in authority level with the people they lead.

Under Bernard Law, that was impossible. People never knew how bad the priest shortage would get. They never knew why lay administrators were outlawed. They never knew how desperate the diocesan finances were. They never knew the dilemma created by aging city parishes built for immigrants whose grandchildren now live in suburbs. They never knew the further dilemma posed by non-territorial parishes: created as temporary way-stations for new ethnic groups, they became permanent in people’s hearts and minds.

In other words, the Archdiocese of Boston, after decades of constant expansion, suddenly found itself dramatically over-extended in an age of dwindling financial and human resources. But it had not prepared the people to face this challenge, because its own leadership was in denial.

So, instead of learning Worcester’s lesson, Bernard Law forestalled the inevitable. And now his worst nightmare has come true. Law himself, of course, is now Rome's most famous arch-priest, so the nightmare at St. Albert’s has fallen in the lap of his successor.

Ironically, the Diocese of Worcester has itself begun a clustering process aimed at reconfiguration. We can only hope that Worcester's new bishop, Robert J. McManus, will provide Worcester with the kind of leadership Boston never got.

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