Dear Archbishop Sean O’Malley,
It is with great sadness that we hear you are forcing the
closure of Sacred Heart parish in
It is with great disappointment and not a little anger, that we observe the same attitudes which were the original source of the continuation of abuse of children by clergy, the repeated attempts to protect the offending priests while the children were left to suffer, that ultimately led to the resignation of your predecessor.
These attitudes include an opacity of the decision making process used in the arrival at the conclusion to close Sacred Heart, the attitude of “we are the ones with the Word of God, don’t you worry about a thing, we will take care of it,” “we know better, you are not guided by God and are therefore ignorant and need our leadership”, “go and pray, but accept our decision as final”, “don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense, you don’t have to understand, just follow what we say and pray for your own understanding.”
Your utter and complete refusal to be accountable for your decisions, your arbitrary selection of which churches will close, your selection of clusters, and arbitrary and invalid criteria for closings, lead to illogical conclusions and undermine and belie the truth you are expected to say, and the love you claim to have, for the parishioners of your flock in this archdiocese.
Opacity, the arbitrary methods used, the closed internal processes, absent logic, and secrecy (the actual schedule for closings does not appear to have been published yet), are the hallmarks of the administration of the Catholic Church, your predecessor’s administration, and the entire support staff which remains after Bernard Cardinal Law left for his penzione under the shadow of the Pope. That administrative structure is as opaque, arbitrary, closed, illogical, and operates in the same secret way as before. Let me tell you they are giving you bad advice.
The formal letter of appeal from our parish will talk about the arbitrary creation of clusters (two in our cluster, one of which had to be selected to be sacrificed), arbitrary criteria used in your own selection (sacramental index, which credited the larger number of funerals at St Brigid as having a higher “value”, even though there were more baptisms at Sacred Heart).
The illogical conclusion to close an active parish, financially sound, with no debt, with recently refurbished church and new boilers and roof, refurbished parish hall with new kitchen, with no burden on the archdiocese and a continuing source of revenue, we are sorry to say, does not come as a surprise. Given the current opaque, arbitrary, closed, and illogical nature of the church, supported by the same people with the same attitudes who helped cover up the abuse of children by priests, we have come to expect outrageous statements by the church.
Do you see what we see, a disturbing tendency to large parishes with big numbers, in the same way WalMart pushes out the smaller stores by treating their own workers poorly? We can personally attest that the most spiritual journeys we have taken are with a supportive, actively involved, parish. Even more so with our small faith group of five families who meet to talk through and listen to each other during and after a meal. The megastore and megachurch are both supremely efficient, they will save you money, but they also both seem to have a poverty of kindness and spiritual value that will drive the smaller storefronts out of business. The loss from closing a smaller parish like Sacred Heart, particularly when we have been and have every chance to continue to be self-sufficient, cuts at the very heart of the church you claim to want to save.
Every Sunday, a number of people stay long after mass has
ended, for conversation and individual personal contact in the parish hall (in
the summer we meet on the porch of the rectory). The diversity of people and their willingness
to share their thoughts and of themselves is a rare and wonderful event that
can happen within a small parish with interested and caring parishioners. Contacts are made through which we help each
other with our special skills and resources.
A group gets together in
Our active parishioners volunteer their time, talent, and resources for unique and insightful demonstrations according to the season; a Christmas “Lessons and Carols”, a holiday concert, a mime presentation of the Passion, and tireless work decorating the church by season and event.
When a parishioner is known to be ill, often so many people offer meals and rides to the doctor, to chemo or radiation treatment, the offers have to be sorted out by a coordinator. This is the wonder of a tight-knit, loving, caring, community.
Fundraisers for supporting a mission in Haiti, exchanges
with a sister parish in Roxbury, and a group of volunteers who go to Honduras
regularly to help with a mission there, bringing medical and school supplies,
and help and hope to rural communities in Honduras. Prison ministries visit prisoners and are a
source of help for them. Volunteers
assist at retirement centers in
It may be too much to expect that the Catholic church will change very soon, to become less opaque, to gain a transparency in accountability, to let the parishioners who support the church financially see where the money goes and how it was decided to spend those funds, to discard the condescending attitudes held by you and other church leaders to us parishioners, and become a church that joins the modern world.
One day, when women are equal members of this church, when administrative decisions and financial distributions are made with open books rather than in secrecy, when parishioners have a viable part in the evaluation and decisions, because they are as much the church as the pastor or the administration he represents, that may become a church that people will want to join, and in which people will want to be priests and leaders.
We do fervently pray that you will look past the hard words in this letter. They were written not as an expression of hate; rather, we deeply wish to see those changes in the church that will make it a powerful source of spiritual leadership in the future. Until that time, please, reconsider the closing of one of your most vibrant, active, mutually supportive, diverse, and loving parishes. Don’t drive them away before the church has a chance to come to its true and full flower.