Posted on 06/08/2004 4:21:35 PM PDT by AskStPhilomena
Historic Holy Trinity Church in Boston’s South End -- where German Customs of decorated Christmas pine trees and Christmas cards were introduced into Puritan Boston in the early 19th century and became American traditions -- is among the 60 churches to be closed in a radical downsizing of parishes.
On May 25th, Archbishop Sean O’Malley OFM Cap, announced the closing or consolidation of 65 churches, a decision he said he was forced to make due to the declining number of priests, declining memberships, and the overwhelming expense of repairing deteriorating structures.
“Although this reconfiguration responds to the very special needs of the present, a radical reconfiguration of the archdiocese has been discussed for many years,” said the archbishop in his formal announcement.
“Changes in population, the movement of people from the cities to the suburbs, the decrease in the number of active Catholics have all contributed to the present predicament. At this time, over one third of our parishes are operating in the red,” stated the archbishop, noting that, “the deterioration of our parish buildings and churches (that in the city of Boston alone would cost over 100 million dollars to repair) and the aging of clergy (130 pastors are over 70 years of age) have forced us to make the hard decisions that we have announced today.
“The alternative to going through this exercise would be that we would experience the continual decline in some areas of our archdiocese, closing parish after parish, school after school, outreach program after outreach program, all because the archdiocese would be unable to subsidize these entities. Furthermore, the archdiocese would be faced with serious reality of not being able to meet its pension and medical fund obligations for its employees.
“This we cannot allow to happen.” he said.
After the archbishop made his announcement, lightning knocked out the phone system in the archdiocese’s headquarters on Commonwealth Avenue in what some angry parishioners trying to call in called “an act of God.”
The archbishop’s decision, criticized by many priests and parishioners, as well as by some local media pundits for lacking a consultative dimension with those involved, will drastically alter the landscape of Boston and the other older cities of eastern Massachusetts.
For elderly parishioners for whom these churches have been centerpieces all their lives, and in whose walls and stained glass dead loved ones are memorialized for the city’s growing ethnic Catholics, from Eastern Europeans to South Americans, whose lives and neighborhoods still revolve around the parish, for families with children in the three parishes where parochial schools will be shuttered, and for all those who rely on soon-to-be closed parishes for essential social services, O’Malley’s decision is devastating.
The fate of these properties is unknown. Parishioners have a right to appeal the archbishop’s decision to him, and ultimately to the Vatican, which rarely reverses a bishop’s decision. O’Malley also said he had engaged a real estate firm to market the closed churches, some of which have extensive complexes of church, rectory, convent, school, and other buildings.
The closing of the 60 churches announced by the archbishop follows a downsizing decision of the former archbishop, Bernard Cardinal Law, who closed 47 churches beginning in 1987. With the current round, that brings the number of churches down from 404 in 1987 to 292 now.
"Self-inflicted Wounds"
The church closings, said C. Joseph Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League, are “in some measure a result of self-inflicted wounds, not only due to the terrible homosexual abuse scandal involving clergy, but also (due to) misguided policies under Richard Cardinal Cushing and Humberto Cardinal Medeiros, who supported urban renewal in the 1960s and ‘racial integration’ in the 1960s, and forced busing in the 1970’s.
“The white flight caused by these government social programs, which block-busted ethnic Catholic neighborhoods, is the primary demographic factor which is ultimately behind these church closings.
“Basically, the Church collaborated in the destruction of Catholic neighborhoods.”
These church closings, according to Doyle, have to be seen in a larger historical context.
“Since the first Catholics - indentured servants - arrived in Boston in the late 18th Century, they have always faced intense, widespread, prolonged and pervasive hostility from Yankee Protestant elites and the institutions they controlled.
“As John Adams once boasted ‘we have no rascally papists or Jacobites here,” Catholics, through a growth in neighbors, hard work, a sense of solidarity, devotion to their religion, and through the extraordinary political skills of leaders like James Michael Curley and John W. McCormack (who was subverted by an upstart John F. Kennedy and Thomas P. ‘Tip’ O’Neill) managed to achieve by the mid-20th century a level of social and cultural influence which would have been unimaginable to their immigrant ancestors and a source of great worry for the banking and business elites known as “the Vault”
The Model Parish Among all the parishes slated for closing, perhaps none illustrates the rising and falling fortunes, of the Church in Boston as historic Holy Trinity, which at the outset of the 20th century had some 6,000 parishioners, its own newspaper, and thriving devotional, social, charitable, and cultural organizations.
Holy Trinity, which is slated to close in June 2005, is a magnificent church designed by the United States’ leading architect of neo-Gothic churches, Patrick Keeley. The Church, left undamaged in the post-Vatican II iconoclastic frenzy, was also the font of many of the popular features that once characterized Church life in the United States. It was the first church in the United States to have a parochial school; the custom of Christmas candlelight processions and Midnight Mass originated here; it held a unique Easter triduum consisting of a wake lasting from Good Friday to Sunday morning at the Holy Grave with a figure of the dead Christ lying in the ground.
And significant to Boston’s history, it was Holy Trinity musicians who founded the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Also, the parish’s German pastor in the 1930s was a friend of the musical von Trapp family of Sound of Music fame. The parish hosted the singers on several occasions, including on its 100th anniversary celebration in 1944.
Today, Holy Trinity, situated in a wasted urban landscape worked over by drug dealers and prostitutes, remains a thriving parish, even though its neighborhood, the former New York Street area of Boston, was erased in the middle 1960s for public housing and turnpike construction. The turnpike (I-90) was built, isolating the church from surround in neighborhoods, and the housing project became a haven for drugs and street crime, inhabited by mostly non-Catholic minorities.
Holy Trinity is one of the few remaining German national parishes in the United States - that is, a parish to which any German, living anywhere, can belong -- as well as the home for a growing Latin Mass community. It boasts a number of vital parish organizations, including:
* the Bishop Cheverus Society, founded in 1989 and named in honor of the first bishop of Boston, which successfully petitioned for the restoration of the Tridentine Latin Mass in the Archdiocese of Boston;
* a Catholic Women’s Guild, founded in 1924, for various charity and social purposes.
* a Christian Arts Series, founded in 1981 in order to promote German culture and heritage.
* the Frauenbruderschaft, founded in the 1850’s. This confraternity consists of married women dedicated to Marian devotion and helping with the Mass on the first Sunday of the month.
* The Holy Name Society, consisting of members of both the German and the Latin communities.
* the Holy Trinity German Choir, under the direction of George Krim. The choir provides music for the 10:00 am German Mass and other events.
* the Holy Trinity Latin Schola, also under the direction of George Krim. It provides music for the Latin Mass.
* the Immaculate Conception Sodality, which promotes a special devotion to Mary, support of Catholic missions, and organized Catholic actions; also
* a Knights of Columbus chapter, a parish council, two other sacred music chorales, the Preces Cantatae, under the direction of Dorothy
Fresolo, and the Schola Amicorum, under the direction of John Salisbury, both of which provide sacred music for the Latin Mass, holy days, weddings, and other special events; and the Joseph Sick Benefit Society, founded in 1870, to provide comfort and aid to the sick of the parish.
Perhaps the parish’s most famous member was Louis Prang, who, around 1850 began the practice of exchanging hand-made Christmas holiday cards with his friends. By 1865 he was printing and selling multicolored throughout the United States. To this day, he is considered the “Father of the Greeting Card Industry.”
A Gem “The closing of Holy Trinity,” said Doyle, “would be a tragedy. This parish is not only thriving, but it is founded around a church of great historical and architectural significance.”
He pointed to the church’s central location, available parking, and interior arrangment optimal for the celebration of the Traditional Mass, adding that the Traditional Mass is a magnet for young Catholics, especially for those involved in the growing home-schooling movement.
“We associate German Catholicism in America with the Midwest,” added Doyle, “with Der Wanderer, the Catholic Central Union (Central Verein) and with the patronage of the Hapsburgs, But in reality, one of the German Catholic America’s premier institutions is located in the heart of New England --- Holy Trinity Church on Shawmut Avenue. “This church introduced parochial Puritans to the mainstream culture of Western Europe, established the American tradition of celebrating Christmas, and gave America one of its most eminent and renowned cultural institutions, the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
“Catholics of German ancestry,” he continued, “who have seen their traditions and achievements overlooked and neglected by American writers and historians since at least World War I, ought to rally to preserve this living example of their heritage and the German contribution to America.
“This church is a gem. Spiritually, historically, and aesthetically, this church is a magnificent and irreplaceable structure and a high altar and sanctuary of significant artistic value,” he said.
Among the other 60 churches set to close, with which Doyle is familiar, are:
* St. Mary’s in Roxbury was Doyle’s childhood parish and remains his territorial parish. A “basement church,” its building fund was purloined by a former archbishop, Richard Cardinal Cushing, and donated to build the magnificent Galway Cathedral in Ireland. After that bitter experience, Doyle said, parishioners hid the parish’s money in the flower fund.
* Blessed Sacrament in Jamaica Plain, said Doyle, is an incomparably beautiful replica, in red brick masonry, of St. Peter’s in Rome, complete with a baldachino over the high altar. The neighborhood, overwhelming Hispanic, is seeing an explosion of storefront evangelical and Pentecostal churches. By some accounts, as many as 50% of Hispanics have left the Church, and by closing Blessed Sacrament”, said Doyle, “the Church is continuing to disinvest in older urban neighborhoods -- which may accelerate this trend of Protestantization among Hispanic Catholics.
* St Augustine’s in South Boston in another historic parish, dating back to the 1880s, when Irish Catholicism began to exercise its clout.
* St. Francis’ and St. Phillip’s in Roxbury, and St. John’s and St. Hugh’s in Roxbury, once largely populated by Irish, Italian and Portuguese Catholics, are now predominantly black neighborhoods, and the churches have had no congregations for at least 40 years.
* “Mary Immaculate of Lourdes in Newton”, said Doyle, “is a beautiful Renaissance-style church with a bell tower ‘right out of Florence’ This closing,” he added, “is particularly painful as it serves a Catholic enclave in Newton.”
“If any church in Newton ought to be closed,” Doyle added,” it should be Our Lady Help of Christians, the dissident headquarters for Father Walter Cuenin and his supporters. Fathe Cuenin is the priest who testified against the protection of the marriage amendment and in favor of same-sex marriages in the Massachusetts state house.
“Many of the churches on the list,” observed Doyle, “particularly those in the old mill and factory towns of Lynn and Brockton, are churches that suffered demographic flight decades ago. In some cases, the Catholic ethnic congregations were displaced by Catholic Hispanics. In other cases, the congregations were replaced by non-Catholic Afro-Americans or by gentrifying yuppies, whose contact with the Church is limited to complaints about church bells ringing on Sunday morning.
“As sad as it is to see these churches go,” Doyle said, “The numbers, the finances, and the clergy to sustain them are not there anymore, and the faith content was weakened long ago.
“The same Catholics who weep over the closing of their churches, are the ones who vote in overwhelming numbers for pro-homosexual and pro-abortion politicians, who practice contraception, who attend the civil marriage ceremonies of their divorced children. Perhaps the loss of their churches is the natural concomitant to the loss of their faith.”
§
Wanderer readers who would like to learn more about Holy Trinity, to see photographs of the magnificent white marble high altar, and or to get contact information for the parish and its many organizations, can visit the parish’s outstanding web site at www.holytrinitygerman.org
Mr. Paul Likoudis will be a Holy Name Society Father Weisner Lecturer, May 15, 2005
I think Abp. O'Malley ought to turn over the operation of this particular parish to FSSP.
That's a nice idea. Unfortunately, requests from Boston Catholics to invite the FSSP into the diocese have apparently met with continued opposition from the archbishop.
If they ever let the FSSP control anything, they would probably require them to crawl around on the floor and bark like dogs first... just for the heck of it.
That's about how they were treated as their reward for "coming back into the fold" for lack of a better term. This is why the SSPX is so wary of of dealing with the heirarchy.
"If they ever let the FSSP control anything, they would probably require them to crawl around on the floor and bark like dogs first... just for the heck of it."
There's no doubt the FSSP have been shafted. Despite an overflow of vocations, not one of their priests (not even one of the more liberal French element) have been deemed worthy of a bishop's miter. The same could be said about the Institute of Christ the King. This sort of neglect says a lot about the Vatican attitude to traditionalists.
It also doesn't help when the cardinal in charge of ensuring a "wide and generous application of the Roman Missal of 1962" publicly admits to preferring the novus ordo. With friends like that, who needs enemies?
Why is that a suprise?
Every one of the 125 cardinals who will vote for the next Pope prefers the Novus Ordo. 90% of them were elevated by John Paul II, who prefers the Novus Ordo.
"Why is that a suprise?"
It isn't a surprise. It would be nice if the cardinal in charge of promoting "a wide and generous application of the Roman Missal of 1962" actually had a preference for the traditional Latin Mass - but that's just wishful thinking, right?
The hierarchy of the Church after Vatican II should support Vatican II, and the Novus Ordo Mass.
It does.
"The hierarchy of the Church after Vatican II should support Vatican II, and the Novus Ordo Mass."
No Catholic should support the Novus Ordo in preference to the Tridentine, or anything in Vatican II that contradicts, adds to, or subtracts from anything that existed prior to Vatican II.
Where such support is seen, there the hand of Satan is seen.
This is the very last Church they should consider closing.
This is the very last Church they would ever consider closing, if Satan were not at work.
O'Malley, seek out an exorcist.
Well, the Novus Ordo is the Normative Mass, according to John Paul II, so I will support it.
Where such support is seen, there the hand of Satan is seen.
Your signature line. "The hand of Satan" is in John Paul II?
Give me a break, papasan.
Sorry, no breaks for racists.
Especially liberal racists.
""The hand of Satan" is in John Paul II?"
Yes, even the Holy Father is in some things deceived by Lucifer.
This is a surprise? No man is capable of going head-to-head with Lucifer and winning.
Especially liberal racists.
Racist? Because I acknowledge that you're heavily influenced by your surroundings? Please, dsc.
Yes, even the Holy Father is in some things deceived by Lucifer.
And you, mired in Japan, knows when the Pope is deceived.
You have a Satan-fixation. Everybody who disagrees with you is "of Satan."
Dramatic hyperbole.
My childhood parish, my father's childhood parish, my grandmother's childhood parish, my great-grandmother's childhood parish and my great-great grandparents parish when they first came over from Ireland. We all lived in the same three decker, too. :-(
This parish was supposed to be made a Basilica but Boston politics kept it from being made one. St. Thomas Aquinas in Jamaica Plain was Mayor James Michael Curley's parish and so he did a bit of manoeuvering to keep Blessed Sacrament a 'regular' parish. Blessed Sacrament also has a side altar which you kneel at and when you push a little button, the altar lights up showing a glass casket with a life sized wax figure of St. Tarsisius which contains relics from the saint. Scared the heck out of me as a little kid! But it is one of those 'cool' Catholic things.
Unfortunately, requests from Boston Catholics to invite the FSSP into the diocese have apparently met with continued opposition from the archbishop.
Whaaa? Where'd you hear that?
I've heard the same thing elsewhere.
But I do like to see a source instead of a statement on these important issues. You know how it is, anyone can say anything.
"Because I acknowledge that you're heavily influenced by your surroundings?"
No, because you start that crap up every time you get a little edgy, and that's far from the worst example.
"And you, mired in Japan, knows when the Pope is deceived."
Mired? Japan is mire? Information doesn't flow through Japan? The Catholic Church doesn't have priests and bishops in Japan? No print media, no broadcast media, no Internet?
Sorry, the argumentum ad domicilium is no more valid than the argumentum ad hominem.
One thing I have learned during my years overseas: distance can either deceive or lend perspective. The trick is knowing which is happening at any given time.
"You have a Satan-fixation."
Yes, I alone, of all the men who ever lived. (Gonna call me crazy again pretty soon? Send me another ominous mail?)
"Everybody who disagrees with you is "of Satan."
Oh, how nice it would be if liberals were intelligent enough to see how bone-tired that tactic is. Ah, well, wish in one hand...
"Dramatic hyperbole."
Oh? Don't you smell the brimstone? Soles of your feet not getting just a little warm?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.