Reactions mixed to recently announced parish changes

By Sharon Roulier
and Father Bill Pomerleau

ADAMS – Reactions were mixed this past week as the Diocese of Springfield announced that it intends to close 11 more churches in 10 parishes by Jan. 1.

At an Aug. 11 press conference in Springfield, Bishop Timothy A. McDonnell outlined plans to reconfigure parishes in four regions of the diocese: the Adams-North Adams area of northern Berkshire County; several towns in southern Berkshire County; Franklin County; and the western suburbs of Springfield.

Following the procedures set out in canon law, the bishop announced his decisions after consultation with the presbyteral council. In written material accompanying his remarks, he quoted the findings of the Diocesan Pastoral Planning Committee.

“Realistically, what this is all about is being church better,” said Bishop McDonnell. “We’ve been putting money into buildings, rather than into people.”

“I know that every church is a memory box,” the bishop said. “For so many people, the highlights of life – baptisms and funerals, weddings, first Communions, confirmations – so many joys, so many sorrows.

“The memories are there. I know that. And I know it’s tough to let go. But the interesting thing is, the memories stay, even when the buildings are gone,” he said.

In some locales, parishioners reacted to Bishop McDonnell’s announcements with sorrow, but acceptance. In others, there was overt opposition to the scheduled changes, with four canonical appeals planned.

“I’d say that people here were a little teary. But on the other hand, there was no surprise,” said Father Dennis P. Bombadier, pastor of St. John Parish in Millers Falls.

“We’ve averaged maybe 60 or 70 people at the two weekend Masses, and we sometimes have summer folk who have places on Lake Wyola. But we really have no young people left,” he told The Catholic Observer.

Similarly muted reactions seemed apparent at St. James and St. Stanislaus parishes in South Deerfield.

After three weekend Masses on Aug. 16-17, parishioners seemed to accept the decision to form a new parish under the patronage of Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha. Concerning South Deerfield, Bishop McDonnell alluded to the 1704 attack on English colonial settlers by French Catholics and their Native American allies, a battle which many contemporary historians put in the context of earlier attacks by English Protestants on Catholic settlements in Maine.

“There was a blessed in the church who prayed for peace: Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha. She was a Mohawk Indian, and so the new parish coming into existence, she is being named the patroness of that new parish,” he said.

A similar reaction occurred in West Springfield, according to Father Venance Max Kishe, administrator of Immaculate Conception and St. Louis-de-France parishes. Father Kishe told iobserve Aug. 19 that St. Louis-de-France parishioners were “very accepting” of the diocese’s decision to merge into a new parish, named for St. Francis Xavier Cabrini, at the Immaculate Conception site.

Bishop McDonnell said that the name for the new parish reflects the character of the Merrick section of West Springfield, which has been, and continues to be, served by parishes with many immigrants.

Father Kishe said since “no one wants to go on wasting money on heat for the building,” St. Louis-de-France has scheduled its last Sunday Mass for Oct. 19 at 8:30 a.m. He added that representatives of St. Ann Mission, another church community scheduled to become part of St. Francis Cabrini, have already contacted him to plan the parish transition.

“The (St. Ann) finance council will have one more meeting, then they will meet here with our finance council,” he said.

At the press conference, Bishop McDonnell explained that in West Springfield, “We not only went through the listening sessions, but we did a physical analysis of each of the buildings.”

The bishop was referring to large pastoral planning meetings for clergy, professional parish ministers and representative lay parishioners who were invited to give their thoughts on parish reconfiguration.

St. Ann’s, a mission of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Parish in Springfield, has historically been staffed by the Stigmatine Fathers. When the religious order notified the diocese in March 2007 that it could no longer send a priest to the parish, the diocese made preliminary plans for its closure.

It then put those plans on hold so that the mission could be included in the pastoral planning process, and while an independent engineering study of the three parish properties was conducted at the request of St. Ann’s parishioners.

In its final report of the area, the pastoral planning committee concluded, “It is apparent to us that retaining Immaculate Conception as the parish for this area is the best option.”
Adams reactions

At press time, the most serious opposition to the reconfigurations was centered in Adams, where Peter Borre, co-chairman of the Boston-based Council of Parishes advocacy group, gave advice during an Aug. 17 meeting to those interested in reversing these decisions.

Nearly all of the approximately 150 people who filled the front hall of the Elks Club in Adams were from St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish, which is scheduled to close along with the St. Thomas Aquinas buildings of Notre Dame des Sept Douleurs and St. Thomas Aquinas Parish.

The new Adams parish, which will use the Notre Dame buildings, will be known as Pope John Paul the Great Parish.

No members of the former St. Thomas Parish appeared to be at the gathering, but about a dozen members of St. Francis of Assisi Parish in North Adams and three members of All Saints Parish in Agawam, parishes also slated to close at the end of the year, came to question Borre.

St. Stanislaus parishioner Laurie D. Haas announced that, after consulting with Borre, she had written the bishop Aug. 14, formally asking him to reverse his decision to close her parish.

In carefully phrased letters received Aug. 18 at the diocesan chancery, Haas and six other St. Stan’s parishioners attempted to file a remonstratio, or appeal, to Bishop McDonnell to change his mind about the closure of the parish.

In her letter to Bishop McDonnell, Haas argued that “unlike a number of other parishes, St. Stanislaus has consistently been ‘in the black.’”

But Father Daniel J. Boyle, pastor of the linked parishes in Adams said that both St. Stanislaus and Notre Dame-St. Thomas ended the last fiscal year in the red.

“At St. Stan’s, we cut the budget seven percent, but we still ended with a $20,000 deficit in the fiscal year that just ended. The utilities are killing us,” said Father Boyle, predicting that the predominantly Polish-American parish would deplete its savings in three or four years.

Haas’ letter to the bishop, which she made available to the media, argued that the diocese should retain two churches in Adams, or choose St. Stanislaus as the sole worship space for the new parish. Comparing her home church to Notre Dame church, she argued that “it is patently obvious to any impartial observer that St. Stanislaus is both architecturally and artistically superior, and as such better expresses the glory of God and hence affords a more appropriate atmosphere for worship.”

Under the plan, the diocesan-run St. Stanislaus School will continue to operate.

According to church law, Bishop McDonnell is not required to immediately respond to any of the recent letters. However, once he issues a decree stating his intention to suppress a parish, he will have 30 days to consider the appeal letters sent to him.

If the bishop rejects the local appeal, or if he fails to respond to it, the parishioners may then take their case to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Clergy, a body which has rarely overturned any U.S. parish closures. Borre himself warned those gathered in Adams that an appeal to Rome may be largely symbolic.

In Boston only 12 parishes took their cases to the clergy congregation. All lost their appeals, although the Vatican body ruled that the archdiocese could not use the assets of closing territorial parishes to fund general archdiocesan operations. Boston then adopted Springfield’s model for property dispersion, distributing any remaining assets of a closed church among neighboring “receiving parishes.”

Five of the 12 parishes then took their cases to the Apostolic Signatura, the church’s “supreme court” for parish matters. Earlier this year, a three-judge panel of the Signatura rejected their appeals.

The announced closings also brought a response from State Rep. Daniel E. Bosley (D-North Adams) who called for a moratorium on parish closings.

In a letter published by iberkshires.com, an Internet only news site in the Berkshires, Bosley said that no churches should close until “the members of the respective parish have had equal opportunity to weigh in on the matter.”

Charging that “there is not a true understanding of how certain parishes were chosen over other ones,” he said, “There is concern as church leaders have haphazardly planned the closing of these parishes without holding any formal meetings or contacting public officials.”

Bosley said that the diocese was “shortsighted” centralizing churches “under an arbitrary new name that ignores the connection that parishioners have had with their parish church and native saint.”

Of the six to-be-renamed parishes in his legislative district, Bosley mentioned by name only St. Stanislaus, which features a large bronze bust of the late Pope John Paul II in front of its property.

Bosley’s comments were refuted by diocesan spokesperson Mark E. Dupont.

“This process has been underway for a number of years now and it involved independent analysis as well as input from the parishes,” Dupont said. “We’ve been gathering data from the parishes for more than three years and each parish was represented at listening sessions.”

Dupont went on to state that all public officials, including state representatives, received copies of the Mullin Report in March 2007 along with other background information on the pastoral planning process. He also noted that Msgr. John Bonzagni, director of pastoral planning for the diocese, had participated in a parish-wide meeting at St. Francis in North Adams which was attended by more than 300 parishioners.

Dupont concluded, “This process was designed to be an inclusive as possible, yet the pastoral planning committee had to confront the very real challenges our church is facing.”

In a homily preached at four weekend Masses at the three Adams parishes Aug. 16-17, Father Boyle reminded parishioners that, “believe it or not, we were fully involved in the listening sessions that pastoral planning offered to us.”

He noted that a representative 15 members from both parishes attended an “all day meeting for laity only.”

“Regardless of what you read or hear, there was a process that was followed and we are now experiencing the results of that process,” Father Boyle told parishioners.
At the press conference, Bishop McDonnell also explained his rationale for choosing St. Elizabeth of Hungary as the patron of the new parish in North Adams.

“The two churches in North Adams are named for Franciscan saints,” said the bishop. “And the third is Our Lady of Mercy. And St. Elizabeth of Hungary was a Franciscan saint who brought other Franciscans together and had a great devotion to Our Lady. So, she carries on the tradition of the three (parishes).”

At press time, similar appeal letters had been sent from parishioners of St. Francis of Assisi Parish in North Adams, North American Martyrs Parish in Lanesboro and All Saints Parish in Agawam.

Bishop McDonnell said the Lanesboro parish, which is now linked to St. Mary of the Assumption Parish in Cheshire, will be closed because “it is very close to three other parishes and only seats 123 people in the church.”

Some pastors told iobserve that their parishes may end public liturgies, if not formally close, in the weeks before the end of the year in an effort to spare the parish the expense of rapidly rising utility costs.

This will almost certainly be the case at St. Thomas Church in Adams and St. Francis of Assisi Church in North Adams, where parishioners have been worshiping in neighboring churches during recent winters. Others said that their final liturgies may occur around Christmas time.

“The first liturgy at All Saints (in Housatonic) was a Christmas Eve midnight Mass. If I can find another priest to take the liturgy at St. Peter’s, we might be able to end with a midnight Mass,” said Father William P. Murphy.

Father Murphy is currently the pastor of St. Peter Parish in Great Barrington, and All Saints Parish and Corpus Christi Parishes in the village of Housatonic. Under the plan, the Housatonic parishes will combine into a new parish named for Blessed Teresa of Calcutta at Corpus Christi Church.

Msgr. Bonzagni said the upcoming changes in parish life in the diocese are necessary so that the future of the Catholic Church in the diocese will be secure. However, he did not dismiss the pain that many of these changes will inevitably cause.

“People really love their parishes, they love their priests. They love their church,” he said. “And that’s a fantastic thing. And you can’t get upset about something you don’t care about. Our people care, and they care deeply. And we’re trying to deal with them respectfully,” he said.