Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [196]
It is necessary to make known to the Cardinal [O’Malley] that your activity, perhaps undertaken in an erroneous manner, was not a struggle against him, but a manifestation of attachment to the Church, and to which She represents your faith in God … As proof positive of this, dissolve the organization and make yourself available to the Cardinal, who has a mandate from God to guide our Church, to collaborate with him for the purpose of holding open the greatest possible number of churches, as the presence of God in the community and the city. We are certain that this is also the innermost desire of His Eminence.
Perhaps some breakthrough with O’Malley might in time be possible, but dissolving the Council of Parishes without a quid pro quo was not in Borré’s deck of cards.
In the fall, on another trip to Rome, Borré drew encouragement from a priest in the Congregation for the Clergy who told him to continue with the parishioner challenges of their churches’ relegation “to profane use.” Puzzled, he replied that if parishes were closed, wasn’t the raising of a canonical issue like “profane use” little more than arguing over a cadaver? No, said the cleric. He explained that a bishop had the power to shut down a parish for any just reason, but the bishop’s authority to reduce the church to profane use (nonreligious status) and to order that it be sold could be challenged. The bishop needs a grave reason, the priest emphasized. In Italy the attitude was not to sell a church unless it was falling down. Italy had closed parishes in villages, but the churches remained churches. A priest might visit once a month, say Mass, baptize infants. The church had limited use, but the larger church wanted to maintain its presence by keeping these small churches.
In the first week of 2011, a different legal shift was registered in a U.S. federal district court. After the diocese of Springfield, Massachusetts, closed Our Lady of Hope Church, the city council through its Historical Commission gave the church protected status to halt its demolition. The diocese sued the city, arguing that its rights under canon law had been abrogated. Judge Michael A. Ponsor ruled in the city’s favor. “This lawsuit places the court at the intersection of two important, protected rights: the right of a religious entity to manage its places of worship in accordance with church law without oversight by secular authorities, and the right of the larger community to have a role in the preservation of a beloved landmark that was once a church,” the judge ruled. The city council had taken action after the diocese had demolished another church, St. Joseph, “without really an opportunity to protect that church, which was of great historical significance to the city’s French immigrants and culture,” the city attorney, Edward M. Pikula, told the Springfield Republican.27
The diocese had accused the city of “religious gerrymandering,” but a spokesman said the bishop would not take further action on the site until the Vatican ruled on the parishioners’ appeal of the closure. Judge Ponsor, it seemed, had echoed the logic of the Congregation for the Clergy priest who endorsed the maintaining of old churches in Italian villages.
Fourteen parishes in the Pennsylvania diocese of Allentown had pressed appeals at the Congregation for the Clergy, expecting first to be denied and then to appeal to the Signatura. Meanwhile, Sister Christine Schenk had learned that fourteen parish appeals in Cleveland filed at the Congregation for the Clergy were on some sort of standby.
But in early 2011, Borré’s strategy, carried out on the many trips to Rome—meeting with officials in Clergy and the Secretariat of State, working with Gullo in generating appeals to the Signatura—was bearing fruit. In January, Cardinal Raymond Burke, the prefect of the Signatura, in a speech to a gathering of clergy from England and Wales,