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By Root 1518 0

said that closing a church should only come “as a last resort.”28 In early March, Congregation for the Clergy overruled the diocese of Allentown, Pennsylvania, on the shuttering of eight parishes out of the fourteen that had appealed. “It does not bring the parish back to life, but it puts on the table what could be a workable compromise: to physically reopen the locked-up church as a Catholic place of worship,” Borré told the AP.29 He was feeling good about three other Clergy decrees that allowed as many churches to stay open in the diocese of Springfield, Massachusetts. At the same time, eleven of nineteen parish appeals to Clergy had decisions to reopen their doors as churches, if not as operating parishes. The distinction between sacred and profane use had become leverage against a real estate sale, although the bishop was under no order to send a priest to say Mass. Seven closed parishes in Boston had appeals at Clergy protesting the relegation of their churches to profane use. Cleveland parishes had fifteen appeals pending. In the six months since Borré had last seen Sambi, Lennon had become more beleaguered.

Pope Benedict refused to intervene in the cases after the appeal by Carlo Gullo. Yet to Chris Schenk it was clear that Rome was searching for a response to the rising tide of people protesting the church closures. She had had many cordial dealings with bishops over the years, even prelates who did not share FutureChurch’s agenda. She knew those men had to show their obedience to the Vatican even when they did not agree, as in endorsing a celibate priesthood while the worsening shortage of priests forced them to close churches. But with so many outcries from the grass roots as people demanded that their sacred spaces not be shuttered and sold, the signal sent to Rome was that bishops had not shown pastoral leadership. In Cleveland the various groups had sent thousands of letters to the nuncio in Washington. Sambi told a Cleveland priest that he had gotten more letters from Cleveland than any other diocese. Schenk knew that St. Patrick parishioners had sent three thousand letters in one day.

These stirrings of pluralism were part of a larger shift. An investigation, or “apostolic visitation,” of the women’s religious orders had been ordered by Cardinal Franc Rodé in Rome. Even if the women who led their congregations had not known Rodé was a loyalist to Father Maciel and the Legion of Christ, they would have resisted questions about their finances. The investigation did little to hurt the nuns, with no great Roman show of power. Someone at the Vatican realized that if you lose the nuns, you lose a big piece of the American church. Bob Bowers telling the New York Times that “very, very old men” in the Vatican were deeply out of touch was more than a display of courage by a gutsy priest who had lost his parish. Bowers was saying what Catholics could see: the Vatican had no mystique of religious elitism or even the shield of secrecy to combat the media coverage of clergy child molestation cases and the complicity of cardinals like Sodano and Castrillón. American bishops could not shelter Vatican letters from the subpoena power of lawyers like Jeff Anderson.

Chris Schenk had changed her view of letter-writing campaigns. Several years before, FutureChurch members had written letters to Rome about the need for opening ordination beyond the male-only celibacy law to preserve access to the Eucharist; the advancing shortage of priests meant that Mass attendance would drop—the data pointed toward exactly what came to pass. In the 1990s pastors who circulated appeals in their churches, seeking a change in the celibacy law, had generated two thousand letters to the Vatican. The letters went to Bishop Pilla, who held a stance of silent passivity as the priest shortage deepened.

The parish-closing protests galvanized deeper issues of spiritual integrity and money, striking the central nervous system of the church. Archbishop Sambi responded to many of the people who wrote to him. “He sent a letter to one parishioner with