• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1487 0

door to BC in Brighton. Social protests that jolted campuses in 1968 hit St. John, too. Some seminarians clamored for direct involvement with the ghetto in Roxbury; others wanted the traditional path of enclosed study. Liberals clashed with Cardinal Cushing; half the seminarians soon left. Coming out of those years, Dick Lennon fell in love with canon law. He pursued it the hard way, teaching himself avocation-ally, from his studies in theology and the master’s he would earn in church history. He read voluminously in church law, amassing a library of three hundred books. Dick Lennon lacked the stylized polish of clerics educated in Rome, but having conquered his stutter, he could take whatever life threw in his way. In 1998, after a decade of parish work, the autodidactic canonist was plucked by Cardinal Law to be his canonical adviser. In 1999 Law named him seminary rector. In 2001 he became an auxiliary bishop. Within the priestly society he was known for his cold candor.32

Determined to salvage his parish, Bowers put out feelers to rent some of the unused space in the large rectory. A law firm said yes. A cell phone company approached him about installing a tower behind the steeple. Bowers was thrilled! Let the private sector subsidize the school! Build an endowment, offer scholarships to worthy children. But then he hit a wall. The chancery told pastors to make no new contractual agreements until Bishop Lennon’s parish Reconfiguration was done. No law firm rental, no cell tower revenue.

Faced with the hard demographic realities of Charlestown—three parishes with reduced populations, school-age children at parishes up the hill eschewing the neighborhood school—Bowers and the principal reluctantly made spring 2003 the last semester for Charlestown Catholic Elementary School, the one Cardinal Law had told him to save.

During Law’s seventeen years in Boston, he had reduced the archdiocese from 402 to 357 parishes, without great protest. But Bishop Lennon entered a minefield. The Cardinal’s Appeal had raised only $8 million of the needed $17 million for archdiocesan operating expenses. Through the winter of 2003, as lawyers wrangled over the victims’ settlement, Lennon surveyed the topography of Catholic Boston—a church infrastructure in the city and outlying towns crisscrossed with map lines of money. What could be closed could be sold. The proceeds from sales would allow the church to regain its financial footing.

In a city with neighborhoods steeped in tribal loyalties, closing a given church cut deep into social cloth. In “Southie,” as South Boston is called, St. Augustine Elementary School was a bedrock for families of cops, firemen, and blue-collar and city workers. St. Augustine’s Cemetery, with a Greek Revival chapel, was the city’s oldest Catholic graveyard. A Southie pol once quipped he would be buried there because “I want to remain politically active.”33

But as older people who had raised large families died off, many of their children moved away, and Southie, like Charlestown, had a shrinking core of old Irish mixed with poor people in projects and the incursion of upscale couples, some without children, who were renovating buildings, laying on a patina of gentrification. “Sixty-one percent of South Boston residents have lived here less than five years,” reflected Brian Wallace, Southie’s representative in the statehouse. “The majority of them have no children … and the number of students going to Catholic schools is rapidly declining.”34 St. Augustine’s, with 158 students in grades K through 8, relied on a $100,000 subsidy from the archdiocese. The pastor, Monsignor Tom McDonnell, was a Southie institution, and he had good ties with the cardinal. Law had forgiven a $328,000 parish debt on its unpaid assessments in 2000.

Three years later, in May, as Bishop Lennon remapped the infrastructure, students went home with notes to their parents: St. Augustine Elementary was closing. “This was a decision that came out of the parish,” a priest-spokesman for the archdiocese stated. Because of declining enrollment