Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [62]
Bowers realized that Seán O’Malley was depressed.
Other priests saw it, too. The leaden expressions and slow speech sparked speculation that O’Malley was taking antidepressant medication. O’Malley lived in a spartan room in the Holy Cross Cathedral rectory. His kindness and politeness were offset by reserve, a holding back of emotions. He had come to Boston as a healer and Reconfiguration had blown up in his face. He cannot understand why one of his priests will not agree with him, reflected Bowers. When he gave O’Malley the Charlestown consolidation report that his parishioner Val Mulcahy had sent to Lennon, the archbishop rebuffed the gesture.
He said: “I want you to do what I’m telling you”—resign, take a new assignment. But that meant a death warrant for the parish where Bowers had planted heart and soul. Lennon’s plan ignored the research group’s advice on a long phaseout, fusing three parishes into one. The meeting ended in a stalemate.
Bowers turned to Father William Leahy, the Jesuit president of Boston College, who assured him that he had sent the report to Archbishop O’Malley.
PARISHES AS REAL ESTATE
Priests in the fourscore parishes on the closure list confronted a maze of issues. Some pastors in neighborhoods with few parishioners and unmanageable debt accepted reality. The clustering process put stress on other clerics whose followers wanted to keep their parishes intact.
Among the priests at parishes targeted for suppression, Father Stephen Josoma in Dedham had followed Bowers’s travails and decided on a different approach. Born in 1955 into a close-knit family, his father a technician at MIT, Steve passed boyhood summers mowing lawns with his Irish-born grandfather. The old man had done time in Galway Prison as a Sinn Féin rebel before shipping out to America in 1920. Josoma saw him as a landscape artisan. Each night the old man knelt in prayer, “not an in-your-face piety, just a peaceful guy with trust in the Lord,” Josoma recalled. “That stayed with me.” Of the twenty men with whom he began seminary, only Josoma became a priest.
In 1997, at a church in Dorchester, he succeeded a popular priest “who had lived in a condo half the time while the parish ran up millions in deferred maintenance,” he recalled. Josoma and an associate priest “turned the finances around. The accountant warned us we had to cover the school deficit out of parish funds—$70,000. We achieved that. Next, we put in a cafeteria, a science lab, a library. We had an army of kids selling wrapping paper door-to-door. People saw that, they gave more on Sunday. We got the teachers raises. You can do a lot when the people are behind you.”
Josoma put his popularity on the line when he clashed with real estate agents he accused of redlining sales to keep blacks out of Dorchester. The experience was so searing he took a one-year leave from ministry and lived with his folks. In 2001 Cardinal Law asked him to become pastor at St. Susanna in Dedham, a cohesive flock, largely white, that was absorbing Filipino families. Dedham sits on an island in the Charles River with a population of twenty-four thousand.
“This parish was created by Cardinal Cushing in 1961 for his friend Father Michael Durant,” Josoma said, smiling in the fading light of a winter afternoon. “In those days, churches were like fiefdoms. The other parish, St. Mary of the Assumption, is 125 years old and three times our size. They called it ‘the cathedral in the wilderness.’ Twenty-five hundred families stayed at St. Mary when this one opened. St. Susanna had 300 families and a rectory with three priests, a housekeeper, and a cook. Today, it’s me and Felix [the dog] for 850 families. At least half of our families come from outside of the town, mostly from neighboring Needham. We’re a bit staid, perhaps, but more family-friendly.”
A wave of foreclosures hit Dedham in 2008. The parish food pantry fed rising numbers in an area where the