Render Unto Rome_ The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church - Jason Berry [65]
An editorial in the National Catholic Reporter, an independent weekly, scoffed at the bishops’ legal gambits:
The arguments made by the diocese of Spokane and Portland bring to mind Marx’s (Groucho’s not Karl’s) famous question: Are you going to believe me or your own eyes? The niceties of canon law aside, power in the U.S. church, ownership, if you will, clearly resides with individual bishops in their dioceses. That power is wielded benignly by some, less so by many, but it is disingenuous to say that it doesn’t exist. Bishops answer to Rome, and, presumably, to God, but not to their pastors and certainly not to the people in the pews.
It is a bankrupt church in more ways than one.49
THE VIGIL MOVEMENT BEGINS
A public Mass on August 15, 2004, at the greenery of Boston Commons, organized by Voice of the Faithful, drew a thousand people under a chilly, rain-darkened sky. Josoma and Bowers were among the five priests who celebrated the liturgy. “The Archdiocese of Boston has confused the mission of the church with the money of the church,” declared Bowers in his homily, pulling applause. “What we don’t have are bishops who have the courage to say why?”50 Bowers’s barb gave voice to the frustrations of people holding signs that said “Keep St. Albert’s Open”—referring to a Weymouth parish with 1,600 families that was debt free and had nearly $200,000 more in income than expenses.51
Like the churches in Charlestown and Dedham, St. Albert the Great had in its pastor, the Reverend Ron Coyne, one of the fifty-eight signatories to the letter that called for Cardinal Law’s resignation. Like Bowers and Josoma, Ron Coyne had revitalized a parish that had been losing membership. The three priests oddly mirrored the role that the Vatican imposed on Archbishop O’Malley as turnaround specialists, albeit of parishes rather than a diocese. Coyne had the smallest building among five parishes in Weymouth; it also had no school. As outrage crackled among parishioners opposed to Reconfiguration, ten people in Weymouth announced on closure day, August 29, that they would not leave. They came with pillows and blankets and slept in the pews. “I feel very sad about it,” Coyne told the Associated Press. “It’s very unjust. [The archdiocese] saw new life coming into this parish and yet didn’t even take that into consideration.”52
Within two days two hundred people had joined a list to maintain the vigil in rotating shifts. The parish filed a canonical appeal to the archdiocese.
“We’re not going to drag people out of church,” the chancery spokesman said in the quickening media coverage. “The archbishop says let’s just be patient and work this out as Christians.” But Christians from the pews of St. Albert the Great raised $100,000 for legal fees and sued the archdiocese, claiming they owned the parish. “We now understand that we are the church and we are followers of Christ and not the archdiocese of Boston,” read a parish council statement, all but declaring a religious secession, or schism.53
Archbishop O’Malley let the rebels stay in Weymouth’s priestless church.
At St. Catherine of Siena, Peter Borré watched people groping for a strategy. They wanted to meet with the archbishop. Borré wondered how to expose the financial duplicity and use that information to force the archdiocese into reversing course. Bowers held more meetings with O’Malley, to no avail. As much as he liked Bob Bowers, Borré, with his corporate background, was a gritty realist on the dynamics of large organizations; he was skeptical that the idealistic pastor whom his mother-in-law adored had a real strategy. Bowers was a go-to figure