A Month After Pope’s Visit . . .Cardinal O’Malley Closes German Parish

The Wanderer Press | 5 June 2008 | Paul Likoudis

[Serviam1]

One month after Pope Benedict XVI made his historic visit to the United States, Sean Cardinal O’Malley ordered the closure of Boston’s oldest German parish, Holy Trinity, and declared all its assets — including $ 242,000 in its bank account — be transferred to Holy Cross Cathedral. The priests and parishioners of Holy Trinity Church, established by German immigrants in 1844, opened the first parochial school in New England and introduced the Christmas tree and Christmas cards to Puritan Boston, among many other traditions. Since 1990, the parish has been home for the Traditional Latin Mass community from 1990 to 2007, when the Traditional Latin Mass was relocated to Mary Immaculate of Lourdes Parish in Newton. Following Pope Benedict XVI’s motu proprio, parishioners of Holy Trinity successfully petitioned the pastor administrator, Fr. John J. Connolly, for the Latin Mass. Since January 2008, when the Latin Mass was restored, the congregation at Holy Trinity has tripled, despite a standing-room-only congregation at Mary Immaculate of Lourdes, said C. Joseph Doyle, a member of the Latin Mass Community at Holy Trinity, and executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts. For four years, Cardinal O’Malley has been intent on closing Holy Trinity, which Boston Globe reporter Michael Paulson described as being located in the “last ungentrified corners” in South Boston. “What Paulson means by ‘ungentrified’,” explained Doyle, “is that Holy Trinity is located directly across the street from a low-income housing project of largely Hispanic tenantry, and has not yet been taken over by yuppies, homosexuals, and effete transients from New York and New Jersey.” In addition to closing Holy Trinity, O’Malley also announced that St. Casimir’s in Brockton, a Lithuanian parish, would close. There, parishioners responded by placing crosses all around the church and in front of their homes, recalling Lithuania’s famous “Hill of Crosses,” erected in defiance of the Soviet occupation of their country. Both churches will close at the end of June. “The whole so-called reconfiguration process,” Doyle told The Wanderer, “ is insane. Venerable churches of great historical significance and architectural and artistic distinction are being destroyed, while churches of no historical or aesthetic value are being preserved. Orthodox congregations are being dispossessed, while parishes that are hotbeds of dissent remain open.” Holy Trinity was the first church designed by distinguished church architect Patrick Keely, who led the neo- Gothic revival in the United States. Churches he designed, running across New England, New York, and New Jersey, and from New Brunswick to Baltimore, often became the cathedral churches as dioceses were formed in the major metropolitan regions. “The former St. Peter and Paul Church in South Boston, designed by J. Gridley Bryant Fox, who designed Boston’s Old City Hall, is now a collection of condominiums,” Doyle observed. “Jesuit-run Immaculate Conception Church, another Keely edifice that was once one of the most beautiful churches in the city of Boston, was gutted more than a decade ago to create the Jesuit Urban Center, and was finally closed last year. “In the Roxbury-Jamaica Plain area of Boston, two adjoining parishes serve the same Hispanic community; one, St. Mary of the Angels was a basement church that was never completed; the other, Bles sed Sacrament, was, architecturally, one of the most magnificent churches in the archdiocese. Blessed Sacrament was closed and St. Mary of the Angels was left open. This is ludicrous. “If a private, for-profit corporation was engaged in this level of architectural destruction and artistic vandalism, government agencies charged with historical preservation would have intervened. This is a case where the religious freedom guarantees of the First Amendment are actually working against the interest of faithful Catholics,” Doyle said. “In other words, the state cannot step in and prevent Church leaders from destroying the spiritual and cultural patrimony of Boston’s Catholics.” O’Malley’s decision to close Holy Trinity and St. Casimir’s came during the same week that the archdiocese announced its Caritas Christi network of six regional Catholic hospitals will now be administere d by a lay board, independent of the archdiocese and answerable to the attorney general of the Commonwealth, Martha Coakley, who had demanded this change. According to press reports, the archdiocese can still intervene in matters of Catholic identity, provided it files written notice ahead of time, with the public charities division of the attorney general’s office, which is dominated by pro-aborts. “Coakley is pro-abortion fanatic who wants to ensure that the hospitals all comply with the new law in Massachusetts requiring all medical facilities to dispense abortifacient so-called emergency contraception,” said Doyle. Doyle added that this “ is the medical equivalent of the Land O’ Lakes decision, which transferred colleges and universities owned or governed by religious orders to lay trustees.”

All contents © Copyright 2008 The Wanderer Press

[Gondring]

Link? Paragraph breaks?

[Clemenza]

It never made sense to keep these huge old Churches that are now in communities where you can count the Catholics on one hand. Of course, there are always the 10 people who drive in from the suburbs to worship at "their parish" yet expect the diocese to continue to financially support what is in effect no longer a viable parish.

[max americana]

I hope this is NOT due to the molestation case that cost O Malley’s diocese MILLIONS to the victims.

[Salvation]

Pparagraphs please.

[bboop]

Yes, paragraphs. I am out of breath ...