CATHOLIC ACTION LEAGUE MOURNS CLOSING OF HOLY TRINITY CHURCH

Basically, when a Diocese is in the trouble that Boston is in, you try to save larger parishes first, and itty-bitty parishes such Holy Trinity (German) might have to be sacrificed...

Remember that Jesus had lived a life of poverty -- during his public years, he never had a roof over his head.

He was more concerned with his flock than building temples in Jerusalem...

http://www.holytrinitygerman.org/Schedule.html

Please read this and the previous discussion.

A serial "Going Out of Business Sale," I submit, is not being a Good Shepherd to anyone. The Archdiocese of Boston is in the process of literally abandoning the inner-city parishes of Boston, Lowell, Lawrence and Brockton. When the Re-evangelization that Rome speaks about kicks-in, where will the infrastructure be for the Church to regain more than its current toehold? Look, the vast majority of Catholics in the Archdiocese of Boston are nominal, at best. Many left the active practice of the faith decades ago over what they saw was a disastrous watering-down of both the Faith itself and its liturgy. The sexual abuse scandal - and Boston is its hub! - drove many others away, disgusted by the palpable set of hypocricies, and the closures, that were largely driven by the abuse scandal fallout, sealed the deal. If the Cardinal and the rest were serious about being models of the Good Shepherd, they would have been doing far more to inculcate orthodoxy and orhtopraxis among the laity, would have ensured proper theological and pastoral training for a whole "Lost Generation" of priests here, would have simultaneously rooted out the ever-growing Lavender Mafia from the seminaries, would have made the glaring disconnect between what the Faith teaches and what certain prominent local "Catholic politicians" are allowed to practice and facilitate a non-starter, would have nipped the sexual predators among the priestly ranks in the bud 30+ years ago...etc. and so forth.

That they did none of these things, or, at best, did them half-heartedly in a way that any half-asleep layman could see was an exercise in "mailing it in," speaks volumes concerning the issue of diminishing attendance in many churches here. As it is, Holy Trinity had been growing (slowly, to be sure, but growing, nevertheless)every year from the mid-1990s, thru the onset of the abuse scandal, and right up to the point where we were first slated to be closed. With a little help from the higher-ups, the TLM alone could have staved-off HTs closure, especially if either the FSSP or ICKSP had been allowed in. But, as I said in another post, the success of the TLM (and, by extension, Holy Trinity Church) was most unpolitic, and had to be countered.

We Catholics belong to the same Church that sent Saint Boniface out among the pagan germanic tribes, with an expectation of his success. Nowadays, our bishops are too afraid to even attempt to re-evangelize their own, merely lapsed flock, who surely cannot be as openly hostile to the Faith as the germanic tribes Boniface dealt with were initially. These "pastors of souls" have quit the field before they even get in sight of it! This is most certainly true here in Boston, and is true enough in whole swaths of the Western Church. The exceptions are few and far between.

Bottom line: we would not have "attendance problems" at Holy Trinity or elsewhere had the bishops and priests been doing their God-appointed jobs all along. We would not have such problems if they saw their work as a "vocation" rather than as a mere "career." We would not have these problems if the teaching orders of nuns were not allowed to become heretical and apostate, thereby infecting whole generations of nominal Catholics with similar mindsets. Do the laity have a responsibility to see to their own proper catechesis? Certainly. But their responsibility is mitigated when a second (and now a third) generation comes along without (generally speaking) even an awareness of their deficiencies, and they can be somewhat excused when only one in six of them condescends to go to Sunday Mass here. They don't know any better. As for Holy Trinity, the attendance didn't drop off all that sharply even after the announced intent to close (though the donations did, I grant), and the 250-300 people forcibly moved to Newton in 2007 nearly all continued going to the Mass there. They hung in there, and did not wander off in a huff or join some schismatic group. In spite of everything. And now, the church they attended for 17 years (since the Indult was granted to HT in 1990) is closing "because no one goes to it."

Holy Trinity has great local and national significance for its history and its musical and architectural heritage. This significance is ongoing. Old North Church, on the other hand, has a national notoriety and significance because of events that took place there on just one evening, specifically, the evening of April 18-19, 1775. Yet, could you imagine the outcry if anyone in the Congregational Church (or whatever it's affiliated with these days) decided to close it down? Why, even the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston would be appalled!

Pastoral solicitude for an “itty-bitty parish” is analogous to the man who leaves ninety-nine sheep to save one. Our Lord’s pastoral logic flies in the face of modern day asset management. Does it not? Unfortunately, all too many dioceses are being administered by hirelings...and the hireling flieth.

Matthew 10:13
13 And the hireling flieth, because he is a hireling: and he hath no care for the sheep.

Matthew 18:12-13
12 What think you? If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them should go astray: doth he not leave the ninety-nine in the mountains, and go to seek that which is gone astray? 13 And if it so be that he find it: Amen I say to you, he rejoiceth more for that, than for the ninety-nine that went not astray.

BTW, we DID have two Masses, right up till last Sunday. Masstimes.org apparently hadn’t been updated since the TLM was forced to leave Holy Trinity in April 2007. When the TLM was allowed to return last February, it was given a Mass time of 9 AM, the German/English Mass was moved to 11 AM.

Thanks for the link!

The Archdiocese had to find a way to pay the Cleary Abuse victims.

If closing a very small parish does this, then I consider that to be good.

People from this parish may have to transfer to another parish...

Cardinal O'Malley inherited a mess from Cardinal Law...

And he might make mistakes when trying to clean up the mess, but he still deserves the support of Catholics of Boston.

Unless there are those who wish to form a schism in the Church and go the route of SSPX...

My former parish in Atlanta only had 7 masses on Sunday, with one in Spanish and one in Portugese.

I imagine it had over $20k from offerings on Sunday.

The Cathedral for the Archdiocese of Atlanta also has 7 masses on Sunday -- one in Spanish.

Now the Archdiocese of Atlanta is a very healthy diocese compared to a liberal Northeastern diocese like Boston.

Boston is going to have problems as long as the local Catholics think they are better than the Cardinal and go around criticizing the Cardinal and the actions of the Archdicoese.

I can of feel like groups like Call to Action are rejoicing in threads like this.

In the Gospel of Matthew, the sheep are representative of souls, not Churches.

Jesus did not say that if He had 100 stones and one of his stones was missing, he would leave the 99 stones and search for the stone that is lost.

A church is building -- not a living thing. It is possible, though difficult for parishoners to go to other parishes.

It is an unfortunate situation -- I admit that.

But if the faith of these parishoners are shattered because the Archdiocese is closing their parish due to financial hardship, then they have weak or little faith.

The movie Lilies of the Field tries to depict what some people have had to endure due to hardships in believing in the Catholic faith but not having a real Church to worship in. There are people in other countries that suffer real hardship because of religious oppression (Iraq, China, Vietnam, Sudan, etc. to name a few).

This is more a Call to Action type topic than a conservative Catholic topic.

The

pastoral way to pay for the settlements would be to do something like the following:

Step 1: Then-archbishop O'Malley buys 10 minutes of simultaneous air time on all local TV outlets, paying a premium to take up the end of their 6 PM news slots (this type of time-blocking has been done around here many times by pols before an election).

Step 2: On the simulcast he has just paid for, the archbishop, in simple Franciscan habit, flings ashes on his head from the pile he is sitting on, begging the forgiveness of his flock while promising (under an oath he has just taken on the Bible) the following:

A) ALL priests found guilty of sexual abuse of minors will be dismissed from the clerical state forthwith.

B) ALL priests will be obliged to live up to their promise of celibacy, including those involved in "consentual relationships with adults. From this date, all of these adult relationships will cease; any further continuances will result in a dismissal from the clerical state.

C) The seminaries will be purged of their homosexual occupants, both among the faculty and among the seminarians. Policies will be put in place to ensure that the archbishop has a hands-on ability to see to it that these corruptors do not infiltrate again.

D) The seminaries will also be purged of heterodox teachers and teachings (this will largely overlap the purge of homosexuals, but not entirely overlap them). Seminarians and priests of the archdiocese will begin a "review" of proper Catholic theology. Liturgies will be mandated to follow the missal. Failures in this regard will be dealt with personally by the archbishop. Preaching will be coherent and related to the readings, remedial help will be given to those priests and deacons found deficient in this area. Reports on progress will be public record. With this loud, public commitment to Catholic orthodoxy and orthopraxis, the archbishop is overtly wooing back those disaffected by the institutionalized laxity in theology and practice that has infected the archdiocese for well over 30 years.

E) In a related effort, ALL parish CCD programs and parochial school religion courses will be stopped immediately. The content, universally guaranteed to be dreck-filled, will be replaced by one or another of the several "sound" CCD text series out there (Ignatius, for example). DREs and other teachers will be obliged to demonstrate competency in theaching the authentic Catholic Faith; heterodox agendas will NOT be tolerated. The archbishop will take-on personal responsibility for oversight in this matter.

F) The archbishop will make clear that the settlements will be paid for by a combination of the insurance money and the proceeds from the sales of several pieces of archdiocesan property (sold for a total of well over $100,000,000). NOT ONE PENNY of the settlements needs to come from the closure and sale of churches, and not one church will close on this basis alone. Between the two sources named above, there is more than enough to pay-out all of the existing claims. If there is a future need to settle more claims, then, before the Church uses even one church as a cash-cow, it will begin selling off the over one thousand pieces of property it holds that do not affect parishes.

G) The archbishop will mandate that all archdiocesan clergy, beginning with himself, will personally visit with every single Catholic family (or at least attempt to) in the archdiocese, imploring them, on a one-to-one basis, to consider the contrition of the Church about certain recent events, and its resolve to remedy them. Sexual, catechetical, theological, liturgical, etc.

H) The archbishop will then continue to heap the ashes on his head, and make one last, plaintive appeal to Catholics to "come home," promising, under his aforementioned oath, to make things right for them. In other words, he will swear to do the job he was consecrated for. -30-

If the then-Archbishop O'Malley had done these things when it was opportune, I strongly suspect he would not have had to even consider closing one single church. Even now, if he implemented the actions noted above, and promised no more church closures, he would go a LONG way to restoring the number of faithful attending Mass and other Church functions each week, and thereby solve his real and imagined financial problems.

Will he do this, or even anything slightly bearing resemblance to this? Almost certainly not! This kind of thing is too hard, and might not generate a cash flow as quickly as selling-off the patrimony, infrastructure and sweat-equity accumulated by many generations of Catholics here! No! Better to destroy that patrimony, abandon the inner-cities, and further alienate the 360,000 remaining Catholics (out of 2.3 million nominal catholics) who have heretofore hung in there in the maelstrom known as the Archdiocese of Boston! Sure! That's the ticket!

Look, you don't live here. You don't know the MESS that the AoB is and has been for at least a generation. You have no idea of the anger, hurt and sense of betrayal that PERMEATES this area. Even among - and ESPECIALLY among - long-suffering orthodox Catholics who have seen their heritage destroyed and the salvation of many thousands of souls seriously imperilled by the misfeasance and malfeasance of those in power here.

Don't condescend to us about the "regretability" of "having" to close "some churches"! They don't HAVE to close ANY! The settlements are more than paid for by the insurance and the BC sales alone. These guys are selling off churches and schools to create a safety net for "The End" of the Church here in Boston, which looms on the horizon precisely because these guys would rather sell-off EVRERYTHING than try to reclaim the hearts and minds of the erstwhile faithful. All they are good at is alienating the people who have hung-on all this time to now. They will NEVER get back into the fold ANY of the folks who have left over theology, liturgy, sexual abuse or the existing church closures. NEVER!!! Only a remnant of us will remain, and that is only because we trust in Christ enough to see us through. Even then, many of us will take as much of our "business" as possible to legitimate venues outside of the diocese, to Providence, Worcester or whatever.

This place is a seething cauldron of resentment. Even among those of us who know the faith reasonably well, and can see - to some extent, at least - past all of this toward the "bigger picture." DON'T lecture us about how it's a "good thing' to close a beautiful piece of Catholic patrimony with as much historical and musical value (did I tell you that the HT organ, combined with the acoustics inherent to the building, makes for one of the best pipe organ experiences in the eastern US, according to experts?) as Holy Trinity has! It's a crime and a scandal, and I'm sure it's part of a much bigger package around here that will be something requiring an "answer" one day from the person(s) who perpetrated it.

Your comment here is well worth the read.

I may be prejudiced by some dioceses being in hard financial times -- such as the Diocese in Oregon that filed for bankruptcy.

Maybe there is a better way.

One thing is for sure -- even if Cardinal O'Malley says that a parish will be closed -- even that can be undone.

May take people taking sack cloth and ashes and lots of prayer...

But nothing is impossible with God...

South Jersey here. Our parish has been recommended closed by our bishop. We are not the only ones.

Over 30 parishes have been recommended to be closed.

We are still waiting for the decision by Rome.

It does seem that our Bishop(Galanti)has a history of closing down parishes.

Our parish has been recommended to be closed, and we had just finished paying all but 23K of a million dollar loan to build a parish hall, we always surpassed the Bishops Appeal, we have total handicapped access, and collections every week was in the 3-4 K range.

I would submit that how the movie "Bella" was handled showed how Cardinal O'Malley got an A- to B+ grade and Father Frank Pavone and PFL got a flunking grade.

Father Frank Pavone was in the credits of the movie. He also gave a retreat for the cast. He knew how important this movie was to the pro-life movement.

Yet, two months after the movie was out, he was doing a whimpy job of promoting the movie.

On the other hand, even though Boston was not a target market for the opening of the film, Cardinal O'Malley was able to help get the movie INTO THE BOSTON MARKET.

The only thing coming out of PFL was a whimpy message from Father Denis Wilde, OSA, saying that this movie needed to be in the Boston market.

Basically, PFL went around crying about things and did nothing. Cardinal O'Malley even went so far to put this on his BLOG -- about the movie coming to Boston.

If Father Frank were competent, he would have promoted this movie a month before it was scheduled to open and urged activism from pro-lifers to get this movie into more locations. Instead, it was almost Christmas time before PFL started to roll into gear.

From what I have seen, Cardinal O'Malley has done a good job -- not a great job. The mess he inherited and the attitude problem of Bostom Catholics who look for leadership more in John Kerry and Ted Kennedy -- is about 90% of his current problem.

This and the fact that many Catholics in Boston turn to PAGAN run newspapers such as the Boston Herald and the Boston Globe for Spiritual Guidance.