The fight over the fate of Boston’s Indult parish may be coming to a head. The Archdiocese has scheduled a meeting with parishioners for this coming Sunday, March 25.
The Rev. Mark O’Connell, an Archdiocesan Canon lawyer appointed to consult Holy Trinity parishioners about the closing of the church who will run the meeting, told the South End News in an email, “The purpose of the meeting is to report on the feedback I have received and to present the next step of the process.” O’Connell declined by email to comment further, but he did say that no closing date for the church has been set.
Holy Trinity was among the 67 parishes that the archdiocese announced would be closing during reconfiguration. The parish is historically German, but also includes the Tridentine Mass community, which has folks who travel from all over the region every Sunday, as well as several charitable agencies that serve the needy in downtown Boston. A closing date was put off in 2005.
O’Connell first met with the parish last November when he told them that the Indult community would be moved to a parish previously slated for closure in Newton, which is more centrally located in the archdiocese. The German parishioners would get a chaplain and were expected to be moved to the nearby cathedral and the charities would also receive relocation assistance as necessary.
The folks at Holy Trinity didn’t like the plan, mainly because it assumed that the different elements of parish life—the culturally German parishioners and the Tridentine Mass community—were essentially separable and could be split up with no problem. However, the parishioners have maintained from the beginning that though their liturgical lives may be separate, they are one parish community. Would that more parishes had the same unity. That is admirable.
I’ll be curious to see what further solutions the archdiocese has come up with to accommodate them.
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