The Archdiocese of Boston has made a deal with a closing parish in East Boston to prevent another sit-in.
Essentially, the parish, Our Lday of Mount Carmel, will still be supressed as of this weekend, but the welcoming parish, Sacred Heart, will still have a Mass everyday in the old parish’s convent while closing and selling off one of its own buildings. That shows real sacrifice on the part of the welcoming parish, with a heart toward preventing dissension and division. They could have said, “We’ve got ours still and we’ll just wait until they get tired of fighting and surrender.” Instead, they took up the cross, made a sacrifice of their own, and worked out a solution without having it imposed from outside. That’s a model for how these things should work.
Of course, the Boston Globe has to make the archdiocese the bad guy anyway. He says that many of the Mount Carmel parishioners are elderly and thus didn’t really want to stage a sit-in, so they agreed in a face-saving gesture, not because it was a good deal.
The interesting thing is that the very conditions that allowed this deal to take place are the same conditions that dictated one of the two parishes should close: Mount Carmel’s congregation is mainly elderly; it has relatively few parishioners; and the parishes are so close together that the building swap is easily accomplished.
