A sit-in at a not-closing parish has ended and that’s big news? I guess anything chance to bring up the dissension in the ranks of the Catholic Church is news for the Boston Globe.
For the record, the people of St. Bernard’s parish in Newton, which was given a year to figure out how to merge with nearby Corpus Christi parish after its closing order was suspended, have decided to stop their sit-in protest after a meeting with Archbishop O’Malley. It looks like the archbishop’s news strategy is to personally sit down with each of the protesting parishes and talk with them. It’s interesting how that simple act is disarming a lot of the critics.
It’s not like I haven’t been saying all along that one of the archdiocese’s biggest screw-ups in the whole process has been the lack of communication. Right the beginning there wasn’t enough communication with the archdiocese telling parish clusters to decide which ones to close without providing clear direction on how to do that. And it went downhill from there.
Now St. Bernard’s is staying open and not just for Sunday Masses as originally planned. They are re-starting CCD, weekday Masses, sick visitations, and all the other stuff that makes up the life of the parish. It is an open-ended question whether people who have already moved to another parish will return. I think some people are just sick of the uncertainty and waiting and want to move on. I don’t blame them.
