Easter at St. Brendan's

 

St. Brendan’s is a magnificent old Catholic church that was opened in the Dorchester area of Boston in 1933, during the worst part of the Great Depression. Like Old St. Pat’s church in Chicago, the majority of the parishioners were immigrants from Ireland.

Noreen Kelley always sat in the same pew for Sunday Mass at St. Brendan, halfway up the church, on the right side.

It’s where her mother, Rosemary O’Brien, always sat. It’s where her grandmother, Nonie Sullivan, always sat.

Noreen Kelley’s grandmother was a longtime parishioner at the church that opened in 1933, at the height of the Depression. Her mother was in the first graduating class at St. Brendan church.

They will probably be the last. St. Brendan, one of the great Catholic churches of Dorchester, has been designated by its pastor for so-called relegation, which sounds more like the fate of an underperforming soccer team than a neighborhood institution that means so much to so many.

The church’s future now lies in the hands of Boston’s archbishop, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, but the current pastor, the Rev. Chris Palladino, has recommended the church be closed, citing declining attendance and $1.6 million in repairs needed over the next 18 months. Whatever Cardinal O’Malley decides, Father Palladino said there will be no more services after May 31. Her three daughters became the fourth generation of their family to worship at St. Brendan Church.

In 2018, St. Brendan was merged with St. Ann’s, a mile away in Neponset, to form the new parish of St. Martin de Porres. Father Palladino says St. Ann’s can easily accommodate those who now attend Mass at St. Brendan.

But parishioners like Kelley say talking about St. Brendan as if it is nothing more than a building fails to appreciate that it has its own distinct history and culture, that families measure their lives and every signature stage in those lives — birth, marriage, death — wrapped in the comforting arms of a space and a spirituality that can’t simply be moved like furniture.

This year, for the first time in her life, Noreen Kelley will be unable to attend Easter Sunday services at St. Brendan’s.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/04/11/metro/sins-father-geoghan/

 Kelley believes the beginning of the end of St. Brendan began 20 years ago, when the Archdiocese was roiled by the massive coverup of sexual abuse of minors by priests. In the 20 years that followed, she said, St. Brendan has had a dozen pastors, with needed maintenance not deferred so much as ignored.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Archdiocese_of_Boston_sex_abuse_scandal

No man was more scandalous and evil than the predator posing as a priest named John Geoghan. Geoghan was the poster boy for the sexual abuse scandal that rocked the Archdiocese. St. Brendan, where he served three years in the early 1980s, was merely one of his myriad postings, as he was moved around by bishops more concerned with protecting the church’s reputation than protecting the bodies and souls of the young people he raped.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Boston sex abuse scandal was part of a series of Catholic Church sexual abuse cases in the United States that revealed widespread crimes in the American Roman Catholic Church. In early 2002, The Boston Globe published results of an investigation that led to the criminal prosecutions of five Roman Catholic priests and thrust the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy into the national spotlight. Another accused priest who was involved in the Spotlight scandal also pleaded guilty. The Globe's coverage encouraged other victims to come forward with allegations of abuse, resulting in numerous lawsuits and more criminal cases.

 John Geoghan (1935–2003) was accused of sexual abuse involving more than 130 children. Charges were brought in Cambridge, Massachusetts alleging molestation that took place in 1991. Geoghan was laicized in 1998. In January 2002, Geoghan was found guilty of indecent assault and battery for grabbing the buttocks of a ten-year-old boy in a swimming pool at the Waltham Boys and Girls Club in 1991, and was sentenced to nine to ten years in prison.

The trial included testimony by the victim. Dr. Edward Messner, a psychiatrist who treated Geoghan for his sexual fantasies about children from 1994 to 1996 also testified, as did Archbishop Alfred C. Hughes, who testified that he banned Geoghan from the swimming club after a complaint that he had been proselytizing and had engaged in prurient conversations.

After initially agreeing to and then withdrawing a $30 million settlement with 86 of Geoghan's victims, the Boston archdiocese settled with them for $10 million, and is still negotiating with lawyers for other victims. The most recent settlement proposed is $65 million for 542 victims. The settlements are being offered in response to evidence that the archdiocese had transferred Geoghan from parish to parish despite warnings of his behavior. Evidence also arose that the archdiocese displayed a pattern of transferring other priests to new parishes when allegations of sexual abuse were made.

Geoghan was charged in two other cases in Boston's Suffolk County. One case was dropped without prejudice when the victim decided not to testify. In the second case, two rape charges were dismissed by a judge after hotly contested arguments because the statute of limitations had expired. The Commonwealth's appeal of that ruling was active at the time of Geoghan's death, and remaining charges of indecent assault in that case were pending.

On August 23, 2003, while in protective custody at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, Massachusetts, Geoghan was strangled and stomped to death in his cell by Joseph Druce, a self-described white supremacist serving a sentence of life without possibility of parole for killing a man who allegedly made a sexual advance after picking up Druce while he was hitchhiking. An autopsy revealed the cause of death to be "ligature strangulation and blunt chest trauma." There have been questions raised about the advisability of placing these two men on the same unit, as prison officials had been warned by another inmate that Druce was planning to assault Geoghan.

Because of molestation claims, at least 325 of America's 46,000 priests were removed from duty or resigned in the year following the Geoghan case. Cardinal Bernard Law resigned as Boston archbishop in December, giving up his post as spiritual leader to 2.1 million Catholics because of his mishandling of abuse cases.

Cardinal Law was not the only archbishop who covered up the sexual abuse committed by priests.

According to the National Catholic Reporter, the abuse scandal has cost the Catholic Church close to $4 billion. In addition, separate research recently published calculates that other scandal-related consequences such as lost membership and diverted giving has cost the church more than $2.3 billion annually for the past 30 years.

https://www.ncronline.org/news/accountability/ncr-research-costs-sex-abuse-crisis-us-church-underestimated

Over the last 14 years, 19 Catholic dioceses and religious orders in the United States have filed for bankruptcy protection because of the clergy sexual abuse crisis, according to the watchdog group Bishopsaccountability.org.

The Diocese of Tucson was one of the first to file, and it settled for $22 million in 2004.

I grew up in the Twin Cities, which was not immune for the sexual abuse scandals. The Archdiocese filed for bankruptcy in 2015, after agreeing to pay $210 million to 400 victims.

Even today, cases are still pending for 5 more dioceses.

https://www.ncronline.org/news/accountability/catholic-dioceses-and-orders-filed-bankruptcy-and-other-major-settlements

 

Attendance at Catholic churches has been declining for years. In the United States, 38% of the Catholic population attends mass on a regular basis, and it is much less than that in European counties.

https://comparecamp.com/church-attendance-statistics/

In France (where only 12% of the Catholics attend mass regularly) any church built before 1905 is actually owned by France, rather than the archdiocese of Paris.

 The archdiocese of Paris could not afford to cover the estimated $1 billion that will be needed to rebuild Notre Dame Cathedral – but is makes sense for France itself to pay for it because it is a symbol of the country itself, since it is the most visited destination in the entire world.

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2019/04/we-are-all-french_19.html

So, what will happened to St. Brendan’s?

As developers gobbled up churches in downtown Washington in 2013, the Rev. Amy Butler had a realization. Institutional Christianity, she believed, was unlikely to revive itself after decades of declining membership.

 Butler later learned that religious institutions in the United States were valued at $1.2 trillion. And she met a man who was distributing money to anyone he perceived to be working for some kind of community healing.

 Those experiences prompted a lightbulb moment for Butler. Why couldn’t money left in the coffers of dying churches be repurposed to fuel projects aimed at doing good in the world? Years later, Butler has brought her idea to life through Invested Faith, a fund established to receive assets from closing houses of worship and disburse them to entrepreneurs motivated by faith and focused on social justice.

 Now the pastor of National City Christian Church in Washington, Butler knows that some see accepting the closure of churches as akin to giving up on institutions that mean a lot to many. But she rejects that framing, reminding skeptics that belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead lies at the heart of Christianity. “We don’t need to be afraid of death,” Butler said. “We’re people who believe that after death is resurrection.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/04/15/amy-butler-invested-faith-dying-churches/

There’s a possibility that St. Brendan’s will be sold to developers and torn down, making room for new offices or condominiums.

In Europe, old churches have been re-purposed as libraries or gymnasium s or restaurants – and dozens of other uses.

 https://www.dw.com/en/repurposed-churches/av-17136647#:~:text=Repurposed%20Churches%20As%20congregations%20in%20Europe%20see%20their,converted%20into%20luxury%20hotels%2C%20private%20homes%2C%20or%20restaurants.

Noreen Kelley will likely regret the death of St. Brendan’s, but in the greater scheme of things, it is a blessing in disguise.

On the day that we celebrate life after death, what could be more fitting than to see the church being repurposed as something else that is more relevant to the current needs of the community it served?