Church closures may alter city's rhythm
Boston Archdiocese wants to sell off as many as 80 parishes, in a city with deep church-neighborhood roots.
On paper, in the stark world of timetables and statistics, the Rev. Robert Kennedy knows his parish looks like a shell of its former self.
A diadem of beige brick and limestone, the soaring two-level church of St. Mary's Star of the Sea needs $3 million in maintenance. The school across the street and the rectory next door, circled overhead by a phalanx of lunging seagulls, are modest and in quiet disrepair.
But in this heavily Irish and Italian neighborhood, where cultural life has revolved around the parish for more than a century, he sees more important considerations than bleak finances.
"It is the lived experience of this place that needs to be preserved," says Father Kennedy, an intellectual and raconteur.
Like Kennedy, scores of parishioners and priests in the Boston Archdiocese are bracing for one of the biggest downsizings since the Catholic church was first established here in 1788.
Faced with dwindling finances and dwindling numbers of people in the pews, recently installed Archbishop Sean O'Malley wants to sell off as much as 20 percent of the archdiocese's 400 parishes as part of an urgent restructuring.
Archbishop O'Malley has called on clusters of parishes to recommend Monday which among them should close. St. Mary's is one of the names on the list.
A reduction of this many churches and schools from what is arguably one of Boston's most influential institutions, in one of the nation's most Catholic regions, would likely have a resounding effect on the social and cultural life of the city - and carry larger symbolic overtones.
For more than a century, Boston's parishes have shaped the rhythm of neighborhood life, dictating everything from where children go to school to the route families take to walk their dogs.
"Parishes served as anchors for the neighborhood," says James O'Toole, a history professor at Boston College. "In some neighborhoods today, if you ask someone where they are from, they won't say 'Dorchester,' they'll say 'I live in St. Mark's, or St. Brendan.' "
Situated a few blocks from the ocean, St. Mary's was built in 1910 to accommodate waves of Irish Catholic immigrants who sailed to East Boston from Nova Scotia. The parish was a sanctuary for the families of thousands of roustabouts, salts, and swabs who made their living fitting and unloading rigs in the city's harbor.
In the first half of the 20th century, the average urban parish was a locus of the social and economic life of Boston's neighborhoods as families went there seeking worship, education, social services, and friendship.
"At one point when I was a boy, I knew every house and everyone in the neighborhood because of how close knit the parish was," says Jim Donovan, who was baptized at St. Mary's 83 years ago.
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