At Holyoke’s Mater Dolorosa Church, a Band of Parishioners Refuse to Take No for an Answer

By Suzanne Wilson
Daily Hampshire Gazette
February 11, 2012

http://www.gazettenet.com/2012/02/11/the-faithful

On Thursday, at 3 p.m., Jane Pokora, 80, and her brother, Chester Kos, 83, arrived at Mater Dolorosa Catholic Church in Holyoke for their two-hour shift.

Bundled in coats against the cold, the pair, both residents of Chicopee, settled into two side-by-side chairs in the vestibule where space heaters have been set up.

They don't go into the church itself, where the heat is kept low. "It's too cold," Pokora said.

Pokora and Kos are members of the former Mater Dolorosa parish. Now they come here once a week as part of a vigil that began last June to protest the decision by the Springfield Diocese to close the church.

The day Kos and Pokora were there marked the 225th day of the vigil, which continues 24 hours a day, seven days a week - and shows no sign of stopping.

Nearby, set out on a table near where she and her brother sat were sign-up sheets filled in for the next few days.

"I love this church," said Pokora when asked what motivated her to join the vigil. "I had my first communion here. I was married here. My children were christened here," she said.

Her brother, his rosary in his hands, began to pray.

According to news reports from last June, Mater Dolorosa was one of the churches Bishop Timothy McDonnell closed as part of a diocese plan to deal with declining numbers of parishioners, a shortage of priests, financial shortfalls and structural problems at some of its church buildings.

The decision to close Mater Dolorosa was announced in August 2009. At the time, parishioners were told that a new parish, Our Lady of the Cross, would be created by merging Mater Dolorosa with nearby Holy Cross Church.

Bishop McDonnell held the last Mass at Mater Dolorosa on June 26, which news reports described as an emotionally charged occasion at which McDonnell was confronted by protesters, one of whom called him a liar.

Instead of moving on to their new church, some parishioners began their vigil at their old church immediately afterwards.

Since then, the gulf between the diocese and the parishioners seems to have become a great divide as the dispute has wended its way through the Vatican's hierarchy and the American legal system.

"We're not interested in confrontation," said Mark Dupont, a spokesman for the Springfield diocese, in a telephone interview Friday. "They are our brothers and sisters and our heart goes out to them." But, Dupont said, "they're not interested in anything other than getting their way."

As those keeping vigil see it, the church hierarchy has been at best out of touch and at worst deceitful in dealing with the painful matter of closing a parish.

"We are the faithful," said Victor Anop of Chicopee, a lawyer and longtime parishioner who is participating in the vigil. "We are the grassroots. We're the glue the binds the whole thing together."

Back and forth

The latest chapter in the long-running back-and-forth between the two sides took place earlier this week, when a Hampden Superior Court judge dismissed a trespass suit against those keeping vigil brought by Bishop McDonnell. The judge also dismissed countersuits that had been filed by the protesters. The Feb. 3 ruling said that the dispute remains a church matter and not an issue to be decided by American civil courts.

Anop called the ruling a victory for religious freedom.

In a telephone interview Friday, Dupont said the diocese likely will appeal the ruling on the grounds that the court is denying its rights as a property owner.

The diocese owns the building, Dupont said. "There's never been a question about that."

The vigil keepers don't see it quite that way, though. In his statement hailing the decision, Anop seemed to suggest that, legal technicalities aside, the church belongs to the people who have prayed there for decades. The judge had said that church members "can continue God-given rights to pray in their church while appeals continue within church courts," Anop wrote.

Family ties

Anop, who lives in Chicopee, was at Mater Dolorosa Thursday, as he says he is just about every day.

His ties to the church go back to his grandparents' day, when the family settled in Holyoke. "I moved to the suburbs," he said, "but I always came back to this church."

Others did too, he said. Mater Dolorosa always drew Polish people, he said, from Southampton, Easthampton, Northampton, Chicopee and other communities.

Joined by two vigil supporters, Joe Borucki and Carl Zieminski, both of South Hadley, Anop led the way into the church, pointing out the soaring stained glass windows which have been there for more than a century.

The Friends of Mater Dolorosa, as the vigil supporters are called, say they're doing their best to take care of it. They've tended the grounds, pulled weeds in summer, trimmed trees, cleaned bathrooms. They had a spaghetti supper to raise money that brought in $20,000 and likely will do more, they said. And they say that about 100 people regularly come to the prayer services that are held there every Friday night.

Between 100 and 150 people have taken part in the vigil, Anop said, and the round-the-clock effort will continue while the legal machinations grind on.

Last September, several months after the vigil began, the Vatican upheld the decision of the Springfield diocese to close Mater Dolorosa. In response, the vigil organizers said they would take the Vatican's internal ruling to the Apostolic Signatura, the next higher level of appeal. They hired a law firm - Carlo Gullo in Rome - and have been sending along the paperwork, Anop said.

That's where the matter now stands, Anop said, and no one knows when the Apostolic Signatura will have something to say.

"It could be two months or two years," Anop said.

As Anop, Borucki and Zieminski talked about their cause, they zeroed in on several themes.

For openers, they said, the plans and decisions about the church's fate were made "in the back room," as one put it, in the dark, with no input from the people in the pews. They believe the diocese is out to close churches, like Mater Dolorosa, that draw heavily from certain ethnic communities. "It's a form of ethnic cleansing," Anop said.

Zieminski, a Northampton native, said he went to St. John Cantius in Northampton until that parish closed in November 2009. At first, he accepted closings as necessary, he said, but as one parish after another was lost, he said he grew increasingly dissatisfied with the reasons given. He no longer gives much credence to what gets written in church bulletins, he said: "I call them the fluff report."

Nor have protesters' financial questions ever been fully answered, they said. The powers-that-be, they said, have never really opened the books and allowed close scrutiny of how Mater Dolorosa came to be $750,000 in debt, as the diocese contends. Moreover, they say that if many parishes are in financial straits, it's because the church has had to make so many payments to victims of the ongoing clergy sex abuse scandal. It was the scandal, covered up for years and badly handled when it emerged, they said, that sapped morale and drove parishioners - and their checkbooks - away.

Then there's the steeple.

Two engineering firms hired by the diocese - Barry Engineers and Constructors Inc. of Pittsfield and Engineering Design Associates of West Springfield - determined that the building and steeple are both in need of serious work. In its report, Barry Engineers wrote that portions of the steeple have decayed and that the steeple "could be subject to failure due to forces from wind and/or seismic forces." The second firm noted that even a partial collapse could injure people and cause additional damage.

The Friends of Mater Dolorosa countered by hiring Neal Mitchell Associates of Northbridge. That firm, Anop said, concluded that the steeple was not going to fall down and needed only minor repair.

The scaffolding that's now in front of the church was ordered by the diocese, Anop said, and is nothing more than a "pretense" and "scare tactic."

Asked about those claims, Dupont said the diocese remains concerned about the steeple's structure and the safety of those inside. The reports done for diocese contained "far more detailed analysis," he said. The diocese would like to have the steeple worked on, he said, but can't as long as there are people inside. "Clearly we're the liable party," he said. "If something happens, we're on the hook for it."

Mater Dolorosa's financial problems and debt were no secret within the parish, Dupont said, and he disputed the charge that parishioners were not informed along the way.

Dupont also took issue with the notion that any parish's financial problems are linked to the abuse scandal. Payments were made out of insurance policies, he said, not out of parish accounts. To say otherwise is "a false argument, absolutely, positively false and terribly disrespectful of the victims. They've suffered enough."

Dupont said the diocese doesn't begrudge any parish the right to protest a church closing and to appeal the decisions, as has happened at other places, including St. Mary of the Assumption in Northampton. But the dispute in Holyoke "is dividing families" and causing deeper damage, he said.

Dupont said his sense is that most of Mater Dolorosa's parishioners, especially those with young families, have long since moved on to other churches.

What's driving those who have chosen to stay behind is "emotions, plain and simple," he said. It's true that attachments to a parish church are deep, powerful and strong, he said. "We understand that."

At the end of the day, Dupont said, a church building "is an instrument to assist us in our faith journey. The church itself is not our faith. It's not about bricks and mortar."

But to Chester Kos and Jane Pokora, bricks and mortar matter a lot. They'll be back to sit vigil at Mater Dolorosa whenever they're needed, Pokora said.

"We're fearful that they want to demolish it."

Suzanne Wilson can be reached at swilson@gazettenet.com