Bruised, Hurting and Dirty

By Arthur McCaffrey
MetroWest Daily News
May 11, 2014

http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/article/20140511/OPINION/140519579/2011/OPINION?refresh=true

We don't wear a stiff white collar, or dress up in fancy robes. We don't drink expensive whisky and smoke cigars. We don't fly the expensive seats to Rome. We are not obsessed with sexuality, and, for the most part, lead healthy, balanced lives. By geography, occupation, socioeconomic status, we are a diverse group in Massachusetts: from Lowell, Lawrence, Everett, and East Boston, to Quincy, Scituate, Wellesley, and Framingham, we are plumbers, landscapers, teachers, lawyers, doctors, academics.

Who are we? We are the accidental activists, parishioners of Vigil Parishes all around the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston (RCAB), like our own local parish, St. James in Wellesley. When ill-conceived diocesan policies threatened our religious patrimony and rich heritage of faith in 2004, we were forced to reconfigure our traditionally passive roles inside the Church. Long before there was Occupy Boston, we have been occupying our local churches for the last 10 years in vigils of protest against the misguided efforts of Cardinal O'Malley to close us. Our grass roots resistance movement is the first of its kind in the 200-year history of the diocese. You couldn't find a less radical group of populist activists - we are middle-aged and elderly, predominantly women, with very few youth in our midst. When a criminal Church lost it moral authority, it lost a whole generation of young people for whom Rome no longer has credibility. When we go, we leave empty pews behind us.

So who are we and what are we up to? We are the Pope's dirty dozen! In his recent, first apostolic document ("Joy of the Gospels"), Pope Francis said that he prefers ".... a church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security." Well, we've been there, done that; not so much doing missionary work to spread the good news of the gospels out in the world as leading by example, through actively bearing witness to our faith and foundational beliefs by maintaining an evangelizing presence inside our threatened parishes. A visiting Jesuit called our vigiling a "charism of the Holy Spirit". The public witness we began in Boston in 2004 has now spread around the country. A Fordham professor has even written a book about us.

We have been fighting bruising battles with RCAB and the Vatican as we have pursued a lengthy, expensive appeals process to reverse the Cardinal's closure decisions. We have been hurting from the spiritual wounds inflicted on our deep faith and love of parish. And we have gotten down and dirty in the streets to make our voices heard and the justice of our cause proclaimed. We have held services in the street outside closed churches - Sacred Heart in Natick, Star of the Sea in Quincy, Our Lady of Mt Carmel in East Boston. Or we have filled buses to attend a Massachusetts District Court in downtown Boston, where we packed the courtroom to hear our civil suit against the Archdiocese (and had an "aha" moment, when we saw the diocesan lawyers dressed in very sharp, very expensive, 3-piece suits - "so that's where our Sunday collections go", we thought.) We lost the local, civil battles, but continue our fight for our rights under Canon Law in Rome, where we are represented in our appeals all the way up to the Vatican Supreme Court by a couple of Roman avvocati who have to be paid in Euros. Thanks to our resident Italian parishioner, Teresa, we get regular updates in Italian on the progress of our appeals. While our activism may be accidental, the sophistication of our operations is, well, inspired.

So who are we to take on the might and power of the local Chancery and the Vatican? Well, in "Joy of the Gospels," Pope Francis calls us Catholic laypeople who "..... are, put simply, the vast majority of the people of God. The minority - ordained ministers - are at their service."

So who are we? We are the church, the people of God, the salt of the earth, people of great faith who don't mind the hurt and the bruising and the dirty politics of opposing unjust treatment at the hands of an unhealthy institution trying, vainly, to cling to its own security. As we metamorphosed from passivity into activism, we quickly learned to draw strength from one another. Solidarity trumps suffering every time.

Who are we? Simply the people of God, waiting for our servants to minister unto us.

Arthur McCaffrey is a parishioner of St. James of Wellesley.