Archdiocese Won't Say Whether Former Quincy Church Has Buyer
By Patrick Ronan
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston has taken the closed Star of the Sea church in Squantum off its list of properties for sale, leading former parishioners to assume the building has a buyer. However, the archdiocese won’t say whether the 58-year-old building, which hosted its final Mass in 2011, is on the verge of being sold. “We generally do not comment on the sale of property until such time as we have closed,” Terrence Donilon, an archdiocese spokesman, said Thursday. Meanwhile, in recent weeks the archdiocese has removed the former church’s stained glass windows and crews have been testing the soil at the Bellevue Road property, according to neighbors. “The archdiocese isn’t telling anyone anything,” said Maureen Mazrimas, co-chair of Friends of Star of the Sea, a group of former parishioners who want to keep the property open as a place of worship. But the archdiocese has said the Star of the Sea church building and rectory can’t be used for religious purposes, considering they were relegated to “profane use” in 2011. For this reason, the archdiocese rejected a Squantum developer’s proposal last fall to build housing at the site while retaining the chapel as worship space. The Star of the Sea properties are in a Residence A zoning district, meaning they can only be used for single-family use unless the owner gets a variance from the city. In 2004, Star of the Sea was among 82 churches shut down as part of the Boston archdiocese’s reorganization plan to try to shrink its growing debt amidst a shrinking congregation hurt by the clergy sex abuse scandal. Friends of Star of the Sea tried to reopen the church, but their appeals were rejected by Vatican courts. Following a nine-month closure, the group’s appeals managed to temporarily reopen Star of Sea for limited service in 2005. The final Mass was held in September 2011. The church closures in 2004 also included St. Frances X. Cabrini Church in Scituate, where former parishioners have been keeping an around-the-clock vigil at the church for more than a decade. Next month, a Norfolk County Superior Court judge will preside over a trial to decide whether the parishioners must leave the Scituate church. Mazrimas said Squantum’s former parishioners have accepted that Star of the Sea won’t reopen as a Catholic church, but she said the site should be preserved as a place of worship. “I haven’t moved on with the fact that most of my church experiences over the past 40 years happened in that church,” Mazrimas said. “My daughter was married in that church. My children received all of their sacraments there.” Mazrimas said what’s especially frustrating about the archdiocese’s actions is that it was a group of Squantum Catholics who started the parish in the 1920s, built the first church, gave it to the archdiocese, and then funded construction of a new church in the 1950s. And in return, Mazrimas said Squantum’s Catholics have been left in the dark as the archdiocese moves to sell the church. “Going back 10 years to 2004, nobody from the archdiocese ever came to us and said ‘this is what we’re going to do,’” she said.
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