MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Globe
By Hattie Bernstein | GLOBE CORRESPONDENT JUNE 22, 2014
On the Sunday before Memorial Day, the Rev. Brian F. Manning stood on the landing outside St. Mary Catholic Church in Franklin watching families hurry across the busy street and up the flight of granite steps, on their way to the 10:30 a.m. Mass.
“In American culture, people don’t run on time. There’s so much traffic, so many obligations. They’re doing the best they can,” said the pastor, not a trace of disdain in his voice.
It wasn’t like this in the 1950s when the priest was growing up in the Sacred Heart parish in Roslindale. In those days, 10 Masses were held on a Sunday, and rarely did you see anyone rushing into the church at the last minute, or the pastor, poised like God’s crossing guard, at the front door.
But on this day, people spill into the pews in the 900-seat church moments before the Rev. John Sullivan begins the service. …
The kind of attendance at St. Mary is rare in churches in the Boston Archdiocese, which in response to declining Mass attendance, a shortage of priests, and a corresponding drop in collections has closed and sold church properties, and consolidated parishes across the region in recent years.
For more than a decade a drumbeat of bad news about the church, including reports on sexual abuse by priests, has diminished the number of local Catholics active in their faith.
St. Mary has not been immune to the troubles.
In 2002, the Globe reported allegations that the Rev. Anthony J. Rebeiro had sexually abused a woman while a priest at St. Mary in 1983. The woman’s husband said he was rebuffed by the pastor at the time, a regional bishop, and then-archbishop Bernard Law when he complained in 1984 about the abuse. But the archdiocese paid for psychotherapy for the woman in 1994, according to the Globe.
Rebeiro was placed on administrative leave in 2002 after a report that he had molested a child at another parish in the 1970s, the Globe reported. He has denied all allegations.
“He remains on administrative leave and is not in ministry,” archdiocesan spokesman Terry Donilon said last week.
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