MASSACHUSETTS
The New York Times
By JESS BIDGOOD
JULY 9, 2015
SCITUATE, Mass. — It was a bright Sunday morning at St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, and the building’s stained glass windows cast a jewel-colored glow over the service. An elegant 81-year-old woman led a few dozen congregants in Catholic prayer. A single flutist accompanied the hymns.
But there was no priest. The parishioners were not, in fact, supposed to be there. And there is nothing the Archdiocese of Boston would like more than for them to get out.
“We,” Jon Rogers, one of the organizers, said with some frustration, “are disobedient Catholics.”
The parishioners here gather every Sunday for acts of communion and epic resistance. The building is deconsecrated. The parish was, like dozens of others in the region, slated to close in 2004, but some of its members, who call themselves Friends of St. Frances X. Cabrini, have kept it open by keeping at least one member inside the church at all times — a dogged effort called a vigil.
Wielding baked goods, detailed sign-up sheets and fierce devotion, they have frustrated the powerful Archdiocese of Boston, of which they are a part, and officials there have taken their own parishioners to court to get them out. In the coming months, the two parties will meet again in court for the parishioners’ appeal. The petitioners filed their brief in a Massachusetts appeals court this week.
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