No Closure: Catholic Practice and Boston’s Parish Shutdowns

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Description

In 2004 the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston announced plans to close or merge more than eighty parish churches. Scores of Catholics―28,000, by the archdiocese’s count―would be asked to leave their parishes. The closures came just two years after the first major revelations of clergy sexual abuse and its cover up. Wounds from this profound betrayal of believe had not healed.

In the months that followed, distraught parishioners occupied a couple of churches in opposition to the closure decrees. Why did these accidental activists face up to the parish closures, and what do their actions and reactions let us know about brand new American Catholicism? Drawing on extensive fieldwork and with careful attention to Boston’s Catholic history, Seitz tells the stories of resisting Catholics in their very own words, and illuminates how they were drawn to reconsider the past and its meanings. We hear them reflect on their parishes and the sacred objects and memories they hold, at the way their personal histories connect with the history in their neighborhood churches, and at the structures of authority in Catholicism.

Resisters describe how they took their parishes and spiritual lives into their very own hands, and how they struggled with on a regular basis theological questions of respect and memory; with relationships among religion, community, place, and comfort; and with the meaning of the local church. No Closure is a story of local drama and pathos, but also a path of inquiry into broader questions of tradition and change as they shape Catholics’ ability to make sense in their lives in a secular world.

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