No Closure: Catholic Practice and Boston's Parish Shutdowns (review)

The Occupy movements that seized Americans' hearts and minds during 2011 relied on some tactics already familiar to the angered Catholics who had staged parish occupations in the previous eight years to prevent the closure of their parishes by order of their bishops. John Seitz provides a fine, compact ethnographic study of the recent and current struggle in the Archdiocese of Boston between lay Catholics and the hierarchy, which since 2004 has attempted to close as many as 137 parishes. There, resisters occupied their targeted parishes by holding vigil services; staying round-the-clock inside church buildings; and keeping the archbishop on notice that they would not abandon their beloved parishes, even against threat of police intervention and arrest.

Grassroots resistance to the hierarchy's decisions to close parishes began in Worcester, Massachusetts, and soon inspired parishes in Boston and elsewhere, often through direct sharing of personnel, tactical advice, and legal and spiritual support. The Archdiocese of Boston, whose leader, Cardinal Bernard Law, had been exposed as presiding over the cover-up of the clergy sexual abuse scandal that broke there in 2002, was still reeling from that shock when announcement of the parish closures followed less than two years later. By then, Law had resigned, but was seemingly rewarded by the Holy See with a promotion to a plush position in Rome, further aggravating the anger and grief in his wake. His successor in Boston, Cardinal Seán P. O'Malley, a Capuchin Franciscan, has been obliged to conduct the mandated parish closings, steering a cautious line between persuasion and force. Seitz documents how the faithful resisters now represent an unfamiliar third-party position in the Church—they are not desirous of leaving the Church, nor do they consent to attend the new parish assigned to them by the archdiocese.

Seitz, then a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School, began his study of local events in August 2004 at the Mass held on Boston Common organized by Voice of the Faithful and led by pastors who also disagreed with the parish closures. He conducted fieldwork in parishes for about three and a half years, including observation and interviews with more than fifty resisters, pastors, and other Catholics involved in the Boston area. From his examination of the emergence of faith-inspired grassroots organizations, Seitz discerned that Catholics tend to privilege the actual practice of their faith above the doctrinal issues that often concern the clergy, often creating tension between the Church's antidemocratic hierarchical structure, and the concerns of laity for the buildings, objects, and events that compose parish life. Clearly outlining his goals as neither trying to lionize the resistance nor "popular" religiosity, nor to define a "true" or "false" Catholicism, Seitz presents his evidence with sensitivity and clarity. (He opted to change the names of his informants to protect them from any possible retribution.)

Throughout the book he employs the dual themes of sacrifice and sacred presence to explore the rhetoric used by clergy and laity alike in their quests to achieve a certain actualization of "the Church." Is it the actual buildings, or the people who inhabit them? Has the logic of sacrifice on behalf of the Church lost its power of persuasion? The first two chapters treat the histories of the parishes slated for closing, at least half of which are ethnic parishes, whereas the two subsequent chapters deal with how the ecclesial and liturgical changes of the Second Vatican Council prepared the way for the responses of the organizers at the closing parishes, who combine responses from past and modern traditions. Chapter 5 deals with the complex meanings of resistance and an epilogue catches up with the very recent dimensions of the conflict. Participants and observers alike are left to wonder what has happened to Pope John XXIII's famous plea for the Catholic Church to use the "medicine of mercy rather than that of...