No Closure: Catholic Practice and Boston's Parish Shutdowns

John C. Seitz

Published by Harvard University Press 2011

No Closure

Catholic Practice and Boston's Parish Shutdowns

John C. Seitz

https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674061316

Overview
Contents

About this book

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 trust had not healed.

In the months that followed, distraught parishioners occupied several churches in opposition to the closure decrees. Why did these accidental activists resist the parish closures, and what do their actions and reactions tell us about modern American Catholicism? Drawing on extensive fieldwork and with careful attention to Boston’s Catholic history, Seitz tells the stories of resisting Catholics in their 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, on the way their personal histories connect with the history of their neighborhood churches, and on the structures of authority in Catholicism.

Resisters describe how they took their parishes and religious lives into their own hands, and how they struggled with everyday 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 of their lives in a secular world.

Author / Editor information

Seitz John C. :

John C. Seitz is Assistant Professor in the Theology Department and the Associate Director for Lincoln Center of the Francis and Ann Curran Center
for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University.

Topics

Frontmatter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	i
Contents Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	v
Introduction: Closings Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. The Pasts Living in People Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	40
2. Divergent Histories: Change and the Making of Resisters, 1950–2004 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	81
3. “What do we have?” Locales and Objects in the Hands of the People of God Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	131
4. “This is unrest territory:” Authority and Sacrifice in Resisters’ Practice of the Parish Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	174
5. Openings Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	213
Epilogue Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	234
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	251
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	305
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	309

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 322

eBook

Published: June 14, 2011
ISBN: 9780674061316