A group of Catholic parishioners who have kept vigil in a Scituate church 24 hours a day for the last 11 years are going to court Tuesday. They're being sued by the Archdiocese of Boston, which is trying to evict them from the church.
The Archdiocese tried to close St. Frances Xavier Cabrini in 2004 so they could sell the 30 or so acres the church sits on to help pay for settlements from the clergy sex abuse scandal. Jon Rogers says parishioners like him were so upset about losing their spiritual home, that they decided to do something about it.
“We just opened the doors and walked in,” he said.
And they haven’t left, day or night, for nearly 11 years. Their group has repeatedly appealed to the Vatican to stop the church from being closed, but without success. And Rogers says he’s reached out to Cardinal Sean O’Malley to ask for a resolution.
"Open us up as a fully functioning parish, even consider selling back our church," Rogers said. "But you know something, take the 3,000 registered parishioners, and what at one point was a vibrant community, and lets negotiate something that basically you can live with and we can live with. And his response was dragging me into court.”
In an earlier statement, the archdiocese has said they respected the vigil while the group’s canonical appeals were being considered, but when the Vatican court ruled against them and they still didn’t leave, the archdiocese had to file the lawsuit. The archdiocese said, "We continue to hope and work for a peaceful and prayerful resolution to the vigil."
