When you walk into the front vestibule of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church in the seaside town of Scituate , it doesn’t look or sound like your average church.
“What the hell are you doing?” asks Nancy Shilts, one of more than 100 parishioners who have taken turns holding vigil in the church, night and day, since the Archdiocese announced more than 10 and a half years ago it wanted to close the church.
The Young and the Restless is on a big-screen TV, and two reclining chairs are set up in front of it — all right next to a stained glass window.
"We have a TV here," Shilts said. "We have a puzzle here. We have a kitchen so we can eat."
The Archdiocese of Boston went to court this week to try to evict the parishioners from St. Francis. At issue is what it really means to 'own' a church.
St. Frances wasn’t alone. The Archdiocese said in 2004 it was closing nearly a quarter of its churches as a result of declining attendance, a lack of priests and financial problems that were compounded by settlements from the clergy sex abuse scandal. Boston was at the center of that crisis. Parishioners from nine of those churches protested by going into vigil, but St. Frances is the last one still going. The church is on about 30 acres near the ocean, and the group says the Archdiocese’s decision to sell the property was just about money.
Parishioner Maryellen Rogers says this isn’t just real estate. It’s her spiritual home.
“You just can’t take a faith community and say you can go here or there," Rogers said. "It breaks up a community. This is our church, we’ve always been told this is our church, and we’ll do whatever it takes to protect our church.”
It comes down to the question of what 'ownership' really means.
"The Catholic Church has traditionally taught its people that they belong to a particular parish," said Thomas Groome, director of the Church in the 21st Century Center at Boston College. "And that a particular parish belongs to them."
In Scituate, they’re taking that quite literally.
“We put a bed in a long time ago because the aero mattresses kept losing air," said Rogers' husband, Jon Rogers. He says they’re OK with the diocese selling off most of the 30 acres, and that they’ve told the archbishop they just want to keep the church building.
“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 we can live with and you can live with. And his response is dragging me into court."
A spokesman for the archbishop declined to comment because of that pending court case. The Archdiocese said earlier they only brought the case because the Vatican had rejected all the parishioners’ appeals. The parishioners claim they still have one more pending.
In court this week, there wasn’t much question over who the property legally belongs to. The first witness was a real estate lawyer who explained the archidiocese is listed on the deed.
But the parishioners haven’t given up hope that the judge will throw the case out, deciding it’s really an ecclesiastical dispute. And for now, the parishioners are not saying if they’ll leave the church if the civil case doesn’t go their way.
