In cuts, archdiocese is seen as sharing burden

Rich and poor parishes alike are being closed by Boston's Roman Catholic Archdiocese, according to a Boston Globe analysis of the decisions announced yesterday. Still, the heaviest cuts are in minority and immigrant communities.

Unlike in Detroit and Chicago, where the Catholic Church closed churches primarily in poor areas, the Archdiocese of Boston is distributing the cuts more evenly, in affluent and low-income areas.

What the parishes that are closing have in common is relatively lower attendance at Mass, and fewer baptisms, marriages, and Communion celebrations, the essence of parish life. Parishes without schools were far more likely to be closed than those with schools.

For nearly every Saint Mary of the Angels, a church being shuttered in a poor section of Roxbury, there is a Saint Anselm, a church that is closing in wealthy Sudbury.

"At every step of the process," Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley said yesterday, "we took great care not to place the burden of reconfiguration on the backs of the poor."

Nevertheless, the archdiocese is closing or merging 27 percent of churches in urban areas, 18 percent in suburbs, and 10 percent in small towns. (Decisions on Lowell and Lawrence are still to come.)

The rate of closings is higher in nonwhite neighborhoods. The typical parish being closed or merged is in a neighborhood that is 16 percent nonwhite, while the typical parish being spared is 9 percent nonwhite. And parishes with a non-English Mass had a 27 percent chance of being affected, compared to 19 percent for the rest.

Churches that serve immigrant populations and offer non-English Masses set to be closed include the only parish with German and Latin Masses (Holy Trinity in Boston). Spared are all the churches with a Mass specifically for the Cambodian, Cantonese, Cape Verdean, Creole, Korean, Mandarin, Nigerian, or Vietnamese communities.

The neighborhoods losing churches are no poorer than those keeping theirs. The typical household income in the neighborhoods around the parishes being closed or merged ($52,900) is nearly identical to the income in the neighborhoods of parishes remaining open ($53,300). The Globe's measurement is imprecise, using the 2000 Census income for residents of the census tract containing the parish address, not the actual parish boundaries.

The economic fairness was achieved through O'Malley's cluster system, in which groups of neighboring parishes were forced to offer up at least one parish for possible closure. The most affluent parish in the cluster was targeted just as often as the poorest, the Globe found. O'Malley generally followed those recommendations.

What most distinguishes the closing churches is poor attendance, as judged by a census taken at Mass on several Sundays last October. The closing and merged churches had an average attendance of 559 that month, compared with 1,068 at the churches remaining open. In most clusters, the least-attended church was closed. In only one cluster did O'Malley close the most-attended church. (Beverly's Saint Margaret was closed in favor of churches in Manchester and Essex.)

But the decision was not made solely on attendance. If it had been, then Milton's Saint Pius X would have survived. With an attendance of 1,767, it's the largest church marked for closure. At the other extreme, Brockton's Saint Casimir survived, despite an attendance of 193.

Churches were also likely to be closed if they scored low on what the church calls a sacramental index: the sum of people baptized, married, and having a funeral Mass in a year. In no cluster was the most active church closed.

Of the parishes without schools, 25 percent are being closed or merged, compared with only 10 percent of parishes with schools.

The communities losing their only parishes are suburbs or small towns: Lincoln, Rochester, Rockport, and Stow. As a concession, the church buildings will stay open as "worship spaces" in Lincoln, Rochester, and Stow, and the same may happen in Rockport, the archdiocese said. That would allow those communities to retain a church building, but they must rely on visiting priests, rather than a regularly assigned one, for Mass and other sacraments.

The community losing the most churches, of course, is Boston, which dwarfs all others in population. The current 57 parishes in Boston will become 42.

Boston's Hyde Park neighborhood is losing two of its three parishes. In Roxbury, 1 out of 3 parishes is closing, and another is merging. In Dorchester, 3 of 12 parishes are being merged into others. In East Boston, 2 out of 6 are closing. In Allston and Brighton, 1 out of 4. In Charlestown, 1 out of 3. In Jamaica Plain, 1 out of 3. In Mattapan, Readville, and Roslindale, the only church is remaining open. In West Roxbury, all three survive.

In the other large urban areas of the diocese, the cuts varied: In Cambridge, 3 of 10 are closing or merging; in Brockton, 3 of 7; in Lynn, 1 of 6; in Quincy, 3 of 8; in Somerville, none of 6.

"We have tried," O'Malley said, "to distribute closings across all regions of the archdiocese, so that we shall be able to ensure the church's presence in all areas of the archdiocese in the future, especially in the inner city and in rural areas."

Bill Dedman can be reached at dedman@globe.com.