From the pews, quiet rebellion

They are young mothers and retirees, workers who stop by on their lunch hours, and students who drop in after school.

For years, they followed the rules as best they could, attending Mass at least once a week, teaching religious education, helping in the office or the rectory.

But for weeks now, in a quiet but extraordinary uprising against the church authority they had been taught to respect, hundreds of Catholics in eight communities in and around Boston have been occupying churches the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston is attempting to close.

They have taken over the roles formerly administered by priests and paid church employees, doing everything from leading worship to cleaning buildings. One major thing they cannot do, consecrate the Eucharist, is being done for them by a secret network of sympathetic priests.

Last week, for the first time since the vigils began, the parishioners saw the first evidence that they are having an impact: Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley met with the leaders of vigils in Sudbury and Weymouth, scheduled a meeting for today with leaders of a vigil in East Boston, agreed to reopen a partially closed parish in West Newton, and asked a committee of prominent lay Catholics to meet with the leaders of all parishes in vigil.

The vigils, participants and observers say, illustrate a dramatic transformation of the Catholic laity in the United States that has been unfolding since the 1960s, but has accelerated over the last three years as Catholics have become increasingly vocal in demanding change after the clergy sexual abuse scandal. Many of the vigilers, a word they have coined to describe themselves, are not affiliated with any interest groups and have not previously protested church activities, but have been spurred to resistance by a combination of sadness, anger, and distrust of the church hierarchy.

"I've always been a regular churchgoer, but I've never been a lector or a Eucharistic minister or anything," said Nancye C. Connor, 67, a Wellesley real estate broker who is leading worship services, following church instructions for worship without a priest, at the closed St. James the Great Church in Wellesley. "I've been a run-of-the-mill Catholic until now, to tell you the truth. I have never met, close-up and personal, an archbishop or a high-ranking priest, and it does feel a little scary. But now I'm leading prayer services and planning my day around the hours at the church, and really looking at things through different eyes."

The archdiocese -- citing shifting demographics, a financial crunch, a dwindling number of priests, and diminished attendance at Mass -- has closed 49 parishes since July, of which 16 are for sale. The archdiocese plans to close another 31 parishes, most over the next six months; a handful of other closing decisions have been delayed.

The majority of Catholics at closing parishes have accepted the change peacefully and have either moved to other parishes or have left the Catholic Church. Most of the vigils are attracting only a fraction of the parishioners of the closed churches. Without priests, and in some cases deacons, the closed churches are unable to hold sacramental rites such as baptisms, marriages, or funerals, and many families have followed activities such as religious education classes to other churches.

But scholars say the emergence of so many vigils and the threat of several more as the closings proceed is a striking demonstration of the impact of sociological and theological trends over the last half-century.

"These vigils are highly significant, because lay Catholics are ordinarily quite passive; the worst they do ordinarily is grumble about bad homilies or bad music," said Stephen J. Pope, an associate professor of theology at Boston College and the author of the new book, "Common Calling: The Laity and Governance of the Catholic Church." "These are people who have decided to escalate their investment in the church in the face of the closings."

Catholic laypeople have been demanding a greater role in the church for decades, reflecting an increasing antiauthoritarianism and a skepticism of institutions in American culture. At the same time, the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church, which met from 1962 to 1965, called for a greater role for laypeople in the church.

"The underlying factors are certainly sociological change in the Catholic population, increasing levels of education and upward social mobility, so that these are people who are accustomed to being in charge of their own lives," said James M. O'Toole, a professor of history at Boston College who is writing a history of the American Catholic laity. "Laid on top of that is 40 years of the Vatican II notion taking hold that the church really is the people, to an extent that may surprise the hierarchy."

O'Malley declined to be interviewed for this story, but he appears to be shifting his stance toward lay involvement in archdiocesan governance. In the months after he was installed as archbishop in July 2003, he emphasized canonical church structures, such as an Archdiocesan Pastoral Council, as the primary mechanism for involving laypeople in church affairs, and he has largely ignored Voice of the Faithful, the lay reform group. He has begun to reconstitute the Pastoral Council, to which he plans to appoint 55 people; the group met earlier this month for the first time during his administration.

But O'Malley also has appointed two lay-led panels not spelled out by canon law, one to review his parish closing decisions, and another to monitor the disposition of the assets of closed parishes. Both of the panels include lay Catholics who had been critical of church leaders, and O'Malley has accepted multiple recommendations from the panel on parish closings, leading him to alter decisions in Charlestown, Newton, Plymouth, and Roxbury.

The emergence of so many vigils suggests that some Catholic laypeople are not waiting for O'Malley to spell out their role in the church. Some involved in the vigils have little contact with one another, but there is an informal infrastructure to the vigils. Parishioners in Sudbury have distributed a handbook that explains how to occupy a church, those in Weymouth have visited the other parishes, and parishioners at 15 churches have formed a Council of Parishes that is supporting the vigils.

"There really is a movement here, fueled by the tools of communication and the sharing of knowledge," said James E. Post, president of Voice of the Faithful. "Just the fact that there are so many canon law appeals going on shows that there has been a lot of collaboration in understanding what the procedural requirements are and taking advantage of the expertise."

At the vigils, laypeople have stepped up to take on tasks previously done by professionals.

Mary Lou DeSouza, 78, sorts the mail each day at St. Bernard in Newton, a task once done by a paid secretary. O'Malley agreed last week to fully reopen St. Bernard, but demanded the resignation of its pastor; parishioners are continuing to protest.

"When I was a child, growing up, your church and God were the supreme beings in your life, and you would never say a word against your priest," DeSouza said. "And now, to have come to this point."

Jerome Watson-Peters, 64, a former Maryknoll priest who left the priesthood and got married years ago, said that he had been asked by church leaders to keep a low profile in parish life after he was laicized, but that he now feels free to help. He is leading worship once a week at his parish, St. Anselm in Sudbury.

"I have never been that rebellious, but this just really got us all so incensed," Watson-Peters said.

Several priests around the archdiocese are consecrating wafers for use at the vigils, and one priest is regularly saying Mass at the vigil at Infant Jesus-St. Lawrence Church in Brookline. But the vigilers are shielding the identities of priests who help them, for fear that the archdiocese will punish clergy who facilitate worship at closed parishes.

The lack of trust of the hierarchy is striking. At several closed churches, parishioners keep the doors locked, convinced that the archdiocese will attempt to physically remove vigilers from the churches. (In Newton, a number of police officers have been supporting the vigil; one uniformed officer, asked by a Globe reporter whether he was at St. Bernard to drag out the vigilers, responded, "I'll be one of the ones being dragged out.")

The long-term implications of the vigils are unclear, but scholars say there is no going back to an era of automatic deference to church authorities.

"Laypeople are going to be involved [in the church], either negatively, in terms of protests or vigils or some form of resistance to the hierarchy, or constructively, in consultation with the leaders of the church in making decisions about the life of the archdiocese," said Pope, the Boston College theologian.

But social change is far from the minds of many of the vigilers, which is part of what makes the vigil phenomenon so remarkable.

"We're not a militant, rabble-rousing group," said Ann C. Kirrane, 64, of Dedham.

Kirrane, a 44-year-parishioner at what is now Infant Jesus-St. Lawrence Church in Brookline, taught seventh-grade Sunday School there for a decade, worked as the housekeeper in the rectory for several years, and has always helped with coffee, snacks, spaghetti suppers, and corned beef and cabbage dinners. Now, five days a week she goes to the church at 6 a.m. and sits there for up to six hours, praying or embroidering, watching a televised Mass, or reading the archdiocesan newspaper, The Pilot. "It's quiet, very churchlike," she said.

Esther T. Doherty, 77, offered a similar assessment of her refusal to leave St. Therese in Everett, where she was married 52 years ago. "Doing the vigil is something I would not have done years ago. But my heart is broken. I didn't expect to outlive my church."

Michael Paulson can be reached at mpaulson@globe.com.