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A new parish grows amid the closings

E-mail|Link|Comments (0) Posted by Michael Paulson September 7, 2008 08:57 AM

In southern Worcester County, Catholics in two small but growing towns have decided to head off the inevitable twinning of their parishes by engineering their own merger. In Globe West, Calvin Hennick reports:

"Parishioners were asked to bring rocks from their own property, decorated to represent their families, to a ceremony to bless the land where the new church will sit. Those rocks will be poured into the foundation of the new building, Lambert (Daniel Lambert, cochairman of the inter-congregation group Catholics Working Together) said. Lambert said the rocks illustrate a metaphor - that the people from both parishes will form the foundation of the new church."

(Photo above, by Josh Reynolds, shows the Rev. Laurence Brault, pastor of Holy Angels Church in Upton, which will close, along with St. Michael the Archangel parish in Mendon, and be replaced by a new parish, St. Gabriel the Archangel, near the border between the two towns.)

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Michael Paulson covers religion for The Boston Globe. He shared in the Pulitzer Prize in 2003, won the Mike Berger, Templeton and Supple awards in 2008, and is a four-time winner of the Wilbur Award.
E-mail mpaulson@globe.com.

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