A family institution

On a recent evening, a man stood in the aisle of Sacred Heart Church, eyes ablaze and feet planted firmly apart as he dressed down the priest who would marry his son in a month.

"I don't know if the good Father knows what's going on," said Daniel J. Passacantilli. "The people here are fed up with the treatment by the archdiocese. We are pleading with you to be with us. But if you are not going to be with us, Father, please let us know."

The priest, seated at the front of the North End church, clasped his hands, stymied. He had few assurances to offer. Higher-ups had given word that it could be shuttered as part of a wave of parish closings. The timetable was unknown. But the closing could come too soon for Passacantilli to see his son marry in the church attended by the family for three generations.

In a dark and measured tone, the Rev. Vincenzo Rosato pleaded for calm, sending a ripple of tense chatter through the congregation gathered to discuss Sacred Heart's fate.

"The decision is being made in consultation," he said. "It is a long process."

With the list of church closings set to be announced Tuesday by Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley, clergy and parishioners across the Boston Archdiocese are wringing their hands. But the ordeal is particularly fraught with anxiety for those with dates once believed secure for marking life's rites of passage.

For the Passacantilli family, it is a wedding.

Daniel L. Passacantilli, 32, owner of a telecommunications company, and Sue Riggi, 37, a real estate acquisitions analyst, met at a diner in their North End neighborhood. Both Catholics of Italian heritage, the two found easy affinity, she drawn by his intensity and he by her whimsy.

"After the second date, I was hooked," Riggi says.

"I knew going into the first," Passacantilli says.

They dated for six months and became engaged. The couple chose to marry on June 12, almost to the day his parents wed 34 years earlier at Sacred Heart.

"There was never any question of where," said the bride-to-be, who grew up in Connecticut. And so it was settled: the ceremony at Sacred Heart, the reception at the Park Plaza Hotel and a honeymoon in Italy -- exactly as her fiance's parents had done.

Then in March came bad news. Sacred Heart was one of 144 parishes recommended for possible closure. Word was that it could be shuttered within months.

Riggi cried. And then she worried. The church closing would mean last-minute invitations, frantic arrangements, and costly changes.

The groom-to-be immediately signed onto a church committee formed to fight the closing. The committee drew up lists of why Sacred Heart was different from the other churches, noting its attendance numbers and financial figures. The lists were the work of logic and reason, the sort a businessman like Passacantilli produces to keep a deal from falling apart.

But a church, as Passacantilli says, is not a business.

"You go to church your whole life. You look up to priests as reverent people, and then you deal with the church at this level and they treat it like a business and treat you like you're an unhappy customer and tell you to move along and not worry about it. But they're not dealing with customers; they're dealing with people's faith."

For his family, the situation had produced a welter of emotion. Sadness that a tradition of sacraments taken at the church could be at an end. Bewilderment that a touchstone is suddenly, inexplicably vulnerable. And anger, a resentful sort born of a sense that the archdiocese -- which the family blames for the clergy sex-abuse scandal's depth and severity -- could once again be doing harm.

"They did everything behind closed doors, just like they did with the molestation charges," said the younger Passacantilli. "And they are doing the exact same thing now."

His bride-to-be agreed. "All of this, it's doing so much damage to Catholicism."

The archdiocese has said the closings are necessary, pointing to a decline in Mass attendance by Catholics, a shortage of Catholic priests to oversee parishes, and a decline in the church's financial situation driven in part by the clergy sex-abuse crisis.

Church officials emphasize that closings will affect communities across the diocese, although many listed for possible closing are in Boston, which has some of the oldest buildings and smallest congregations.

Rosato, of Sacred Heart, said he's tried to be open with his congregation, sharing what he learns from church officials. But he said the matter is a difficult one.

"They are hearing things they don't want to hear," he said.

For the Passacantillis, Sacred Heart, with its roots as an immigrant church that served a largely Italian-speaking congregation, has been a thread through family history. The groom's grandmother, whose parents emigrated from Naples, took all her sacraments at the church.

Her daughter, Lorraine, 54, an administrative analyst with the Boston Department of Public Works, was baptized there, took Communion there, and was married there in 1970 to the elder Passacantilli, 56, Essex County's chief juvenile probation officer. Their three children, of whom Daniel is the oldest, took their sacraments at the church and attended the parish school, St. John's.

Weddings were to be next, with baptisms and other holy occasions to follow. All of which prompted the elder Passacantilli's outburst to the priest during last month's meeting to discuss the church closings.

"It pains me," he said. "But I am not going to veneer my feelings."

Two weeks ago, the family got something of a reprieve. Word came down that any church selected for closing would remain open until at least July. The June wedding, it seemed, was safe.

The family remains concerned.

"Of course, it's still hanging over our heads," said Lorraine Passacantilli. "With their track record, you just don't know."

Even if the church closes, her husband insisted, "We'll get a justice of the peace. We'll have the wedding in front of the church."

But it isn't so simple. "What about our son?" Riggi wondered. "Where will he be baptized?"