Pope's condition may slow appeals

With the rapid deterioration of Pope John Paul II's health, Boston-area protesters holding 24-hour vigils to block the closure of their churches may have to wait months longer than they had expected for news of their appeals to Rome, canon law specialists and Vatican watchers said yesterday.

Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley head of the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, gave two protesting parishes, in Weymouth and Sudbury, new life Thursday by overturning his earlier decision to close them.

But protesters at five other parishes who received bad news Thursday now view their appeals to the Vatican as their last best hope.

Some of those parishes were told that they would hear from the Vatican as early as next month, but that is now unlikely with the pope so close to death and the administrative machinery of the Vatican certain to have ground to a halt, observers said.

How soon the bureaucracy starts up again depends on several factors, they said, including whether the next pontiff reappoints John Paul II's top administrators or brings in new ones of his own.

''When the pope dies, it will be a whole new ballgame," said Charles M. Wilson, executive director of the St. Joseph Foundation in San Antonio, a group that helps Catholics receive fair treatment under canon law. ''All matters pending will be considered frozen."

When a pope dies, all the heads of the Vatican dicastries, or departments, are required to resign, specialists said. Whether they are reappointed will depend largely on whether they are philosophically compatible with the new pope, but even if they are, the process of getting the Vatican bureaucracy up and running will probably take months, they said.

Even with the changeover, most church analysts interviewed yesterday said they doubted that new leadership would increase the chance that the five parishes in Brookline, Everett, East Boston, Wellesley, and Scituate would hear good news from Rome. The main obstacle to their appeals, the analysts said, is a deeply-ingrained reluctance to overturn decisions of local bishops on nontheological matters such as finances or parish boundaries.

''To the extent that the fact of a new pope raises expectations for a change, those expectations are going to be unrealistic," said Stephen J. Pope, associate professor of theology at Boston College. ''The Vatican will always be loath to overturn a local decision."

The Rev. Ladislas Orsy, a canon law professor at Georgetown Law School, said a new pope is unlikely to become involved in a matter as small as the closing of a parish.

''These kinds of petitions do not go to the highest levels," Orsy said. ''The people who decide them are somewhat at the lower level of the Vatican civil service, and those people are the least likely to be changed. It's not like the Republicans coming into Washington after the election and replacing all the Democrats."

Wilson, however, said he believed that there could be a change in attitude at the Vatican if the next pope decides that John Paul II, who is widely seen as centralizing authority to a nearly unprecedented degree, went too far.

''It was almost an obsession," Wilson said. ''It has been almost unheard of, to overturn a decision of a bishop."

Still, some protesters said this week that they would continue to press, no matter how long it took to get O'Malley's decision reversed. Gina Scalcione, a leader of the vigil at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Parish in East Boston, said the protesters there still have $10,000 in their save-the-church fund and aren't going anywhere. ''We're here indefinitely," she said.

Peter Borre -- one of the leaders of the Council of Parishes, an umbrella group for the protesters -- said the council will meet tomorrow to gauge whether the protesters at the five still-closed parishes have the will and the resources to fight on through what could be a protracted delay.

''We will ask each of the five what their plans are," he said. ''I would imagine that some will have experienced a fatigue factor and others won't have."

Warren Hutchison, a leader of the protesters at Infant Jesus-St. Lawrence Parish in Brookline, said parishioners there have resigned themselves to a longer wait for a decision on their Vatican appeal. The protesters were all praying for the pope, he said, and considered their protest and the pope's health ''separate issues."

''All of our concerns and prayers are with the pope," Hutchison said. ''We have never tied the individual decision to close our church to the pope, and he is certainly still our father here on earth and we are concerned about his health and praying for him."