Angeline Kounelis: Guardian angel
Don't mess with Angie.
That's what many people who've tried and failed to take on Angeline Kounelis say.
As president of an East End neighborhood association, she's Watertown's answer to Norma Rae, a relentless watchdog firing off sharply worded letters that challenge the status quo, and a frequent thorn in the side of politicians and consultants trying to tell East Enders what's good for them. Earlier this year, Kounelis, 54, squared off with a Goliath few thought even she could topple: the Catholic Church.
Though she's Greek Orthodox, this daughter of Greek immigrants almost singlehandedly got the Boston Archdiocese to withdraw its plan to close Sacred Heart church, one of the town's two Catholic parishes.
''The church would not be there if it wasn't for Angie Kounelis," said friend John DiMascio, who cheekily suggested that if she had been around for the ''Great Schism" of 1045 AD, the Catholic Church might not have split into Eastern and Western factions.
For more than a year, Kounelis pelted top church officials and state leaders with impassioned letters, faxes, and phone calls, demanding to know why the church was closing. In a letter to Archbishop Sean O'Malley, Kounelis called the drawn-out suppression process a ''slow, manipulated death."
She hounded the archiocese's Meade-Eisner Reconfiguration Review Committee to come -- not once, but twice -- to Sacred Heart to see that it was in good shape physically and financially and that attendance was on the rise.
Sacred Heart's fight to stay open got comparatively little media attention. Much like the elderly parishioners themselves, the parish's protest was quiet, polite, almost obedient. Many worshippers said it was not their place to publicly argue against the church hierarchy. Nobody barricaded themselves inside chapels or staged candlelight vigils; there was no big-firm lawyer to make speeches or to fire off missives. All they had was Kounelis.
''She's bright, she gets her facts straight, though she can be a little abrasive to people who don't like her," said Peg Cassidy, a parishioner at Sacred Heart and a member of the East Watertown Betterment Association.
''She's one of the few people not out for herself. She had nothing to gain by it; that's the most impressive thing about her."
The archdiocese ultimately agreed with Kounelis, who argued that closing the church would affect not just Watertown, but Cambridge and Belmont worshippers who already had endured recent parish closings and had been coming to Sacred Heart on Mount Auburn Street near the Cambridge line.
When grateful parishioners gave Kounelis an honorarium as a thank-you for her work on their behalf, Kounelis immediately dropped it right back into church coffers, said Cassidy.
Earlier this month, Kounelis drew on the considerable pool of good will she's built up among East Enders to unseat the neighborhood's longtime representative on the Town Council, Salvatore Ciccarelli.
She ran a nearly invisible, self-financed campaign and her three-vote margin of victory in the Nov. 8 town election went to a Dec. 1 recount, where she was officially pronounced the winner. 