A Parish, and Its Faithful, in Limbo

For 43 years, Mary Giorgio has started her day with a glass of orange juice and a sliver of home-baked cake. She rifles through a closet too full from outings to Filene’s department store. She fluffs her short hair -- once golden, now bright white. Then she gets in her car and drives to Mass at St. Susanna Parish.

Giorgio and her late husband, Salvatore, moved to this Boston suburb in 1961, the same year St. Susanna opened less than half a mile from their house. The Giorgios joined the parish before they unpacked all their moving boxes. Mary became a fixture in St. Susanna’s women’s group, and Salvatore in the men’s group.

They went to weekly dances at the church. They had barbecues by their backyard pool for the late Cardinal Richard James Cushing, founding father of St. Susanna. Their daughters Barbara and Lou Ann were confirmed and married at St. Susanna. When Salvatore died four years ago, Mary held his funeral at St. Susanna, and on the anniversary of his death each June, she has sponsored a memorial Mass there.

The parish is Giorgio’s spiritual and emotional fulcrum, her social anchor. St. Susanna means so much to her that when she learned the Archdiocese of Boston was going to close the church to save money, Giorgio, 91, let out a shriek of grief.

“I said to myself, please God, if my time is coming, make it happen before the parish closes,” she recalled. “I can have a Catholic funeral in any church. But I cannot conceive of myself having the last rites and leaving this world from another parish.”

Giorgio loves every nook and cranny of St. Susanna: the shiny, polished floors, the grand wooden crucifix and the trompe l’oeil painting of the Holy Land. She has prayed daily with eight pastors over the years, watching the light dance through twin panels of stained glass that stretch from floor to soaring ceiling over the front entrance.

But her attachment to her parish goes beyond the building, the liturgy or the priests.

After Mass on Mondays, Giorgio walks next door to the rectory to count the weekend collection money, one of her many tasks at the parish. As she lays out stacks of bills in varying denominations, she explains how the impending closure strikes at the very core of her Catholicism.

“It is just part of me. It is a warm feeling, a comfortable feeling, a feeling of being complete,” she said. “St. Susanna’s is right up on the top of my list of the things that are important to me. There is my family, of course, and then there is St. Susanna’s. I have never had that kind of feeling, that sense of belonging, in any other church.

“My faith is closely connected to this parish,” she said. “This is where it all comes together for me as a Catholic. I get up in the morning, knowing I am going to St. Susanna’s to start the day off right.”

Struggling Archdiocese

St. Susanna is one of 69 Boston-area parishes scheduled to close by the end of the year.

Many of the country’s 195 dioceses are struggling financially from a flood of sexual abuse lawsuits. The diocese in Portland, Ore., on Tuesday filed for bankruptcy because it faced millions of dollars in claims. With a wary eye toward Boston, where the abuse crisis began more than two years ago, many Catholics around the country are wondering if parish closings will be the next step for them as well.

But Boston Archbishop Sean Patrick O’Malley has steadfastly insisted that money problems unrelated to the abuse scandal are making the closures necessary.

Officials of the nation’s fourth-largest archdiocese said that proceeds from the sale of parish properties, as much as $400 million, would not be used to pay off settlements to sexual abuse victims. Boston recently settled 552 abuse cases for $85 million, and church leaders said the money would come entirely from the sale of the chancery headquarters.

O’Malley said the archdiocese was shutting more than one-sixth of its parishes because of diminishing attendance, declining donations and a dearth of priests.

An archdiocese spokesman, Cullen Buckland, said Wednesday that “on the surface” St. Susanna did not appear to fit those criteria. But, Buckland said, “you need to look at the whole picture here. There are other parishes in that area that could absorb the congregation. Proximity in this circumstance played a role in the decision-making.”

His explanation was of scant consolation to Giorgio.

“I just can’t conceive how this church could disappear when so many of us are dependent on it,” Giorgio said. “I feel that it is my church. I can’t conceive how anybody, any hierarchy, could take this away from me, from any of us.”

Giorgio’s sentiments are shared by many in the 825-family parish. At a recent Mass, Father Stephen Josoma asked worshipers to fill out a brief questionnaire indicating what they planned to do if the parish closed as scheduled. Only 17% said they would join another parish. Many in the remaining 83% said they would stop practicing their Catholic faith altogether.

“I don’t want to exaggerate, but St. Susanna’s really represents the essence of being a Catholic for me,” said Matthew Barry, 19. A former St. Susanna altar boy, Barry serves as vice chairman of the parish council, the congregation’s governing body that handles administration, schedules events and works with the pastor to run the church.

“I was basically born into this parish,” Barry said. “I grew up across the street. I just assumed I would be married and buried here. I assumed I would raise my kids here.”

For as long as he can remember, Barry said, “I knew this parish was where I belonged, and where the people around me felt that I belonged. It is hard for me to explain, this sense of community. It is something you have to experience. But at St. Susanna’s right now we feel we are being put out of our home, out of our faith.”

Lou Totino, like Giorgio a 43-year member of the parish, compared the closing to a death in the family.

“When Father Steve read the announcement that the parish was to be closed -- I am not exaggerating -- it hurt almost as much as when each of my parents died,” said Totino, 71.

After Totino was pictured in a newspaper photograph, embracing his priest while both men wept, he was deluged with calls and sympathy notes from long-lost friends, just as if a family member had passed away.

Totino was among more than 50 parishioners who immediately formed a committee called SOS: Save Our St. Susanna. Josoma and his parishioners have invited O’Malley to preside at a Mass at St. Susanna and explain why the church will be closed. No date has been set.

A Church’s Beginning

St. Susanna was opened at a time of expansiveness in the Archdiocese of Boston, when young families began trading Boston’s traditional Catholic neighborhoods for suburbs.

In Dedham, 10 miles south of Boston, they found a town so calm and stable that its 17th-century founders called their community Contentment, before adopting the name of a village in their British homeland.

The town’s tiny cottages beside the Charles River first served as vacation getaways for 19th-century Bostonians, and later, as starter homes for young 20th-century families.

Dedham claimed the county courthouse, as well as a commuter train to downtown Boston. Dedham also was home to landmarks like the Olde Irish Alehouse and Moseley’s-on-the-Charles, a dance hall where St. Susanna held services while the church was under construction.

Dedham already supported one thriving Catholic parish, St. Mary’s. But with the flood of new families, then-Cardinal Cushing set his eyes on a 9 1/2-acre parcel at the opposite end of town, in Dedham’s Riverdale section.

The site was less than a mile from Route 128, the highway that would become home to the region’s high-tech industry. It sat near the Charles River and abutted a prestigious independent school called Noble & Greenough.

The property was close to new housing developments, such as the neighborhood where Mary and Sal Giorgio settled into a brown-and-white, split-level home. The acreage included a traffic circle opposite the church with a carved “Welcome to Dedham” sign.

In the angular architectural style of the early 1960s, St. Susanna was designed with a tall A-shaped roof, and was built of red brick. Stained-glass windows along each side of the sanctuary told biblical stories.

By the time St. Susanna opened, the mills that once sustained Dedham’s economy had been replaced by insurance offices, law firms, contracting companies and small manufacturers of products like cardboard boxes. Automobile dealers and shops selling baby clothes, electric lighting and other necessities flourished along a state artery that bisects the town.

With its steady population of 24,000, Dedham remains overwhelmingly white -- 93%, according to the most recent count -- and affordable. (The median house value is just more than $200,000.)

“Not too poor and not too wealthy, not too big and not too small,” said Giorgio, who lives on a street of well-kept homes with neatly mowed lawns. “It’s just a nice town.”

St. Susanna fast established a friendly relationship with St. Mary’s, the century-old parish that today ministers to 2,329 families. The two congregations share resources, sometimes offering children’s education at one, and adult education at the other.

St. Susanna sponsors Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and every third Sunday offers a Mass for Filipino immigrants. A weekly book group considers the meaning of Catholicism in the 21st century. A film group examines spirituality on the big screen. To honor the patron saint, Susanna, the parish annually holds a giant ice cream social.

Although smaller than St. Mary’s, St. Susanna managed to pay off its mortgage and accrue a substantial bank account. And while attendance at Catholic churches around Boston dropped by 25% during the clerical abuse crisis of the last two years, St. Susanna’s roster of member families grew by 20% in the same period.

Rita Diette, a daily communicant at St. Susanna for 39 years, looked up on her way into Mass one weekday.

“I have something to say,” she said. “St. Susanna’s is the heartbeat of this community. Why would you stop a beating heart?”

Diette said she spent part of the winter in Florida and attended Mass there each day, but the services felt hollow and perfunctory. When she returned to St. Susanna, she said, she caused heads to turn when she entered the church and exclaimed, “Wow!”

“All I can tell you is that I felt the Holy Spirit when I walked back into this church,” said Diette, 64. “And the leaders of the church want to take this away? They are taking part of us away too.”

At the round table in her kitchen, Giorgio produced a cake, fluted at the top, flavored with almonds and baked in her oven early the same morning. She started to slice it, then stopped because she was tearing up.

“There are days when I am here by myself and I think about it -- I think about the parish closing -- and I just fall apart,” she said. “I think about walking down the aisle, noticing the floors polished so beautifully, and I think: Who’s going to take care of those floors? Who’s going to take care of my church if they close it?”

She went back to slicing the cake, careful 1-inch portions.

“What are they going to do?” she asked. “Will they just put a lock on the door? They might as well put a lock on my heart, on my faith.”

Giorgio looked up and in a plaintive voice said: “Please, God, don’t take our church away from us.”