The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Closed churches, not faith, for sale
When St. Elizabeth of Hungary Roman Catholic Church in Branford closed in June 2017, it was a kind of death for Andrea Duffy, and the grieving was difficult. But she moved on to St. Mary Church, one of the other two churches in the newly formed St. John Bosco Parish, and became a trustee and member of the Parish Council.
“It’s not just what the church does for you. You have to join the church and be a part of it,” said Duffy, who had been a member of St. Elizabeth for about 15 years after moving from West Haven to Branford.
“I wrestled for a while and I realized my faith was not in a building,” she said.
So now that her former church, which she can see on her neighborhood walks, is being sold, there is more acceptance of “the inevitable.”
When the Archdiocese of Hartford instituted a major
restructuring plan in June 2017, reducing the number of parishes from 212 to 127, including 59 new parishes formed by merging others, 26 churches were left dark, available for weddings and funerals but not for regular Masses. Now the archdiocese is selling those buildings to other congregations or even nonreligious uses.
St. Paul Church on First Avenue in West Haven, closed when the parish merged with St. Lawrence and St. Louis to form St. John XXIII Parish, is being sold to the University of New Haven. UNH is conducting an environmental review before the sale is closed and has not decided how it will use the property, said university spokeswoman Lyn Chamberlin in an email, but she said UNH has no plans to raze the church.
“It is important for us to continue to invest in the neighborhood surrounding our main campus,” said UNH President Steven Kaplan in a release when the sale agreement was announced in November.
But the closing of a longbeloved church means its former members no longer will be able to worship in the sanctuary where they were married, where their children were baptized and received their first Holy Communion, where their parents and
spouses were memorialized before being sent to their final resting place.
“It was very hard when the sanctuary light was blown out and the doors were closed for good,” said Duffy, whose husband’s funeral was held at St. Elizabeth’s in 2011. “Our last Mass there was June 25, 2017. It’s a grief. It’s the grieving process, just like when you lose a close family member.” Later that year, “Father [Daniel] Keefe was kind enough to have a healing Mass for the people of St. Elizabeth’s,” with a “mingling of holy water into one bowl” from the closed church and the two remaining parish churches, St. Mary and St. Therese.
But the Mass was celebrated at St. Mary in the center of town, not at St. Elizabeth, with its floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the natural world.
“I thought that when we closed the church that was the funeral, and I realized that wasn’t. That was the death.” The healing service served as a funeral. Its expected sale — the buyer has not been revealed because the sale hasn’t closed — is easier for Duffy to deal with. “You know that time goes on and it’s now just a building,” she said.
Pope Francis, however, emphasized the special nature of closed churches in a letter to those attending an International Conference on Cultural Heritage in November, titled “Doesn’t God Dwell
Here Anymore?” “The common sense of the faithful perceives for the environments and objects destined for worship the permanence of a kind of imprint that does not end even after they have lost that role,” Francis wrote to those wrestling with what to do with buildings that are no longer in use.
The Rev. Daniel Keefe, pastor of St. John Bosco, said in an email that he had not been familiar with St. Elizabeth’s parishioners before the merger. “Their reaction to it being closed (not sold) was, understandably, very emotional,” he wrote. “Yet, the majority accepted it as a necessity, and joined the new parish of St. John Bosco. Many of the former St. Elizabeth parishioners now have an active role in the many ministries of St. John Bosco and have embraced the new parish.”
Removing religious objects
When a church is closed, it is not just a matter of locking the doors. It must be deconsecrated, with special prayers and all religious items removed — the altar, relics, statues and vestments. If the baptismal font is not removable, it must be destroyed, according to Paul Connery, director of property and assets for the Archdiocese of Hartford. The stained-glass windows may remain if the building will continue to be used as a church but, if not, anything showing a religious scene must be removed.
While the archdiocese is overseeing sale of the properties, which may include rectories, schools, convents and land, proceeds will go to the parish, Connery said. Any sale must be approved by the archdiocese’s Finance Council and Archdiocesan Consultors, a group of priests who report to Archbishop Leonard Blair.
“Most of these properties are owned specifically by these parishes,” Connery said. “My role in this department is to be an adviser, facilitator … We want to make sure that they follow the proper civil and canon law processes.”
Churches may be sold for use as schools and other “profane” purposes — “profane” as in “secular,” the opposite of “sacred” — but not for a “sordid use,” Connery said.
“We do sell churches to real estate developers, so they are for-profit, but we certainly put restrictions to the degree that we legally can to make sure they are not used in ways that are antithetical to our Catholic Church beliefs,” Connery said. “It would be nice for sure if a church were sold to another church. It’s not a Catholic church anymore.”
He said that restrictions the archdiocese may put on a sale will not last indefinitely. But, he said, “most of these buildings have zoning issues anyway. A lot of them are in residential areas so they’re not going to turn them into a supermarket.”