Bishop Hughes Is "At Peace"

Our Lady of Good Counsel Church, New Orleans

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune:

Even though the decision to send armed police officers into two Uptown churches to evict parishioners was "very difficult and very painful," Archbishop Alfred Hughes said Friday he has no regrets about that action.

"I'm at peace with myself," he said, adding that he was "trying to do what God's asking us . . . for the common good of the archdiocese."

Two people were arrested Tuesday at Our Lady of Good Counsel Church and one was cited with criminal trespassing. A parishioner at St. Henry Church was issued a civil summons for criminal trespass but was not arrested. All charges have been dropped.

Shifts of parishioners of the two churches have occupied the buildings since October when the Archdiocese of New Orleans was to have shut them down due to dwindling membership.

From the Louisiana Weekly in November:

St. Henry, with 350 member families, is financially stable and actually gained a priest when Katrina displaced one from his old quarters and he moved into the rectory, giving them three priests.

Our Lady of Good Counsel, which has about 400 families, is also financially stable, said Barbara Fortier, the head of Good Counsel’s parish counsel, and has two priests.

Both parishes say their membership has increased since Hurricane Katrina.

“We’ve never had a good reason for closing our church,” Fortier said. “Now we are just trying to stay alive.”

The archdiocese will not take any steps to remove those occupying the church, Comiskey said.

“We don’t want any confrontations,” she said. “But we will continue to take steps to transfer records and secure the buildings.”

A parish with those numbers would certainly be viable in the Episcopal Church, but with the ever-worsening priest shortage in the Roman Catholic Church, the numbers may be problematic.

The archdiocese obviously changed its collective mind about removing the occupying parishioners.


St. Henry's Church

Back to the TP:

He [Hughes] denied Friday that Tuesday's events came in response to a directive from the Vatican that the standoff be resolved before a new archbishop is appointed. Hughes, 76, is a year older than the age when bishops must offer to retire but no successor has been named.

I am at peace that I have done all that is in my understanding and power to do things in the right way," he [Hughes] said.

But, Hughes said he is troubled by the hostile response his decision has touched off, especially from Catholics.

Said Jo Ann Peterson, an Our Lady of Good Counsel parishioner, "The bad feelings are going to linger a very long time."

Hughes described himself as a shepherd but Harold Baquet, who received a criminal trespass citation, said, "He shepherded us into a desert and gave us no pastoral care whatsoever."

Given this climate, Hughes said: "My greatest concern . . . is their being alienated from the Lord and the church. That continues to be a worry of mine."

Oh no! What did the archbishop expect? A dumb sheep response, I suppose.

The two churches marked for closure were integral parts of their neighborhoods for generations, said Barbara Fortier, president of Friends of Our Lady of Good Counsel. "I have a parishioner who is 87 years old who was baptized there and whose parents were married there."

The basic issue "is not just the building," she said. "It's the sense of community that we have there. These are the families that have done fish fries together and St. Joseph's altars. It's a real sense of community that's being dissolved."
....

But members of the two churches insisted that a compromise was possible, perhaps by letting one Mass a week be celebrated at the churches and opening the churches for weddings. "What's the harm?" Fortier said. "We're happy to embrace the new Good Shepherd parish and bring our resources there. We're just asking them to throw us a bone."

Church members had suggested this but it didn't get the necessary approval from Hughes or the council overseeing the consolidation plan, which was enacted last year, said archdiocesan spokeswoman Sarah Comiskey.

The powers in the RCC don't seem much given to compromise. I don't know, but it seems to me that there was a better way to handle this. Why not one mass a week, even if it's only a transitional arrangement to help the parishioners get through their grief and hurt over the closure of their parish churches? Why not make the church available for weddings? Why not throw the parishioners a bone?