Canton Catholic Community plans for merger

The full version of this story appears in the October 22 print edition.

St. John the Evangelist Church and St. Gerard Majella Church have long served the Catholic population of Canton. St. John’s Parish dates to 1860; the present St. John’s church building opened in the 1960s. St. Gerard’s Parish was created in the 1960s, a time when families tended to be larger than they are today and worshippers filled the pews on the weekends.

In June of 2018, the Boston Archdiocese created the Canton Catholic Community — a collaborative that allowed the two parishes to maintain their separate identities while sharing a pastor, deacons, a Pastoral Team and a Pastoral Council. The move meant that the two parishes shared resources and saved on operational costs. Last week, however, the Reverend Thomas S. Rafferty, pastor of both St. John’s and St. Gerard’s, sent a letter to parishioners of both churches informing them that after months of thoughtful consideration, he has formally asked Cardinal Sean O’Malley of the Boston Archdiocese to authorize a merger between the two church communities. One of the parishes will close. St. John the Evangelist School will not close, however.

Rafferty said that when the collaborative in Canton began more than two years ago, the idea of merging the two parishes was not on his mind. “I really didn’t think that we’d be talking mergers this soon,” he said, “because I just didn’t think that Cardinal Sean would go there. I didn’t think he would be as receptive to it, but I think that some combination of reality and COVID certainly put its foot on the accelerator of a process that was occurring.”

In spite of strong pastoral work, programs, and outreach at both churches, attendance at weekend Masses had been declining over the course of the last 10 years. Fewer people at Masses meant that less offertory money was collected at each church — money that was needed to cover the costs of maintaining the two buildings and their facilities. Starting in the fall of 2019, parishioners were able to donate online to their church, a move that left St. John’s and St. Gerard’s in somewhat better financial shape than they might have been. However, the closing of the churches last spring due to the spread of the virus dealt an unexpected blow to their financial health.

As part of the collaborative plan, each collaborative created a committee called Disciples in Mission to serve as a guide for pastoral planning. Parishioners from St. John’s and St. Gerard’s both serve on the committee. “Our primary goal is to help parishes to become stronger by helping them to bring together the resources they need for evangelization,” said Father Paul Soper, the director of pastoral planning for the Archdiocese of Boston. He explained that resources include the people, finances, building, goals, and in Canton, St. John the Evangelist School.

“We hope to help parishes to see beyond what they’re currently doing now in order to get to a place where they can imagine growth,” he said. “It was never our goal in Disciples in Mission to merge parishes.”

Each year since 2012, one-tenth of the parishes throughout the Archdiocese entered into a collaborative. As time went on, some of the collaborating parishes began to realize that the goals that they had set for themselves through their Disciples in Mission committees might be more easily met if the parishes merged, some for reasons that were not always related to finances.

Some parishes merged due to a long shared history. Other parishes needed a larger church to hold their worshippers from their collaborative. “They began to ask the question, ‘Why are we multiple parishes?’” Soper explained. “But then we had COVID. And parishes started to look at their financial circumstances. And started to say, ‘Might we be stronger as one community pooling our resources rather than two communities trying to always each make it on their own and just sharing some expenses?’”

The Disciples in Mission committee of the Canton Catholic Community began their pastoral planning in the fall of 2019 and later met remotely as needs dictated. “One of the things that kind of framed our discussion at the beginning was, being of two parishes working in collaborative, we didn’t want to just be doing two of everything simultaneously two miles apart on the same street,” Rafferty said. He went on to say that instead of trying to replicate the youth program at St. John’s that St. Gerard’s already had, teenagers from St. John’s were encouraged to connect with the program at St. Gerard’s.

“St. John’s was perceived to have a stronger adult music ministry,” Rafferty said. “By combining the choir under a very talented music director, Maria White, the choir members from St. Gerard’s and St. John’s all say the same thing: I’d rather be a member of a bigger choir. So it was that kind of thing. What makes us work better by each knowing what the other is doing?”

Tom Brodnicki is the chair of the Canton Catholic Community’s Parish Council. “What’s really valuable was being able to utilize the resources of our entire community in a way to strengthen, especially from an evangelization perspective, to encourage more people to become involved,” he said. “To be a little smarter about what we’ve been doing. To bring forward the power of the school. We were really on a strong path. Just before the pandemic we were about to roll out our game plan to the parish community, to begin engaging more and more people in the process and inviting them into the life of the work of Disciples in Mission. And that’s when the pandemic came. And the Cardinal gave his indication that perhaps we should think a little harder about a merger. And that’s essentially what happened …

See this week’s Citizen to learn more about the planned church merger. Not a subscriber? Click here to order your subscription today.

Short URL: https://www.thecantoncitizen.com/?p=70642

Posted by Mary Ann Price on Oct 23 2020. Filed under News. Both comments and pings are currently closed.