Searching for St. Gerard’s

By Rachael Allen

If you were to walk into my childhood bedroom, you’d think I was still 13 years old. Flowered wallpaper lines the walls; posters of 2000s heartthrobs peek out from under the couch; snow globes gather dust on a shelf. A corsage from a St. John’s annual father-daughter dance, from a year when I could still dance by stepping on my dad’s feet, hangs upside down from a bulletin board.

Each time I’m home, my mom asks me if I want to redecorate the space. I refuse, partly out of laziness and partly out of the comfort of preserving a space as it once was, even if the era it represents has passed.

St. Gerard Majella

I thought about this idea when I read recently that St. Gerard Majella Church will close next month. My family has attended St. Gerard’s since I was born — and perhaps more than anywhere else in town, for me, it has been synonymous with growing up in Canton.

I remember the Blessing of the Animals, when the pastor at the time, Father Bernard McLaughlin, or Father Mac, blessed our dogs, cats, birds, and hamsters in the parking lot. I remember the days of communion, when my cousins and I, all a few years apart, debated what the communion wafer tasted like, knowing little about what this Catholic rite of passage meant other than it was family tradition.

The Sundays blur together — weaving around adults talking in the church basement to get to the munchkins after Mass, selling cookies for a fundraiser, sitting through CCD lessons taught by my mom. In summers, the church was the home base for Kids Camp; in winters, the practice room for choir. One Christmas, the music director gave us mini-harmonicas, which I stowed in my dresser for years.

But these memories tell only part of the story of St. Gerard’s. During those years I’m remembering, the church at large was dealing with the fallout of the clergy sexual abuse scandal. While many in the Catholic Church turned — and continue to turn — away from the problem, Father Mac turned toward it, writing in his weekly column, “For a long time the Archdiocese has been concerned with appearances and not reality … Secrecy has got to go,” as a 2002 Boston Globe profile recounted.

The secrecy, however, has not gone, nor has the church responded to other realities — that women merit leadership positions, that LGBTQ churchgoers deserve full acceptance as Catholics. The consequences of the institution being slow to change are drastic: According to a 2019 Pew Research survey, roughly one in four Catholics attend Mass less because of the sexual abuse scandal; the majority of those Catholics who do still attend said they don’t hear their leaders speak out against sexual abuse.

I’ve thought about my relationship with Catholicism more deeply in the past few years than I ever did in CCD classes. I’ve spent time reporting on these issues as a journalist. I’ve reflected on the way the church as a whole has often scapegoated churchgoers for the lack of attendance at Mass, rather than addressing the systemic issues that drive people away in the first place. And I’ve come to take comfort in a sentiment expressed by Father Mac, nearly 20 years ago in the Globe profile: “We don’t place our faith in cardinals, popes, or priests. We place our faith in God. The people are the church.”

In each new place I live, I search for a church that offers the community St. Gerard’s once gave me — even as I’m now aware of how complicated it is to be a part of that community. In the days before the pandemic, I’d attend a church in downtown Manhattan where the Mass was filled with music, the coffee hour chaotic with kids weaving around parents’ legs to get to the munchkins. Sometimes, I’d leave feeling melancholy. At 25, I feel as if I’ve outgrown living at home without having quite grown into living on my own, a single person in the pew.

But on most days, I’d leave feeling hopeful. Going to Mass, even in a different city, at an unfamiliar church, reminds me of what I hope to have one day — family, community, place. St. Gerard’s was once that for me, and for many others growing up. And as much as I’d like to save the space for the sake of memories, in the same way I preserve my childhood bedroom, I’d much rather find ways to save how it made me feel. The church, after all, has illustrated the dangers of preserving something purely for tradition.

As Father Mac said, the people are the church, and I hope the sense of belonging that a church, at its best, can foster will be the focus of Canton’s new combined parish, and the parishes we find elsewhere.

Rachael Allen grew up in Canton and is now a writer and high school journalism teacher in New York.

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