{"id":7528,"date":"2004-04-08T07:49:55","date_gmt":"2004-04-08T07:49:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/being_creative.html"},"modified":"2004-04-08T07:49:55","modified_gmt":"2004-04-08T07:49:55","slug":"being_creative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/being_creative.html","title":{"rendered":"Being Creative"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trying to find a way to keep a parish open<\/a><\/p>\n

Some former parishioners of the shuttered St. Francis Xavier Church in downtown Nashua believed they had created the perfect plan to reopen their church: The cash-strapped Manchester Diocese could sell the building to a foundation they formed, which could financially manage the parish under the jurisdiction of the diocese.<\/p>\n

\nMembers of the St. Francis Xavier Church Foundation are not necessarily seeking to have a priest assigned to their church, although they would like to have a Roman Catholic Mass said there once a weekend. Rather, they would like to keep it open as a place of worship, where Roman Catholics could pray the rosary, say the Stations of the Cross, hold Bible studies, and the like. They also would like to restore some of the community service programs once offered, such as day care, health clinics, and classes in English as a second language for the neighborhood’s growing Latino population, who embraced the church in its latter years.<\/p>\n

But foundation members say the diocese has repeatedly rebuffed their yearlong effort, which culminated in February with a formal offer to buy the church for an undisclosed sum. Out of frustration, the foundation and other former parishioners filed a lawsuit in Hillsborough County Superior Court last week, seeking to either have the diocese reopen the church or force it to deed the property over to the foundation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trying to find a way to keep a parish open Some former parishioners of the shuttered St. Francis Xavier Church in downtown Nashua believed they had created the perfect plan to reopen their church: The cash-strapped Manchester Diocese could sell the building to a foundation they formed, which could financially manage the parish under the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nBeing Creative - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/being_creative.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Being Creative - 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7528\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}