{"id":7706,"date":"2004-03-16T23:06:13","date_gmt":"2004-03-16T23:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/when_churches_disappear.html"},"modified":"2004-03-16T23:06:13","modified_gmt":"2004-03-16T23:06:13","slug":"when_churches_disappear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/when_churches_disappear.html","title":{"rendered":"When Churches Disappear"},"content":{"rendered":"

An analysis from a political scientist in the Globe<\/a><\/p>\n

The virtues of such hierarchy and authority were never clearer than in the last decades of the 20th century. As white Catholics began leaving the city in increasing numbers, many urban parishes struggled to pay bills, repair roofs, and fill their pews. In some parishes, Haitians and Vietnamese and Hispanics resuscitated the old churches and sent their children to the parish schools. Since the 1960s, successive archbishops of Boston have committed the archdiocese to subsidizing parishes that could no longer support themselves. Just when synagogues and many Protestant churches relocated out of the city or closed their doors entirely, Catholic parishes stayed and helped stabilize neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

….Suburban towns gain identity from an overlapping web of institutions, all of which reinforce the boundaries of their community — public schools, churches and synagogues, firehouses, police stations, town halls, libraries, shopping districts. In most of the compact neighborhoods of Boston, though, only the parish has been a reliable anchor of community life. Tearing down parish boundaries threatens the integrity of countless neighborhoods. “If we had to close,” a St. Peter’s parishioner told a reporter from the Globe last month, “the people in this neighborhood would have nowhere to go. At this church, it’s not just a matter of going to Mass.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An analysis from a political scientist in the Globe The virtues of such hierarchy and authority were never clearer than in the last decades of the 20th century. As white Catholics began leaving the city in increasing numbers, many urban parishes struggled to pay bills, repair roofs, and fill their pews. In some parishes, Haitians…<\/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-7706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nWhen Churches Disappear - 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\/03\/when_churches_disappear.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"When Churches Disappear - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"An analysis from a political scientist in the Globe The virtues of such hierarchy and authority were never clearer than in the last decades of the 20th century. 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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\/7706","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=7706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7706\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}