Letters

‘My Church Is Closing’

Posted

To the Editor:

My church is closing. The “Keepers of the Faith” have determined we no longer will be a viable community of faith as of Aug. 1, 2015. So they have produced the business plan and the economics to support this decision. I’ll leave it to others to present the practical and sensible reasons to argue this decision. Mine are the personal and the questioning.

The Archdiocese has been closing hospitals, parochial schools and high schools and now has turned its attention to parishes. This is 2014. Our faith is and has been under constant assault from an antagonistic media and an “enlightened intelligentsia.”

Our faith is being met with hostility from City Hall to Albany to the Oval Office. Our faithful from Nigeria to Syria to Latin America are paying for their faith with their lives.

Is this the time for the Archdiocese to retrench or to retreat or to retire from the defense of the faith? Is this the time to find cover behind the weak talking point that is consolidation? No, it is not.

Visitation parish has been a part of me and I of it for over 40 years. It has been a light in the window and a welcoming table for all those seasons. It has been a place where my faith, along with the faith of fellow parishioners, has been asked to the table to share, to profess and to remember. 

It has been a place stood formal for Communions and confirmations. It has been a place where parents sat proud on a day in June. It has been a place where an infant dressed in lace was brought to the water. It has been a place where we walked our parents or loved ones down the aisle for their final Mass. It has been a place where Msgr. Larkin and Father Jimmy and Father Royson became part of our family.

Most of all it has been a place where each day in Ordinary Time you could see the love and the dignity of people reaching to touch a saint or to light a candle of memory or to quietly finger their beads or to turn their prayer one more time before and after Mass. This is not a business plan. This is our heart. This is our church.

James Dalton

Bronx