To the Editor:

In the March 11 Reporter, Regional Vicar Nicholas Ciccone described his difficult assignment recommending which Dorchester parishes to close. I appreciate his efforts to meet that challenge. However, there are two statements from the Vicar that I, as Roman Catholic and an American, find deeply troubling.

I write in part because I suspect that opinions like the Vicar's may be widely held throughout the Church. By reviewing his statements I hope to demonstrate that his recommendation for my own parish, Saint Mark's, is mistaken, and because misconceptions like his are harmful to the Church in general.

Defending his decision to recommend closure of St. Mark's and St. Wlliam's, the Vicar said, "The ethnic makeup of the parishes involved wasn't a consideration." I believe that, for thoughtful Catholics, for thoughtful leaders of any religious faith, the ethnic makeup of communities may not always be a determining factor, but it must always be a consideration.

Racism and its consequences--discrimination, segregation, and xenophobia--are thriving across the world, in America, and here in Boston. A century and a half after the Civil War, with some blessed exceptions, most of us still live in segregated communities, neighborhoods, and workplaces, and racism still causes injustice, pain, and suffering among many people on a daily basis. For a hundred years our reluctance to face this in America has been a devastating problem. For two thousand years, as recounted in James Carroll's book Constantine's Sword: the Church and the Jews, this has been a major failing of our Church. I believe that in our hearts we know this reluctance is wrong, and in the Gospels and in general history, we can read it is wrong.

The United States is a diverse society where democracy and equal rights are in some ways marvelously realized, but in other ways sadly mere potentialities. If we assume, as Father Ciccone does, that the ethnic makeup of our communities is irrelevant, then we turn our backs on measurable evidence of racism and we turn our backs on perceiving which communities succeed and which fail to combat racism.

When we find groups whose members are racially and economically diverse and manage to live and work together in harmony, it means that they are working at building community. At Saint Mark's, I've witnessed the long-term success of one-to-one conversation campaigns, the meticulous process of identifying community consensus, and parishionersí subsequent implementations of their own grassroots actions to address issues like housing, education, ESL, citizenship, voter registration, and local economic development. This is strong evidence of community building and how it defeats racism. In my opinion, such work is a crucial aspect of spreading the message of the Gospels. And communities who do this good work are true leaders of the Church. Those communities, more than any individuals, show us the way to a better future.

The Regional Vicar suggested that closing St. Mark's "could enrich other parishes and the wider community, by spreading diversity elsewhere, and by allocating financial and personnel resources to other church activities." These two assertions display gaps in understanding.

First, community diversity is based on trust, the result of real relationships and real communication. It is a delicate spiritual commodity, built with intention and effort over time. You don't just "spread" it like butter on bread. Perhaps the Vicar did not know that the community-building work done at St. Mark's is a model for Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish communities across the United States, and that St. Mark's is written about and talked about in classrooms and seminars across the country. Would it be a good idea to close Harvard in order to enrich the other colleges and universities of Boston? Scholars would agree that my analogy is not far-fetched.

Finally, the Vicar spoke about reallocating resources. In addition to constituting a working laboratory for growing democracy and understanding, at another more basic level St. Mark's is yet something more. It's a real community, a kind of family whose strength does not come from what property they own, or from their jobs or social positions, but from their personal relationships with one another. What is most valuable at St. Mark's can not be dismantled and distributed elsewhere like so many bricks or so many dollars. Rather, it is something beautiful and quietly powerful that will evaporate if we, the Church, do not take care to protect and nurture it for the future.

We look to Archbishop O'Malley to identify a plan for the future of the Diocese including its financial well being, and surely we must all be ready to make sacrifices to support the implementation of that plan. But what is now recommended is the complete "suppression" of a lively, forward-looking community that is financially sound and spiritually courageous. Saint Mark's is a viable model for our Church, a church that needs such models. I hope the Archbishop does not suppress Saint Mark's, but instead looks to it as a partner in charting our Church's course into the future.

-Paul Dobbs
Dorchester