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parish struggling to stay alive. Bowers was so upset he barely got through the liturgy. He was also afraid. Pitting himself against the archbishop would do his career no good. After the service, he opened the floor for discussion. “Let’s pray the rosary,” a woman offered. But people were crying and angry; they needed to talk.
    Rose Mary Piper gave her son-in-law a prod of the elbow: “You shoot offyour mouth about everything under the sun. So say something about this.” Peter Borré rose and suggested they send a petition to the archbishop, asking him to meet with them. People applauded. A haggard Father Bowers said, “You’re volunteering to help?”
    “I just did,” said Borré, a little unsure just why.
    With help from Mary Beth Borré, the lapsed Catholic, Peter and several members of the parish gathered 3,500 signatures. On a warm June day, Peter and two ladies from the parish entered the chancery in Brighton, opposite Boston College. A receptionist sat behind Plexiglas. The tension in the place was palpable. Borré imagined the stress on people here, coming to work over the grueling eighteen months to date. He told the lady they had a petition for the archbishop. She eyed him nervously. Just then a priest entered the foyer. In his mannered way Borré explained the purpose of their visit. “We’re not interested in petitions,” the priest uttered.
    Borré asked what they should do with the petitions. The cleric, whom he recognized as a chancery official, retorted, “You should go fuck yourself.”
    As the priest withdrew, leaving two startled ladies and Borré to swallow his anger, they went out into the summer day. He got behind the wheel of the car, his rage rising like a volcano. He considered Romans the most anticlerical people on earth, a facet of long memory from Pio Nono and the Vatican’s history as an overlord. Borré’s trust in a modern hierarchy buckled. Mary Beth heard the fury in his voice when he called from the car, saying he’d just been f-bombed by a jerk in a Roman collar. In the days that followed he distilled his anger into a plan of attack that would send him back to Rome to confront a power structure he had once held in awe.

CHAPTER 6
    THE CASE OF THE MISSING MILLIONS

    As the Boston vigil protesters dug in, Peter Borré culled advice from sympathetic canon lawyers and drafted an appeal that he sent in early 2005 to the Congregation for the Clergy. His goal was to halt the suppression order, to undo Bishop Lennon’s handiwork. Archbishop O’Malley wanted the protesters to vacate the parishes, but for the prelate who had publicly confessed his agony over the parish closings—asking God to take him on the worst days—calling the cops seemed out of character. His religious order was founded by Francis of Assisi. Having cops arrest people for occupying pews could be a body blow to area Catholics already steeped in bad news about the church.
    As solidarity grew among people in those empty churches, the culture of resistance drew on Catholicism as a tissue of values. The sacred spaces became arenas of family and community reimagined. On Friday nights at St. Frances Cabrini in Scituate, the parish near the sea, the seven-year-old Arnold triplets—Christian, Scott, and Sean—scampered down the aisle in their slippers, knelt before the altar, and lay down in their sleeping bags. 1 Jon and Maryellen Rodgers, leaders of the vigil in Scituate, were mapping plans for a civil lawsuit to wrest ownership of St. Frances Cabrini from the archdiocese.
    “We believe that we control the assets and the liabilities of the parish property,” an archdiocesan spokesman explained to the town newspaper. “The Archbishop understands the anger and pain people are feeling.” 2
    The civil lawsuit failed. The vigil continued.
    At St. James in Wellesley, which sat on eight acres worth $14 million, vigil leader Suzanne Hurley evinced a rough pragmatism: “Once churches close, the towns can send tax