Men with a Mission
Roxbury's Redemptorist priests reach out to those in
need in an increasingly diverse neighborhood
By Brian MacQuarrie, Globe Staff, 1/8/2000
Its 215-foot spires still tower over a crowded Roxbury
hilltop, but Mission Church today conjures only memories
for most of Boston's Roman Catholics.
The celebrated voice of its legendary preacher, the Rev. Joseph E.
Manton, has been stilled for a year. And the 20,000 faithful who
once filled its vast sanctuary every week are long-gone ghosts from
another era.
Now, the total attendance at six Sunday Masses might reach
1,000. And many of the congregants are elderly people who either
refused to flee the neighborhood in the 1970s or who drive from
the suburbs to worship near their former homes.
But rather than consign the church to being a sacred museum piece,
the Redemptorist priests who call the top of Mission Hill their home
are making an unprecedented effort to reach out to their vastly
altered parish.
Instead of simply ministering to a dwindled congregation, the
Redemptorists are walking the halls of housing projects, visiting the
sick in nearby hospitals, and making contact with a growing swarm
of college students who live in the community.
It's an effort that many of the city's large Catholic churches are
making to become more relevant to parishioners whose faces, and
even languages, continue to change. And it's an effort that seeks to
identify and ease the day-to-day worries that swirl outside the
church's doors.
''We want to reach out to the whole neighborhood and see where
we can be present in their lives,'' said the Rev. Kevin J. Milton,
who has been pastor of Mission Church since August.
To do that, the church next month will canvass every household in
the parish, an estimated 52,000 of them, in what Milton believes is
an unprecedented effort to determine how his church and its faithful
can help each other.
''This is what evangelization is all about,'' said Milton, 58, a
Brooklyn, N.Y., native. And for the Redemptorists, an
18th-century order founded to minister to the poorest and most
disadvantaged, the work is familiar.
Gerthy Lahens, a native of Haiti, said the effort has fashioned
drastic changes in a church that seemed insular and cold when she
began attending Mass there nine years ago.
''This is a totally new church,'' says Lahens, 47. ''I have a place
where I can talk about my concerns, and where I can sit down and
listen to others.''
Lahens, a mother of four, is part of the change. The sea of
Irish-Americans that once covered Mission Hill has been replaced
by overlapping waves of races and cultures from places as diverse
as Haiti, Brazil, Nigeria, Ethiopia and even small towns across
today's Ireland.
The church's ongoing efforts - a reenergized mission of Mission
Church - have a more modern, sharper focus than the sepia-edge
image that many Bostonians retain of the 131-year-old building
whose official name is the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.
That image is linked to the dozens of crutches clumped in bunches
on the church's pillars, vestiges of people who walked into the
church with a handicap and walked out cured. The tradition of
healing here, first documented in 1883 when a woman inexplicably
recovered from a devastating spinal injury, still lures pilgrims by the
hundreds.
The healing services, led for nearly 30 years by the Rev. Edward J.
McDonough, attract more than 50 worshipers for daily Masses on
Mondays through Saturdays, and nearly 1,000 people at special,
end-of-the-month services.
But physical healing, as McDonough says, is not as important to
the Redemptorists as the ''spiritual well-being'' of the parish.
And, it is there, in a ministry to an increasingly diverse
neighborhood still scarred by the trauma of the Charles Stuart
murder case a decade ago, that its priests say Mission Church is
focused.
''It's like being pastor of the United Nations,'' says Milton, who
said he is ''amazed by Boston'' after spending years in suburban
parishes.
But like the UN, the congregants at Mission Church have had
difficulties finding common ground. Blacks, whites, and Hispanics,
for example, had not made broad connections among each other,
Milton said.
So, in its bid to make the parish a community, the priests enlisted
the help of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, which
devised a strategy to forge personal bonds among parishioners of
varied ethnic stripes.
In meetings that spanned last year's Lenten season, more than 100
parishioners gathered at the church each week to get to know each
other. Further one-on-one connections were made by pulling
names out of a hat and scheduling a chat with that person - whether
at the church, a coffee shop, or a bakery.
''You didn't know if you'd get your best friend or someone from
another culture,'' said Rose Cotrone, 43, who is secretary at the
rectory and has attended Mission Church her entire life.
''Our goal is community organizing,'' said Julia Greene, director of
congregation development for the interfaith organization. And at
Mission Church, as at many churches of differing denominations in
Boston, the most important issue is housing, Greene said.
The church, along with the interfaith group, lobbies for increased
rental subsidies from the state as well as more affordable housing.
For Milton and the lay leaders of his parish, an emphasis on ''social
justice'' is a natural outgrowth of religion's road to self-betterment.
''Before, people were fearful to live in this area because of drugs
and guns,'' Lahens said. But now, Milton added, ''the fear on the
streets is whether `I will have enough money to pay my rent.'''
Mission Church's new outreach campaign could not be delayed,
Milton said. ''In other places, we'd wait until the last white person
had died and then go out'' to recruit new congregants, the pastor
said. ''But they'd say, `You didn't care about us before. Why do
you come to us now?'''
Mission Church, by itself, will continue to attract the faithful and the
sick. But by bringing its mission directly to the neighborhood, the
church is seeking to add something vibrantly current to its legacy.
As McDonough, born in Mission Hill 78 years ago, says of the
church's future: ''I think, in God's plan, there is still a place for this
shrine.''
This story ran on page B01 of the Boston Globe on 1/8/2000.
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