A lawyer for the Archdiocese of Boston on Wednesday asked a state appeals court to find that parishioners who have staged a decade-long vigil intended to stop the closure of their church were trespassing and could be ordered out.
St. Frances Xavier Cabrini is the last of a half-dozen Boston-area Roman Catholic churches that parishioners have occupied 24 hours a day, seven days a week, since 2004 when the archdiocese listed it among some 70 parishes to be closed in a restructuring.
The archdiocese ordered the closure of the church, located on a 30-acre (12-hectare) plot on the waterfront in Scituate, about 30 miles (48 km) southeast of Boston, in a round of cost-cutting dating to the early days of the Catholic church's clergy sex abuse scandal.
Parishioners argue that under church law they have a right to be in the church and an ownership stake in the property, which was built in the 1960s using funds donated by church members. They also have appealed the closing repeatedly to the Vatican, and on Wednesday asked a three-judge panel to delay any decision until their appeal under church law is final.
"The defendants continue to claim that this is actually an ecclesiastical matter and of course it is not," said William Dailey, an attorney representing the archdiocese. "We have to have an order from our state court indicating that the defendants in this case are trespassing."
A Massachusetts Superior Court judge in June ordered an end to the long occupation, saying the remaining parishioners had shown "a stubborn refusal to accept the reality of final decisions of the courts."
Mary Elizabeth Carmody, an attorney representing the parishioner's group, The Friends of St. Frances X. Cabrini Inc, argued that the judge who issued the June order violated the parishioners' rights by not agreeing to wait until they had exhausted all their appeal options in church courts.
"When the court excluded the evidence of canon law under church ownership, he committed a violation of the First Amendment," Carmody said. The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects the right to free expression.
The judges made no immediate ruling.
Other groups that had occupied parishes have since abandoned their vigils or lost in the courts.
Several dozen parishioners attended Wednesday's hearing. Among them was Jon Rogers, who heads the friends organization, and contended that parishioners owned the church because they had paid to build and maintain it for more than a half-century.
"If we lose this, we are just hourly renters in these beautiful buildings we've built," Rogers said in an interview. "We were told this was our church."
The decision to shutter the church and others like it dates to the early days of the sex abuse scandal, when investigations showed that church leaders had covered up charges of priests sexually abusing children, moving ministers into new positions when accusations were made.
The scandal prompted dozens of lawsuits by abuse survivors, which cost the U.S. church billions of dollars and drove some prominent dioceses into bankruptcy.