He has accused top clergy of misleading the faithful on their rights, of bungling the closings, of failing to evangelize and expand the church.
Parishioners, he says, develop intense relationships with their churches, where they baptize their children and bury their elders, no matter the building’s physical appeal or the parish’s dwindling membership.
“And that,’’ the 72-year-old energy consultant said sternly, “is what these old men in long robes have failed to understand.’’
To the church, he is an ego-driven agitator who has personalized the conflict over painful church closings, relentlessly criticizing top clergy, including Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley, Boston’s archbishop.
“For the past many years, Peter Borré has exhibited a rather strange, almost narcissistic, approach to fighting and harming the church,’’ said Terrence Donilon, a spokesman for the Boston Archdiocese.
Borré’s own faith formed in the crucible of post-World War II Rome, where he spent seven years in a fire-and-brimstone Jesuit school and attended daily Mass while his father worked in Italy. The rules of the church were thoroughly embossed in him; he denies himself communion because his first marriage ended in divorce.
In 2004, after the Boston Archdiocese announced a sweeping plan to merge parishes and close churches, Borré’s activism began with a petition drive against the planned shutdown of his home parish, St. Catherine of Siena in Charlestown.
Over the widening, seven-year fight that followed, Borré has pioneered strategies to combat church closings, standing at the forefront of an evolving relationship between the faithful and their church leaders, said Nick Cafardi, a canon lawyer and law professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.
“The best effect Borré has had is making people aware of their rights in the church and how to protect those rights,’’ Cafardi said.
Borré’s sharp words and hard-nosed tactics, including sit-in vigils (a politic way of describing trespassing inside closed churches), have galvanized parishioners who organized to rescue beloved neighborhood churches.
