“This would be something that comes up from the ground, not something imposed’’ by church leaders, said Monsignor William P. Fay, pastor of St. Columbkille in Brighton and cochairman of the Archdiocesan Planning Commission.
The exact number of teams and the way parishes are to be grouped together have not been announced, but most teams would oversee two or three parishes. Each parish would retain its own name and identity, though parishes within a group would probably share some staff members, as well as their pastor.
Church officials said yesterday that the plan would, in time, lead to a reduction in the archdiocese’s roughly 3,000 employees.
The introduction of the plan Monday will kick off months of consultations and fine tuning before any reorganization would be put into effect. If the final plan is approved by O’Malley, the changes would take three to five years to implement, Fay said.
Church closings are a prickly subject in the Boston Archdiocese, which is still dealing with vigil protests at several churches that were closed as part of a merger plan in 2004.
Peter Borre, head of a group of parishioners who are appealing church closings to the Vatican’s highest court, said the new push toward “economies of scale’’ within parish clusters will put some more churches in jeopardy of shutting down.
“Inevitably this will mean recommendations for the closing of surplus churches within the superparish,’’ he said by e-mail.
The reorganization, years in the making, is the archdiocese’s response to a long list of recent challenges: falling Mass attendance, shrinking revenues, a shortage of priests and of lay people willing to serve professionally in the parishes, and the inevitability that pastors are going to be required to take on responsibility for more than one parish, according to a written explanation sent to priests by the archdiocese.
