Kevin Cullen, a columnist for the Boston Globe, writes about the situation at St. Mary’s Chapel in Casa Maria Apartments on Endicott Street. This is the first Christmas since the chapel closed a few months ago.
St. Mary’s has just one Mass a week, on Saturdays, and Christmas falls on a Saturday this year, and so there would be the bells of St. Mary’s this Christmas, even if was just the memory of the bells in St. Mary’s steeple, torn down 33 years ago. A lot of the older residents at Casa Maria remember those bells.
But St. Mary’s chapel closed, abruptly, a couple of months ago and it won’t be open for Christmas, if ever.
The Franciscan priests at St. Leonard’s Church on Hanover Street have been serving St. Mary’s since the Jesuits left more than a decade ago. But the Rev. Antonio Nardoianni, the pastor at St. Leonard’s, told the people at St. Mary’s that conflicts with the management of the apartment building and a shortage of priests forced him to end the weekly Mass.
