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TV & Film Work |
Scenes from a Parish,
Four years ago, Paul O’Brien, a young Catholic priest, arrived at Saint Patrick’s Parish on the city’s south side. His new church had always been an Irish-American enclave, but that had begun to change. The Harvard-educated priest announced his intention to “embrace multiculturalism in all its forms” and pledged to build a safe place for all parishioners.
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Life in Lawrence, Massachusetts is hard. The former mill city north of Boston is the poorest in the state. Unemployment rates hover at twice the national average; three out of four children are at risk for hunger. After five decades of Latino, and more recently Asian immigration, Anglo citizens are now a minority in a city rife with language barriers and ethnic tension.
Father O’Brien had inherited a divided congregation. The church had added Spanish and Vietnamese Masses, which some parishioners viewed as an affront to the American ideal of assimilation. Feeling they had lost their city and now their church, they fled to parishes in other cities and towns.