Hosanna! The Rededication of the Church of St. Francis Xavier

I wish that I were in the neighborhood.  I would love to find a spiritual home like this.

In 2007 I was in the neighborhood. Through volunteer work with New York Cares I found myself in the basement of the Church of St Francis Xavier one Sunday morning preparing food for a portion of Manhattan's hungry, and, lo and behold, caught a glimpse of that good fellow Jesus. Shortly thereafter I saw him again in the upper room (Xavier's Mary Chapel), somewhere in the warmth of the small group of parishioners gathered for 7:45 a.m. weekday Mass, in Fr George's sharing of Arrupe's prayer, ''Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything'' and of Rahner's understanding of the fundamental option, somewhere also in Fr Rocco's dynamic preaching, and later still in the quizzical air of Fr Peter's narrow-eyed response to my desire to confess and live as a Catholic: ''Well, how evil have you been?'' You must watch out for these Jesuits. You see, they will help reel you in from the deep and plant you in a new field, and in Xavier's case, plant you in very good company.

“I know what you mean about being repulsed by the church when you have only the Mechanical-Jansenist Catholic to judge it by. I think that the reason such Catholics are so repulsive is that they don’t really have faith but a kind of false certainty. They operate by the slide rule and the Church for them is not the body of Christ but the poor man’s insurance system. It’s never hard for them to believe because actually they never think about it. Faith has to take in all the other possibilities it can.”   Flannery O’Connor
 
 
Faith = prayer + righteous deeds.    Dietrich Bonhoeffer
 
 
“Faith is about relationships; it's not about the rules.”   Bp Joseph Galante of Camden, N.J.

Lovely piece, but for those of us who don't live in the Big Apple, where is St. Francis Xavier? Just curious.
 

For all of Dolan's magnanimity, there was a steep price for the parish to pay.  He "suggested" that they not march in the annual Gay Pride Parade under their parish banner, as they have done in the past.
 
Here is the pastor's press release:  
http://www.sfxavier.org/documents/Gay_Pride_March.pdf
 
The same thing happened to Most Holy Redeemer parish in San Francisco under the "suggestion" of Archbishop Niederauer.

Today is the final mass at St. Emeric's, an historic Hungarian church on Cleveland's West Side. It is the last (hopefully) of 50 churches closed this year in the Diocese of Cleveland, most of which were in the city's urban core. As glorious as St. Francis Xavier's rededication is, I remain disappointed that the Church's presence has been lost in a place so in need of it.

While I'm glad that people have found a spiritual "home" at St. Francis, and while I understand that we are all sinners and rely on the mercy and grace of God...I fail to understand why dissenting catholics don't just leave the church.  Protestants do it all the time.