Can Politics Save Christianity?

This has been a turbulent Advent season at our Catholic parish. My family and I attend a church in New Haven, Conn., St. Mary's, that was in the care of the Dominican friars for 135 years. But now no longer, because the Archdiocese of Hartford decided that its plans to consolidate New Haven's parishes -- a slew of lovely, fading churches in no-longer-very-Catholic neighborhoods -- required using St. Mary's and its attached residence as a hub for the archdiocese's priests, which in turn required moving the Dominicans somewhere else.