Barbara Pivonski was devastated when she learned in May that the Archdiocese of Baltimore intends to dissolve St. Clare of Essex Catholic Church, the parish she has attended for years, as part of its plan to shrink its physical footprint in Baltimore and a few nearby suburbs.

For one thing, the retired teacher said, the church she and her fellow congregants are being asked to join, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, lacks the degree of handicap access St. Clare has provided its congregants for years — and that means some won’t be able to attend the new church at all.

“Our Lord taught us not to leave anyone behind,” she said. “If my whole church family can’t go to the new church, I don’t feel I should be going either.”

Now Pivonski is doing something about the situation. She’s a member of one of at least six groups of Baltimore-area Catholics who have filed formal appeals to try to get the decision to close their parishes reversed.

In doing so, the groups exercised an option laid out in canon law, the administrative code of the Catholic Church.

When an archdiocese or diocese wishes to close a parish for what church law describes as “just cause,” it must inform that parish of its plan in a formal letter and send a decree detailing its reasoning along with it.

Archbishop William E. Lori, the leader of the Baltimore archdiocese, sent such letters and decrees Sept. 29 to 31 parishes in and around Baltimore. All are to be closed, or reduced to part-time status as “worship sites,” as part of Seek the City to Come, an archdiocesan restructuring plan that calls for slashing the number of parishes in the city and a few adjacent suburbs from 61 to 30 to deal with shrinking revenues and soaring costs.

The letters notified the parishes they would be closed Dec. 1 — and that parishioners had until Oct. 11 to file appeals.

It’s unclear how many of the 31 congregations took the long-shot measure. Christian Kendzierski, a spokesman for the archdiocese, said more than two dozen appeal letters had arrived at diocesan headquarters and more were likely in the mail, but the number is inconclusive, as multiple members may submit appeals on a parish’s behalf.

Only a few of the more than two dozen lay Catholics from whom The Baltimore Sun sought comment responded, and of those, only Pivonski agreed to speak on the record. But The Sun has independently confirmed six parishes whose members did file.

Four are in Baltimore City: St. Ann’s and St. Wenceslaus Catholic churches in East Baltimore, St. Mary of the Assumption in Govans, and Shrine of the Sacred Heart in Mount Washington. Two others — St. Clare in Essex and St. Pius X in Towson — are in Baltimore County.

The Seek the City plan calls for all six to be closed by merger with new, geographically larger parishes it has established. St. Joseph’s Monastery would become a worship site within a larger parish seated at Our Lady of Victory two miles away.

The parishes’ buildings will remain open and available only for certain sacramental celebrations, including baptisms, weddings and funerals and special Masses, until they’re sold or repurposed, Kendzierski said. None will offer regular Masses beyond Nov. 24.

The changes will take place Dec. 1, Kendzierski added, even as the appeals process goes forward.

Robert Flummerfelt, a Las Vegas-based canon law attorney who helped parishioners at St. Pius X craft their appeals, said his clients’ hopes are understandable.

“I know from respecting and representing the parishioners that their position is not unreasonable,” he said, “and that they are trying to save something dear and special to them and their Catholic faith — their parish that they have devoted their time, talent and treasure to for years, and where they have experienced various key milestones in their faith and personal lives.”

“We are a vibrant faith community that desires to remain open and be part of the Evangelization plan of the Archdiocese,” elaborated Margie Brassil, a St. Pius X parishioner, in a brief email to The Sun.

Should Lori turn appellants down at the local level, they have the option under canon law of pursuing their cases at two successive levels of the church in Rome — the Dicastery for the Clergy, a department of the Vatican, and the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura, the highest judicial authority in the Roman Catholic Church other than the pope. Each has been known to take months to render a decision.

But successes do happen. More than a dozen parishes designated for closure in the Archdiocese of St. Louis as part of All Things New, a restructuring plan similar to Seek the City to Come, filed appeals to Rome last year. The Vatican bodies canceled closures in three cases.

Five of the Baltimore parishes that submitted appeals, meanwhile, worked with Save Rome of the West, a small Massachusetts-based law firm, in composing their letters.

That firm’s lead attorney, Brody Hale, a canonical consultant, has worked to keep Catholic parishes targeted for closure intact for 20 years, always pro bono. He recently helped win a case involving the Diocese of Joliet.

The leader of that Illinois diocese, Bishop Ronald Hicks, had opted to merge St. Joseph Parish, a historically Slovenian church in Joliet, with three other less thriving parishes. The Dicastery for the Clergy overturned his order last month.

Brody said it was one of only eight occasions he knows of when a decision to close has been reversed — though he finds it encouraging that six of those have happened in the past year.

“It’s not necessarily because any of the cases lack merit, but it’s an incredibly high bar,” he said.

To hear Hale and his assistant, canonical consultant Jordan Bolte, tell it, it’s easy to understand why so few appeals succeed. They see the situation as stacked against challengers.

For one thing, it can take unusual courage, as those who consider challenging church rulings must weigh the possibility of disapproval from fellow parishioners or church officials.

Then there’s the time element.

Lori announced the launch of Seek the City to Come in September 2022. He and church officials worked with a private consultant and met with thousands of lay Catholics and clergy members over the next 20 months to develop a plan they hope will increase the vitality of church operations through reduction, much in the way pruning a tree directs more energy to the branches not cut away.

“I hope that this lays the foundation for what the prophet Jeremiah calls a future full of hope,” Lori said after the archdiocese published its final plan on May 22. “It’s a move away from putting most of our energy into aging buildings, into leaky plumbing, I-beams in danger of collapsing, and roofs long beyond their capacity, and into having a manageable number of parishes really equipped to provide all the services that parishioners themselves have told us they want.”

The archdiocese did notify the parishes in May that it would issue the decrees in late September and grant 12 days — two days longer than the minimum 10 days required by canon law — for parishioners to compose appeals.

Finishing the appeals within that short window was a stiff challenge, said Bolte, like Hale a practicing Catholic.

The archdiocese had between May and September, Bolte said, to write decrees for each parish it selected for closure. The documents point out issues that officials believe make a parish untenable moving forward.

In the case of St. Clare, Lori wrote “Mass attendance had declined from an average of 903 in 2014 to 330 in 2022, baptisms had plummeted from 62 to 12 during the same span, offertory totals were too low to meet the necessary proportion of maintenance costs, and there’s a church (Mount Carmel) only 1.7 miles away.”

A major problem many dioceses face, Bolte said, is that they lack experience in such matters. A successful appeal should cite canon law in specifically addressing each point — and too few parishioners are aware that they must live within a parish’s geographic territory to have canonical standing to appeal.

Even improper formatting can give church officials grounds to dismiss a case — and having such a tight deadline makes it even harder to craft an effective letter.

“Anybody can file an appeal, but trying to do it without help is like trying to perform brain surgery from a YouTube video,” said Bolte, adding that he and Hale worked long hours throughout the week before the deadline to get it done.

Flummerfelt said all the St. Pius group is seeking with this first letter is to secure an in-person meeting with archdiocese officials so they can discuss alternatives to closure.

Pivonski said the letter she helped write for St. Clare refutes many of the points the archdiocese has raised. For one thing, she said, the attendance figures Lori cited include the coronavirus pandemic years, when attendance was low everywhere, and don’t incorporate 2023 or this year, when the church has seen marked growth in part due to its successful integration of the growing number of Hispanic Catholics in the area.

She worked long hours over the months gathering that kind of information, she said, with guidance from Save Rome of the West, and over the last few days before the due date.

After hand-delivering a copy to archdiocese headquarters, she said she was so exhausted she would have loved to take a few days off but called the effort more than worthwhile.

“The bottom line,” she said, “is we wanted to be heard.”

Have a news tip? Contact Jonathan Pitts at jpitts@baltsun.com, 410-332-6990 and x.com/@jonpitts77.