Duncan Black on community and class. The passage he quotes is underlined.

Commitment
No way I could let this one pass.

Outside, on steep, narrow Conarroe Street, there were more tears, some anger and shrugs of resignation.

"I don't know where I'm going" next, said Carl Hood, who recalled with bitterness the words of a nun who tried to reassure him a few weeks ago that the church was "only a building."

"It's not a building, it's a family," said Hood, a member of St. Mary's for 40 years. He said he expected to be treated as a "stepchild" at the next parish he and his wife join.

Several parishioners were emphatic they would not join St. John's, whose brownstone steeple towers above the hillside community, because its parishioners had "looked down" on Catholics from the other Manayunk parishes when they were young.

"We'll be second class," said an usher who did not give his name. "And besides, they've got no parking."

In the late 1990s Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua initiated a review process known as "cluster planning," in which all the parishes of the archdiocese were asked to study their own viability and that of neighboring parishes and make recommendations about which should be closed.

Bevilacqua closed or merged about a dozen parishes, but in many cases abided by the wishes of anguished parishioners to keep their small churches open.

Based only on the above you might say that Atrios is oblivious, but he's done it before.

I'm not religious; there have been no Catholics in my family for 300 years; I haven't owned a car in 25.