By Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine - Every closing of a church is a knife to the heart of a real human community. Here the people feel it more keenly perhaps than in America. There was no school till the Church made one. There were no groups for social welfare till the Church organized them, formally or informally. You did more than meet your neighbors at Mass. The Mass made you more than neighbors: fellow travelers on the way to the four last things. That was an especially powerful thing, perhaps, for people who lived always on a strand hung between life and death—who made their living on the bountiful but cold and perilous north Atlantic.