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The young guys were finished with their warmups on the basketball court at Ronan Park in Dorchester and getting ready to choose sides for a game. Small problem: They only had nine players on hand. "Hey, Pops, how about making it ten?" one of the players said to an older man who was standing nearby looking on. "Not me,' said the observer, whose thin, lanky frame suggested that he might be able to do a few runs up and down the court. "But thanks; you're just going to have to make do with what you have."
For Reverend Richard "Doc" Conway, BC High, Class of 1955, the invitation to join in a hoops scrimmage with young men from the neighborhood was an affirmation that his Roman collar didn't set him apart from the street life of the parish he served, St. Peter's on Meetinghouse Hill, a gathering place looking out over Boston Harbor that is rich in historical fetch extending back to the founding ofDorchester by the Puritans in 1630.
A bastion of threedecker Roman Catholicism over most of the 20th century that has seen its population shift in the last 40 years as the mostly working-class Irish who had sustained it began to move out and ethnic minorities - African Americans, Hispanics, Vietnamese, Cape Verdeans - moved in, 142-year-old St. Peter's parish has been confronted in recent decades with violence and street crime as the transition firmed up and its church-going congregation, some 25,000 strong as recently as the early 1960s, dwindled to 1,000 or so regular participants 50 years later.
But transitions like the one that has transformed not only St. Peter's but also several other close-by Dorchester parishes into communities of ethnic diversity rarely solidify; change just keeps on coming. And it's that change that "Doc" Conway and his fellow clerics - Catholic, Protestant, urban fundamentalists, to name three - are working day and night to fashion into a positive and uplifting spirit that residents of the Bowdoin Street/Geneva Avenue neighborhood (so named for the east-west, north south axis streets that intersect at the west end ofBowdoin Street) can embrace as a promise for the future.
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