Madrid, Spain - The three priests of the church of San Carlos Borromeo looked on calmly as masked graffiti artists went to work on the facade, painting the message: Don't close our church! Step inside the door!
The silver and black graffiti, painted Wednesday, form part of a growing protest against a plan by Cardinal Antonio María Rouco Varela to close the church, whose priests perform Mass in street clothes and offer Holy Communion with donut-shaped buns or cookies instead of wafers.
"He said our liturgy is not Catholic and our teachings are unorthodox," said Javier Baeza, the senior priest at San Carlos Borromeo, who met with Rouco, the archbishop of Madrid, last week, along with his fellow priests, Enrique de Castro and Pepe Díaz.
The archbishop's antipathy has met with opposition in Entrevías, a working-class suburb of drab housing projects where the local church's role in helping the homeless, drug addicts, former convicts and immigrants has earned it a powerful following. Dozens of neighbors of all age-groups - some church-goers, some not - gathered at the church each day this week in a show of support for the priests.
"If the bishops want to fight, they can come here and fight with me", said Isabel Jiménez, a 70-year-old who was married at San Carlos Borromeo in 1962 and whose children and grandchildren were baptized there. "The Mass here is no different from Mass anywhere else."
What is different is that the priests "talk to you about helping drug addicts," Jiménez said. "There's no sin in that."
Inside, San Carlos Borromeo looks like a combination of a community center and church, with a scuffed tiled floor, wooden pews and neon strip-lights. Its appearance is apt: While used for Mass on Sundays, the church serves each morning as a job center, where unemployed can drop off resumes and get help filling out application forms.
In the afternoons, it runs workshops for social workers and volunteers who work with the needy of the neighborhood. For about 180 people who are homeless or have no fixed abode, the church serves as a postal address that allows them to obtain social benefits.
"This is a place where they help you solve your problems," said Jiménez, sitting on one of the wooden pews. "If we went to another church - a rich people's church - they probably wouldn't even let us in."
In a statement Monday, the cardinal's office said that the church itself was to close and that Caritas, a Roman Catholic charity, would take over the facilities. The priests can continue their social work, the statement said, but parishioners would be assigned to two nearby churches. The archbishop's office did not return calls requesting further comment.
Supporters of Baeza and his fellow priests said the Roman Catholic Church is out of touch with the needs and priorities of ordinary people.
"This is a real church, a church of the people," said Carlos López, a 53-year-old who was drinking in the Prince of Asturias bar around the corner from San Carlos Borromeo - "not one of those churches with all its gold and bishops with hands dripping with rings."
The Roman Catholic Church in Spain is grappling with dwindling numbers of church-goers and feels itself under siege from the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, which has legalized gay marriage and taken steps to further unwind the ties between church and state. A survey of Spanish priests, carried out by the Complutense University in Madrid and published last week, showed 61 percent said they considered Zapatero's government "anticlerical."
Baeza said the church needed to update its rituals in keeping with modern society.
The priests stopped wearing robes at the request of some of the "young guys," he said, because they reminded them of the robes worn by judges in courts of law. They offered cookies instead of wafers at the suggestion of the mothers.
The conservative newspaper ABC wrote in an editorial Thursday that San Carlos Borromeo's work in the community did not justify "flagrant deviations from the liturgy."
"The daily work of thousands of priests, monks and missionaries in some of the world's most inhospitable places shows that it is possible for the church to transmit its message of faith and hope without twisting or changing the essence the liturgy of the Eucharist," the editorial said.
Baeza said the archbishop's decision was indicative of a crisis in the church, which is reacting to its dwindling flock by becoming more dogmatic rather than less.
"The church is going through a dark time. People are moving away from the church, and, ironically, the church reacts by moving away from the people," he said.