From The New York Times (gift article):
As a gleaming new police and fire headquarters took shape last year in Quincy, Mass., Mayor Thomas Koch prepared to unveil what he considered a perfect finishing touch: towering bronze statues of St. Michael and St. Florian, patron saints of emergency responders, to stand at the building’s entrance.
Intent on his vision of municipal grandeur, Mr. Koch had not sought approval from voters before he commissioned an artist in Italy to craft the 10-foot figures, at a cost of $850,000 in city funds, and booked their trans-Atlantic passage.
Their arrival in Quincy, a diverse city of 100,000 just south of Boston, did not go exactly as he had hoped.
After a local newspaper, The Patriot Ledger, published the mayor’s plans for the statues in an article last year, 200 people showed up at a City Council meeting to voice their displeasure. More than 1,500 signed an online petition opposing the statues’ installation. A group of 19 local clergy members, representing Lutherans, Jews, Methodists, Catholics and other faiths, issued a statement of concern.
“No single religious tradition should be elevated in a publicly funded facility,” they wrote. “Erecting these statues sends a message that there are insiders and outsiders in this community.”
The uproar — which soon led to a lawsuit against the city, filed by a dozen residents and backed by the American Civil Liberties Union — reflected growing frustration with Mr. Koch, who has been mayor since 2008. Once dominated by working-class Italian and Irish immigrants who labored in its granite quarries, Quincy has welcomed waves of Asian immigrants since the 1980s. Nearly half its population is nonwhite, 40 percent of students in its public schools are Asian and the student body speaks more than 60 languages.
Mr. Koch, a Catholic who left the Democratic Party in 2018 over its support of abortion rights, has recently been embroiled in a string of controversies, and has increasingly been seen by critics as tone-deaf and out-of-touch. Last fall, voters ousted five city councilors viewed as his allies; Mr. Koch was not on the ballot.
“People have been digging in their heels, and not making space for newer people,” said Maggie McKee, a newly elected council member who is half Asian and half white. “Now folks who have been here, who have never felt excluded, are seeing some resistance to what they want to do, and it’s very scary and threatening to them.”
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit include a former Catholic who is now an atheist; a Harvard Divinity School graduate; a Jewish resident who said the statues would make her feel “excluded from the ‘in group’”; and a practicing Catholic who said she resents the city for putting her in the uncomfortable position of having to speak out against her own church’s symbols.
