Congregation to USCCB: Parish mergings aren't suppressions!

A fascinating news story from Amy: The text of a letter sent to Bishop Skylstad from the Congregation for the Clergy (I presume) regarding some seriously botched canon law practices in the U.S.:

Your Excellency,

This Congregation deems it opportune to write to you regarding the closure of parishes in the dioceses of the United States, since in recent times certain dioceses have wrongly applied canon 123 CIC and stating that a parish has been "suppressed" when in reality it has been merged or amalgamated.

"...only with great difficulty, can one say that a parish becomes extinct. A parish is extinguished by the law itself only if no Catholic community any longer exists in its territory, or if no pastoral activity has taken place for a hundred years (can. 120 #1). When a parish is "suppressed" by competent authority in reality the still existing community of Christ's faithful is actually "merged" into the neighboring community of Christ's faithful and constitutes a larger community, and the territory of the extinguished parish is added to the other, forming a larger territorial unit. While the parish church and the physical parish plant may be closed and the name of a particular parish extinguished, the spiritual needs of the portion of the Faithful which once constituted that parish, must continue to be provided for in accord with their rights in law."

"...Often when a bishop calls his action a "suppression" it is in reality a merger of two communities of Christ's faithful."

"...Thus the goods and liabilities should go with the amalgamated juridic person, and not to the diocese. This would also seem to be more consonant with the requirement that the wishes of the founders, benefactors and those who have acquired rights be safeguarded, In most cases "suppressions" are in reality a "unio extinctiva" or "amalgamation" or "merger" and as such the goods and obligations do not pass to the higher juridic person, but should pertain to the public juridic person which remains or emerges from the extinctive union. The goods and liabilities should go to the surviving public juridic person, that is the enlarged parish community."

In conclusion, this Congregation notes that the erroneous use of can. 123 in the dioceses of the United States is not uncommon and therefore asks Your Excellency to bring this matter to the attention of the individual bishop members of the Episcopal Conference. [full letter available at Amy's]

Now, if I am reading this correctly, parish mergers are a two-way street: the parishes that take over the territory previously served by the first parish acquire the "goods and liabilites" of that closed parish - even if in practice most the time there are mostly goods to be had. Either way, this letter is a very interesting safeguarding of subsidiarity at the local church level by the Congregation for Clergy.