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“I’ll be there to help you over,
If you lose your way, if you lose your faith
When your time is through my final wish for you
Is to count your blessings not your regrets.”
– “I Will Pray for You”
When Music Director Kara McEachern finished a soaring solo of “I Will Pray for You” at the last Sunday Mass at St. Francis of Assisi Parish on June 22, the nearly full congregation at the small West End church started clapping.
It’s not that applause is unknown in Catholic churches — it happens after liturgical celebrations sometimes and of course at occasions like weddings and funerals.
But still. It was something to see and hear the largely elderly St. Francis congregants moved with such emotion to the lyrics of the modern-day ballad. The song recounts the story of a person who is praying for another as they travel through all the ins and outs of life.
A place where others prayed for you is essentially what St. Francis of Assisi Church has been to its New Bedford parishioners these past 92 years.
The parishioners talk about it being St. Francis where they were baptized, received their First Communion and Confirmation, got married and buried their dead. It was at St. Francis where their family went to Christmas Mass and where the volunteer ushers passed the collection baskets for many years.
Father Mike Racine, a New Bedford guy who will be the last pastor of St. Francis, got at the importance of ritual to Catholics in his goodbye homily.
“As Catholics,” he said, “we are creatures of habit.” Coming to church, we park in the same space, come and go by a certain door, sit in a certain pew that has occupied us our whole life. The rituals of Catholic ceremonies, of course, are even more deeply meaningful than the mundane habits, with the Mass and other ceremonies existing as people’s connections to the Almighty. So moving away from a church where you have worshipped most of your life is no small thing.
Founded for the small Italian-American community in New Bedford in the 1930s, St. Francis of Assisi Church had begun life as the home of a small Protestant evangelical association 20 years earlier. In 1938, however, it became a place where Italian traditions could take precedence in a city where the big Catholic churches had been dominated by the customs of the larger Irish and Portuguese and French-Canadian populations.
Perhaps nowhere is the story of New Bedford Italian Catholics told better than in the stained glass windows of the modest white-clapboard church building.
One big window, of course, is devoted to the patron, the beloved Italian saint of all things humble — St. Francis of Assisi. Other windows depict the “Blessed Mother” and “St. Joseph,” the guiding icons of Catholic family life.
But St. Francis Church also has full-scale windows devoted to particular Italian saints like Anthony of Padua (patron of lost and found items and known for his miracles), Catherine of Siena (a doctor of the church who along with St. Francis is the patron saint of Italy) and even Maria Goretti, a 12-year-old Italian girl who was stabbed to death in 1902 as she resisted the intended rape of a neighbor.
As the years went by, many of the city’s Italians, as they became second and third-generation Americans, either moved to the suburbs or out of the region. St. Francis of Assisi Church evolved from being a little Italian parish to being a small, intimate parish for anyone at all who preferred its small-scale Masses and up-close-and-personal interactions with its priests.
In fact, St. Francis hasn’t had an Italian pastor since the 1970s, when Father Ronald Toste is credited with the still handsome renovation of the church. Before St. Francis closed last week, Father Racine put together a list of all its pastors, and since Toste, they have mostly been Irishmen.
The church has remained a popular spot for New Bedford Catholics for a long while, including prominent ones, even as some larger churches across the city had to close.
St. Francis, however, continued even as city Catholics said goodbye to St. Anne’s, St. John the Baptist, St. Joseph-St. Therese’s and others. The parish’s fine choir, ably led by McEachern and organist Diana Henry, regularly filled up its small sanctuary with moving music that seemed to almost envelop the attendees in comfort and coziness.
For many years, St. Francis was also known for the informal, down-to-earth ways of pastors like Revs. Kevin Harrington and Racine, who spoke in homey, off-the-cuff manners, rather than through more formal sermons.
Father Kevin, who led the church for many years immediately before Racine, was an off-beat character with a mischievous sense of humor. He had a way of bringing humanity to modern Catholicism, delivering homilies as if he had just sat down for a beer with you and wanted you to know how Catholic theology fit into your life.
Harrington’s sudden death just six months after he retired in 2020 deprived the parish of his continued presence as a readily available fill-in priest. Like other retired Catholic priests these days, Harrington had helped Father Racine with the burdens of Masses even as he entered his seventies.
It’s no secret there has long been a priest shortage in America.
Another retired New Bedford priest who helped Racine, Rev. Robert Powell, a retired pastor at St. Lawrence, also suddenly became unavailable. He was reassigned to Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, an ethnic Polish parish in the North End, after its pastor also died suddenly, the year after Harrington. That church itself ended up closing after a few months.
As the number of Catholic priests has dwindled, Racine, like others in the Fall River Diocese, has headed up what’s called a parish collaborative, the three-church Whaling City Catholic Community, which along with St. Francis also included Holy Name of the Sacred Heart and St. Lawrence Martyr churches and parishes.
But things were not the same for parishioners. With one priest for three churches, St. Francis went from two Masses, 4 p.m. Saturday Vigil Mass and 10 a.m. Sunday, to one Sunday Mass at 9 a.m. Saturday Mass at St. Lawrence’s was replaced by an 11:30 a.m. Sunday Mass.
If you wanted a 4 p.m. or 10 a.m. Mass, you had to go a few miles north, in a different part of town, to Holy Family. It was one church collaborative but not one building.
With fewer Catholics attending Mass and three Catholic churches to choose from in the West End, eventually the numbers at St. Francis began to decline. By the time it closed there were only about 65 regular Mass attendees left, and Bishop Edgar Da Cunha decided to close the little church on Mill Street.
To be fair, the burdens of a three-church collaborative with one priest are great. There were times Racine said he had to say a Mass at St. Francis and then run quickly over to Holy Name to say the next one. Sometimes, if he couldn’t get help, he did three Masses in one weekend.
Father Racine, who is being reassigned back to Freetown, where he was previously posted at St. Bernard’s, this time will take over two parishes in the suburban town north of New Bedford.
Thirty years a priest this year, Racine is philosophical about the closings and the collaboratives. Well aware of the bad feelings of some, in his last homily, Father Racine quoted to the St. Francis parishioners Helen Keller’s comments about the benefits that inevitably come from life’s change as well as the sadness. “When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but we tend to dwell so long at the closed door that we fail to see the doors that can be opened for us,” Keller said.
St. Lawrence Martyr, a grand Catholic structure built by the city’s Irish immigrants as their numbers swelled, is just down the street from St. Francis’. These days, Father Racine said, it is home to a growing number of Cabo Verdean parishioners, and he asked the St. Francis parishioners to consider joining them. He complimented the St. Francis group for the joint programs they have already run with St. Lawrence in the Whaling City Catholic collaborative.
The truth, however, is that some of the St. Francis folks are more likely to end up at nearby suburban parishes. St. Francis has not really been a geographically-oriented parish for a while now.
A city that was home to 20 Catholic churches when St. Francis opened in 1938 now has only eight left. Just since 1999, no less than 10 Catholic churches, small and large, have closed in New Bedford. Society and the Church change and grow, and it’s a different Catholic Church and a different America 60 years after Vatican 2.
With the closing of St. Francis, a door has closed to those who loved its homey ways. As Father Racine said, another door of happiness will surely open to its parishioners. But it may take time.
Bishop Edgar Da Cunha will celebrate one final Mass at St. Francis of Assisi Church at 6 p.m. on Friday, August 15, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Jack Spillane is a columnist for The New Bedford Light.
Dear New Bedford Light,
Thank you for the beautiful eulogy for St. Francis of Assisi Church. While it shone a light on the current state of the parish, I wanted to add a bit of historical, familial history.
The church was founded by several Italian-immigrant families, including my grandparents, Luigi and Elvira Balestracci, and for many years it served, along with the Italian-American Mutual Aid Society , aka “the Italian Club,” as a hub for the small, West-End-centered Italian-American community in New Bedford. The last of the previous generation of Balestraccis passed a couple of years ago, and that, along with all the other funerals of that generation, was held at St. Francis. When I saw that the diocese had decided to “supress” St. Francis I was sad but not surprised, and wrote the following to my cousins.
“I suppose it’s a good thing that our parents’ generation are all gone–this announcement would certainly have killed them. They all put a huge amount of energy into that church and its community…, so much of the locus of my–of all of our–childhood was at St Francis and Aunt Mary’s house.”
Throughout the 1960s and most of the ‘70s the children and grandchildren of Luigi and Elvira all lived within an approximate two-mile radius of St. Francis of Assisi Church. Most of us went to Thomas R. Rodman Elementary School; baby and bridal showers, anniversary celebrations, and funeral repasts were held in the upstairs room at the Italian Club while the men played bocce outside or poker in its cheroot-smoke-filled cellar.
In the days before Saturday masses were an option, most of the Balestracci clan were guaranteed to be at Sunday-morning mass at St. Francis, with coffee and pastry afterwards at Aunt Mary’s house–Mary Johnson, nee Balestracci–located across the street from the church on Newton Street. Many hours were spent there, in the house and on the front porch, with children playing while the adults were discussing more grown-up topics.
During mass the “kids” all sat in the front row of the old church, watched over by Mrs. Danieli, whose mink stole was redolent of her perfume and Mr. Danieli’s cheroot smoke. Assunta Bastoni, my Nonna’s cousin, sat with Mrs. Danieli to keep us quiet. The older men stood in the back of the church, under the old choir loft and next to the confessional, and would duck out as soon as communion was finished, and before the “Ite missa est.” One time, Peter Bacelli and the two Bastoni boys were serving mass and something made them laugh. Father Forni gave them a real death stare and made them leave the altar. This was serious business!
With Mary’s house being almost an extension of the church itself, the various clergy became surrogate members of the family: Fathers Forni, Annunziato, Zichello, Tosti, and even Father Sullivan (who grew up across the street from Bap and Elsie Balestracci’s first apartment on Reynold St. in the North End). When an Italian exchange student from Como, Anna Colli, was living with Dr. Jenney and his family over on Hawthorn Street, she spent many hours with me, her New Bedford High School classmate, at our house on Kempton Street, as well as with the extended Balestraccig family at church and in our homes.
We were all baptized, received our first communion, and were confirmed at St. Francis, quite a few of us were married there, and many, certainly those of our parents’ generation, were buried from the humble “little Italian church.” We all participated in catechism classes, Christmas tableaux, sang in the choir, the boys served as acolytes (girls needed not apply back in those days!), and asked the priests hard questions (“Father, what is adultery?”–”Go ask your parents!”).
The Light article mentioned that Father Tosti headed the renovation project for St. Francis–it was actually Father Annunziato’s project, but Father Tosti was there at its completion and got to preside over dedicatory events. Project spanned the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, when I was a student at Keith and in the High School.
Again, thank you for this eulogy. It prompted me to relive some wonderful memories, and I will close with one of them. The final song sung at benediction on Sunday nights, which I used to attend with my Nonna, was a duet popularized by Perry Como, and always sung by my father Baptiste and my aunt, Anita Belliveau, who was the longtime music director at St. Francis:
Goodnight, sweet Jesus, guard us in sleep, our souls and bodies in thy love keep,
Waking or sleeping, keep us in sight, dear gentle savior, good night, good night.
Goodnight sweet Jesus, pray that each day of our lives mortal thus pass away
Thy love o’erwatching, guiding our right, dear gentle savior, good night, good night.
Goodnight, dear Jeasus, good night, good night.–words and music by Rev. James Curry
Sincerely,
Gina Balestracci
Montclair, NJ