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St. Anthony of Padua Church in New Bedford’s North End has long been recognized as an architectural marvel. Its red sandstone rises from the pavement of Acushnet Avenue, enveloping elongated windows and squinches on its path 256 feet toward the heavens, culminating in a cross that crowns a central spire.
This is part of a series of stories commemorating the 250th anniversary of American Independence and the legacy of the Revolution.
The church has served as a beacon to millions in the city over the course of its 120 years. In that time, it has opened its doors to its French Canadian builders, second-wave Portuguese immigrants, and Guatemalans seeking to make their mark on the city.
In its own way, the church mirrors the city’s immigration history, according to Gisele Pappas, a church historian and lifelong parishioner.
“This church is like home away from home for many of them,” Pappas said.
French Canadians began to arrive in New Bedford in numbers after the U.S. Civil War.
“They were actively recruited by the mills,” said Alfred Saulniers, a local historian who researched and wrote a 2023 book on New Bedford’s French-speaking immigrants.
According to that book, titled “The French of New Bedford,” there were only 97 Canadians, 23 of whom came from Quebec, in New Bedford as of the 1860 census. By the 1910 census, that had increased to 12,241, with another 7,581 children born to those immigrant parents.
The majority of those French Canadians were Roman Catholic and needed a place to worship. The original church was a small, two-story, wood-framed building on Bullard Street that held its first Mass in 1896. In September of that year, the church school began its operations with a mission to educate the growing French Canadian population.
“The community was so large,” Pappas said. “It’s always been an ethnic church, and I think it always will be.”
Construction
It became clear quickly that the parish needed a larger space as the French Canadian population continued to grow. The church corporation began to solicit donations from parishioners at $5 a year (the equivalent of about $200 in today’s money), Pappas said.
In 1902, they contracted Joseph Venne, a Montreal-based architect, to design the current building. The design would result in a church whose nave (main body) was 241 feet long and 135 feet wide at the transepts — creating a building that resembles a cross.
Pappas said the luxurious Romanesque design for which the church is most famous today was immediately meant to impress.
“The intention of the French Canadian people was to build this cathedral church to attract the assignment of the bishop here,” Pappas said. “If they’d won out, this would be the Diocese of New Bedford, not Fall River.”
However, Fall River nabbed the distinction when, in 1904, it separated from the Diocese of Providence.
On Sept. 20 that same year, tragedy struck the French Canadian community when a wall on the church’s north side collapsed and crushed seven workers, five of whom were French Canadian. Two of those immigrant workers, Gilbert Tremblay, a mason, and Joseph Rondeau, a carpenter, died from their injuries.
Construction resumed on the church afterward and workers completed its exterior by December 1905. The congregation celebrated its first Mass in 1906, and the church was formally dedicated in 1912.
French Canadians
For the better part of the 20th century, the parish served as an axis along a line of French Canadian churches in the North End and as a center of the community.
Pappas was born in 1955. She said that even then, the French Canadian community was strong. She spoke only French until she turned 4, and attended school at the parish as well. That was the norm for a world designed for people to walk everywhere; it was easy for a dominant ethnic group to build cultural infrastructure.
“They needed, first, a place to practice their Catholic faith,” Pappas said. “That was of the highest importance. The school was probably of equal importance [to the church].”
Many of Pappas’ grandparents’ generation are still present, if only as effigies, in the church today. The faces of the 36 angels carved by sculptor Giovanni Castagnoli that stand where the interior columns meet the triforum, or mezzanine gallery, were inspired by the faces of early parishioners.
The Gloria, a large image of a dove depicting the Holy Spirit, flies above the church nave at its pinnacle. St. John, St. Luke, St. Mark, and St. Matthew surround it. Pappas said that is an image common in even small churches in Quebec, the place the original parishioners once called home.
In 1974, Pappas moved to New Hampshire, just north of Haverhill, due to her husband’s engineering job.
“I had a gap of a number of years when I wasn’t coming here,” she said. “When I came back, all of a sudden, it’s all these Portuguese families here.”
Os Portugueses
Among the Portuguese filling the pews by then was Francelina Arruda, who immigrated from Chaves in 1972 with her parents and siblings. She already had family in the area, congregants of Immaculate Conception Church, a parish already tailored for the Portuguese community.
“This church wasn’t Portuguese then,” Arruda recalled in Portuguese.
Arruda was part of a wave of Portuguese immigrants fleeing dictatorship, colonial wars, and economic headwinds in the 1970s — a wave that would not taper off until the 1990s when Portugal’s post-revolutionary societal reforms solidified.
Portuguese immigrants, whose presence in the New Bedford area extends back to the whaling era, were attracted to the area for the same reason as the French Canadians: jobs. These immigrants dominated both the fishing and garment industries, with many working in North End factories and living nearby. Most of the businesses on Acushnet Avenue at the time catered to Portuguese-speakers.
Proximity motivated Arruda’s family — and others — to patronize St. Anthony’s, more than anything else.
“We lived close by,” she said. “We always came to this church. We couldn’t speak or understand English at the time, but still, we came.”
Pappas said that the growth of the Portuguese community at the parish happened just as the French Canadian one was shrinking.
“We were in real danger of suppression,” she said, referring to the technical term when a Roman Catholic diocese decides to close one of its parishes. “The Portuguese saved us.”
Arruda said that in her time, the church held multiple weekly Masses in Portuguese. The parish came to play the same role for their community as it once did for the French Canadian. She recalled her daughter-in-law, long before she married into the family, being a student at the parish school in the 1990s and how the language and traditions were alive and well.
“We had many good moments here,” she said, recalling how she would help with religious plays at the church. “So much happiness and fun.”
By the 2000 census, Portuguese were firmly entrenched as the largest ethnic group in the city, with 33,308 residents claiming Portuguese ancestry, according to a city report from the period. But dominoes set in place years before had already begun to fall.
In 1995, with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, Mexico, and the U.S., the factories began to move to Mexico. Jobs once plentiful in the North End began to disappear, as did the Portuguese. Many used decades of savings and moved to suburbs like Acushnet and Fairhaven as their children advanced up the socioeconomic ladder. This, combined with democratic reforms in Portugal and the country’s integration into the European Union, led to the end of the Portuguese wave of immigration to the city. Today, 31,608 residents identify themselves as Portuguese with only 7,000 being foreign born.
Even Arruda, who lives in Acushnet, said she stopped attending Mass at the church for a simple reason.
“There’s no parking,” she said. “So many people want to come see this beautiful church, but there’s no place to park.”
Nonetheless, she said she continues to volunteer at church functions, such as June’s Feast of St. Anthony of Padua.
“I’m always here to help,” she said.
Los Guatemaltecos
Around the time Portuguese immigration tapered off, Central American — particularly Guatemalan — immigration to the city increased dramatically. Economic opportunities, family ties, as well as ongoing violence and instability in their homelands were motivating factors. This migration also led to a proliferation of parishes becoming Central American in makeup.
In 2015, the Diocese of Fall River closed St. Killian’s Church in the North End. The combination of a water leak and dwindling attendance forced a merger with St. Anthony’s.
“When Saint Killian’s was suppressed, that’s when the Guatemalan community started to pop up here,” Pappas said. “And I think that I have never seen a more powerful group of people here.”
That’s when Luis Sicaj, the church’s maintenance man, began to attend as well.
“Us Latinos are rather new here to this church,” Sicaj said in Spanish. “Sometimes I come here, and I am the only person around, and I pray. And I feel that I change a little bit every time I come here.”
Sicaj said the church has become a second home for many of the city’s Guatemalan faithful. And, in Arruda’s telling, it rhymes with an earlier time in the church’s history.
“The Guatemalan community is what is saving this church right now,” she said. “Just like the Portuguese did before.”
The most recent census estimate of the city’s Guatemalan population put it at around 2,500, an undercount according to most experts. But Sicaj said his experience at St. Anthony’s has shown just how much the Latino population of New Bedford has grown.
“When I first started working here, six or seven years ago, there was only one Spanish Mass,” he said. “Now, there are two.”
Pappas said that though the Guatemalans — and Dominicans, Hondurans, Puerto Ricans, Salvadorans, and others — have different traditions, seeing them has reignited her faith in the church’s future.
“I see the way they acknowledge the sacraments, the way they comport themselves at church, how they dress up on Sundays to come to church,” she said.
“It really refreshes my soul,” she said, “because that’s how it used to be.”
Contact Kevin G. Andrade at kandrade@newbedfordlight.org
Excellent article. Good that many New Bedford residents are aware of its history. Would’ve loved to learn about its dark exterior color and how unchecked mills pollution caused it ?
Also the recent scaffolding and the reasons behind it.
Also the history of the bells.
Thanks 😊