WOONSOCKET – For some, retirement means shuffleboard games and golfing. For others, it’s a chance to travel the world. For Father Lionel Blain, pastor of St. Joseph Parish in Woonsocket, his impending retirement is a chance to continue working on the things he’s loved doing throughout his ministry. The difference is “you don’t have to do it; it’s something you choose to do,” he said.
Father Blain plans to continue working for the Family Resources Community Action in Woonsocket, a social services agency where he serves on the baord of directors.
He will also continue his ecumenical work, something he has been involved in for more than 40 years. Father Blain is passionate about “working to bring unity among Christians,” and has been working to that end since the 1960s. When he first began, he noted, “This idea of ecumenism was all the rage in that day. It all began in the 1960s.”
Since then, he has met with leaders from several other Christian churches to discuss the Gospel – “how much we have in common, and how much we have to work toward.” He also attended prayer services, during which people of different Christian denominations came together to share Scripture and pray for Christian unity.
Now, Father Blain marvels at the fact that ecumenical work is being done all over the Diocese and is much less formal than it was decades ago. “Since that time, a lot of people are doing it on their own in their parishes,” he said. “All over the Diocese, you have groups getting together to call for the unity of Christians.”
Education has been an integral part of Father Blain’s life. He attended secondary school and then two years of college at Our Lady of Providence seminary in Warwick before finishing his degree in Montreal at the Seminary of Philosophy. He then studied in Rome under Jesuit priests at the Gregorian University. for four years, and was ordained in 1954. After he returned to Rhode Island, Bishop Russell J. McVinney sent Father Blain to Washington, D.C. to attend Catholic University for his Master’s degree in philosophy and then to the American College at Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, where he earned his PhD in philosophy in 1959. Father Blain is proud of, and extremely grateful for, his education, which he calls “a great gift that I received from God through Bishop McVinney.”
Father Blain was assigned to teach college-level philosophy at the Our Lady of Providence seminary, which he did for 13 years. Many of his students from those years are now assigned to parishes throughout the Diocese of Providence.
“Just about anybody ordained in the 1970s in Providence would have had him in college,” said Father Maurice Brindamour, pastor of Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Church in Woonsocket. “He wasn’t one of those tough kind of teachers... he liked to help guys get by.”
Life in Father Blain’s classroom was never dull, said another former student, Father Richard Desaulniers, now assigned to St. James Parish in Manville. “He loved debate and he challenged us to raise issues and open our minds to all sorts of possibilities,” he said. “I always respected him as a teacher. He was a great teacher; he was enthused in what he was doing and he put life into his responsibility as a teacher.”
In addition to teaching at the seminary, Father Blain also taught catechism to grade school students, lectured on the Catholic faith to non-Catholics and, during the 1960s, wrote a question and answer column for the Providence Visitor that dealt with issues of faith.
Father Blain brought that enthusiasm and intensity when he was assigned to be a parish priest in 1973, Father Desaulniers said. “It entered his entire lifestyle. As a priest he was very intense, very committed. His position as a professor was translated into his life as a priest... That same intensity is still there as it was when he was a young professor,” he said.
Assigned to the St. John the Baptist Parish in Pawtucket for ten years, Father Blain said, “I learned to be a pastor in that parish.” While teaching in the seminary, Father Blain said Mass at different parishes, but that was very different from being a parish priest.
“In seminary there are no women, but a whole half of the parish was women and I had to learn to work with them,” he laughed.
In 1983 he was transferred to St. Joseph Parish in Woonsocket, where he would remain until retirement. A much larger parish than St. John the Baptist and so the transition was again uniquely challenging, the church had a very active parish council. “I wasn’t used to having people talk to me with such passion,” he said. “The opinions of some members of the parish council got pretty hot, and I had to get used to listening to the members.
“We had a lot more young people then,” he reminisced. “The congregation has grown older since I’ve been there. We have to find new ways of reaching out to young people now,” he said.
It is the people who mean the most. “That’s the wonderful thing about being a priest,” he said. “You meet all kinds of wonderful people and God is working in them. “What a wonderful thing – they’re all here in church worshipping God.”
Father Blain’s last Mass at St. Joseph will be on Saturday June 30 at 7:30 a.m. He will move to the rectory at St. Anthony Parish in Woonsocket later that day. He won’t be away from St. Joseph’s Parish for too long though. “I will probably be back here saying Masses once in awhile,” he said.
And then there is reading; he avidly absorbs the written word. His extensive list is scholarly and includes spiritual texts and historical books on the Church as well as secular books on the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln. For Father Blain, every day is an opportunity to learn something or teach someone, and on the best of all days – both.
