COMMENTARY

Memories of Sacred Heart Parish

Posted

The advisory in the letter was not unexpected, yet there was that sense of closure one experiences upon learning that a long time friend following years of illness has now passed away.

But there it was in black and white, the notification that I was invited to attend the last Mass at Sacred Heart Church. Following the Mass and the removal of the Blessed Sacrament, as well as sacred vessels, the door would be locked. That was it, closed, finished, but surely not to be forgotten.

It was in 1872, a year marked by a rapid population growth in Pawtucket, that the Rev. James Smith, newly appointed pastor of Sacred Heart Parish — a parish without a gathering place, a church building, and as yet any committed parishioners walked from the end of the trolley run from Providence to Pawtucket and inspected a piece of farm land that overlooked the Blackstone River. All that went through his mind on that day we are ignorant of but we do know that he determined that was to be the site of the future Sacred Heart Church.

From that day forward the parish church was to be a landmark in Pleasant View as well as the spiritual home to thousands of parishioners. It was not too soon after the founding of the parish that the Sisters of Mercy (later the Sisters of Saint Joseph) took up residence on the View and began to instruct the children of the first and second immigrant families that had settled in the area on the basics of the Catholic Faith as well as the importance of Church attendance. Cold winter mornings as well as hot summer ones saw little Johnny trudging out to serve morning Mass, cassock and freshly washed and ironed surplice draped over his arm. It was long before girls were allowed to serve at the altar. The female role was with the exception of the May Procession one of dusting and sweeping.

The first church building, a wooden structure was soon veneered over in brick. That structure served the parishioners well until a fire reduced it to ashes. Many of the present day "old timers" remember well the January night of the fire in 1953 when so many of their family memories went up in smoke. The fire may have destroyed a building but not the fervor or determination of the parishioners. A new, modern structure soon was constructed on the site of the old church. It featured among other things, modern liturgical artistic design as well as comforting air-conditioning. It has been said that Bishop Russell McVinney disapproved of the air-conditioning but was told that since the design did not allow for opening any windows, the air-conditioning was necessary. For more than 50 years the new Sacred Heart Church building served the greater part of the Catholic population of Pleasant View. The parish educational facilities provided for a grammar school and a girl's high school.

In the sixties, boom years for the Catholic population throughout Rhode Island, the number of parishioners at Sacred Heart began a steady decline. As children of the early parishioners grew up, they also moved away. The age of parishioners began to increase. In the seventies the number of funerals far outnumbered baptisms. The death records often recorded the name of the last member of an old time Sacred Heart family. The schools closed for lack of students and increase of expenditures. More and more empty pews became common at Mass. But in spite of the "handwriting on the wall" those who remained as well as a number of new families, especially those of Portuguese background and the suppressed Genesis community, continued to vitalize the parish. Liturgies were far from hum-drum but impressed with their prayerful content and sense of the sacred.

And so it went, the declining and dying days of a parish. On the seventh day of May in the two thousandth and ninth year of Our Lord, Rome pronounced the words, “it is finished.”

Even as we mourn its passing, so many of us are aware of how graced the Diocese of Providence has been to have had and known her. She has served well. Sacred Heart was far more than a building, but the building was the physical symbol of the people of faith who made it their home, the center of their sacramental and spiritual life. These were great people. Many are still with us, more have gone to their eternal rest. Yes, there is sadness in the closing. And there is sadness that goes beyond the closing. A sadness prompted by the knowledge that in a neighborhood that still contains a healthy population, the symbol of the presence of the Catholic Church is gone. Have we abandoned these people, written them off? Does their presence not remind us that we are called to be a missionary church, to bring the message of Jesus and not to take it away? Should the closing of the parish of the Sacred Heart not prompt us to ask ourselves as Church if we are asking the right questions let alone suggesting the right answers?

Rev. Richard C. Maynard is Pastor Emeritus of Sacred Heart.