St. Brigid’s is the youngest of South Boston’s original parishes.  Formed in 1908, when the City Point neighborhood was just becoming a residential area, it has been the community’s center for a century. 

St. Brigid Parish 100th Anniversary (Book, Part 1)

St. Brigid Parish 100th Anniversary (Book, Part 2)

 

The Beginning:  St. Eulalia’s Chapel

            When Father Robert Johnson arrived at Gate of Heaven Parish in 1890, he saw a need for a chapel in City Point.  He paid $19,000 for a parcel at Broadway and O Street, large enough for a chapel, a school, and a rectory.  The Spanish-style chapel, which cost $15,000 to build, opened for Masses on May 6, 1900. Named for the Spanish St. Eulalia, patron of fishermen, the chapel was so crowded over the next years (particularly since Father Johnson was also building the massive Gothic Gate of Heaven church), that in 1908 Archbishop William O’Connell separated St. Eulalia’s from Gate of Heaven.  M Street, from water to water, divided the two parishes.  On May 10, 1908, Father Johnson surprised the congregations at all St. Eulalia’s Masses with his announcement of their new parish, and by bidding them all farewell.  The new parish would have a new pastor.

 

“Let us work together”: A New Parish and a New Pastor

Father Mortimer E. Twomey came to St. Eulalia’s from St. Bernard’s in Concord. He was then forty-eight years old. Born in Chelsea, he was ordained in Montreal in 1883, and spent the first twelve years of his ministry as an assistant pastor in Newburyport.  He spent eight years at the Immaculate Conception Church in Malden, and in 1903 he became pastor at St. Bernard’s. Father Twomey was noted for his poetry (Archbishop O’Connell had asked him to write a centenary hymn for the archdiocese, for which O’Connell would write the music) as well as for his eloquent speaking style, (he was in demand as a speaker at Catholic gatherings as far away as New York). Twomey was also a builder.  In his five years in Concord he built a new parish hall and community center, and the Church of Our Lady of Help of Christians, encompassing the penitentiary, and St. Joseph’s Church in Lincoln; O’Connell dedicated both in May 1907. He would put his many talents to good use in South Boston.

 “We are beginning together,” he said in his first Mass at St. Eulalia’s, May 18, 1908, “Priest and people, to establish ourselves. . . .“  Though fifty of his Concord parishioners traveled to South Boston for his first Mass, Twomey’s focus was on his new parishioners.  He and they would  “find our needs together.  We are to form our traditions and we are to build up the parish” together.  They would do this, he said, for the glory of God. “We cannot give the right service to God except by the consecration to him of mind and heart and all that is best within us.  Let us do so then and let us work together.”

 

“The Puritan has passed.  The Catholic remains.”

            Twomey arrived at St. Eulalia’s at a critical moment of change for Boston Catholics, and for South Boston.  The Archdiocese would celebrate its own centennial in 1908. Archbishop O’Connell noted the intense and violent discrimination Catholics had faced in their first century; though the faith of the immigrants had withstood “the test of reviling,” he hoped the faith of their children could “stand the test of indifference and flattery.”  As the Archdiocese began its second century, the Catholic population had become Boston’s majority;  in 1905 John Fitzgerald became the first son of Irish immigrants elected mayor.  The days of Yankee political hegemony had passed.  O’Connell was sensitive to the church’s role in the new political order—the Catholic Church had a responsibility to be a moral voice in the community.  “The Puritan has passed,” O’Connell said, “the Catholic remains.”

            Perhaps the most impressive feature of the centenary observance was the parade on November 1 of the Holy Name Society, with 39,000 men, representing each parish in the Archdiocese, marching through the Back Bay.  Dressed in suits, carrying American flags, this orderly procession of Catholic men made a deep impression on Boston, as the formerly Protestant city saw its emerging leaders. Father Twomey led the men of St. Eulalia’s, though the Holy Name group had at its head John Dunn, William McCarthy, Edward McCormick, and Fred O’Brien.  A reporter noted that this group, from “the youngest parish of the District,” had “enough in numbers to rival many older churches.” 

 

“Protect this beautiful part of the city.”

The City Point area was growing, but how it would grow? South Boston’s population would reach 66,310 in 1910.  Most of its people were crowded into the Lower End, but City Point still had open land to develop. The new Summer Street bridge opened in 1899, connecting L Street to downtown over the Commonwealth Flats, easing access for both development and recreation.  On a typical summer weekend, 100,000 people would crowd the beaches of South Boston, particularly Marine Park at the peninsula’s tip, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead, the world’s leading landscape architect.  Marine Park was the culmination of Olmstead’s Emerald Necklace, the series of parks connecting Boston’s neighborhoods from the Back Bay through Roxbury and Jamaica Plain.  With the older industries of South Boston—Harrison Loring’s ship yard, the iron works, glass works, ropeworks—closing down, there was pressure to transform City Point into another Nantasket or Revere Beach, with carnival rides and cheap amusements, detracting both from the natural beauty and the community of stable families.

When Twomey arrived, petitions were circulating to build a merry-go-round at Marine Park.    Though Twomey had barely been in the parish a month, and was still “a stranger in your midst,” he told his parishioners at all the Masses on June 8, 1908 that he would oppose any such development of Marine Park.  “No matter how nice the amusement may be that enters, it is only the wedge, and if you approve and don’t stand out against it then those who give the licenses may readily say, ‘You permitted this one and there are hundreds of others applying.’. . . If you allow one you may have a hundred, and then you will be sorry.”  He called on his parishioners to “protect this beautiful part of the city,” not to allow this “invasion” of Marine Park. 

Twomey stopped the merry-go-round.  He blocked other attempts to invade Marine Park with carnival attractions or other commercial developments. Congressman Joseph O’Connell’s proposed Marine Park fish hatchery in 1909, which O’Connell claimed would enhance the “beauty and usefulness of Marine park and Pleasure bay,” stalled when O’Connell lost his seat in 1910 to James Michael Curley. Twomey in 1910 blocked an attempt to put a movie theatre near Marine Park, arguing that “Nature has provided amply for the gratification of the people, and this is manifest by the throngs that go to City Point during the summer months.  They want outdoor attractions, not indoor amusements.”  Twomey told his parishioners that while he was pastor he would fight against indoor amusements, and he had Mayor John Fitzgerald’s promise not to license any such attractions while he was mayor.  Twomey pressed the city to install outdoor lighting at Marine Park to prevent illicit night-time activities, and politicians like Curley and Fitzgerald learned to listen to Twomey on matters affecting City Point.

When the South Boston Citizen’s Association sponsored a carnival in 1915, Twomey discouraged parents from allowing their children to perform in the nightly pageants, warning about the other attractions they would see.  For seven years, Twomey told congregation, “I have opposed children being in Marine Park at night.”  He had been successful.  “Have you now abandoned me?” he asked their parents.  “What do you think the future is going to bring?” 

 Among the carnival’s attractions were an illegal roulette wheel and a fixed game of ball-toss;  a crowd of three thousand men and boys on Farragut Road hooted and taunted at a “nicely dressed but peculiarly behaving ‘girl,’” who was actually a young man. Fortunately he was able to flee onto a streetcar.  Two members of the Citizen’s Association resigned after the carnival debacle, complaining that they had earlier rejected the idea of this kind of carnival. Others predicted that carnivals and amusements were inevitable, that movie theaters and arcades were coming to Marine Park. But Twomey was unmoved.  His obstinacy prevented City Point from becoming Nantasket or Revere Beach. 

 

“It is only for the future”

            Twomey knew that it was not enough to prevent carnivals or to warn his parishioners away from bad influences.  The church needed to provide alternatives for recreation and socialization.  His curate, Reverend Jeremiah F. Driscoll, took charge of the new St. Eulalia’s boys club, and Father Driscoll organized a baseball team and other activities for the parish youth.  Twomey oversaw the creation of the Holy Name Society, a club for men, which began with more than fifty active members. The Holy Name’s “smoke talks and socials” gave the men of the parish a recreational outlet.

Twomey had asked Cardinal O’Connell’s permission to build a parish hall “where the people in whole or part can come together.” The parish had the land, and Twomey could build the hall for under $20,000.  But the Cardinal refused, wanting the parish first to pay off its debt of $28,000.  Even without a parish hall, Twomey began holding social events—the first St. Eulalia’s garden party in July 1908 drew more than two thousand people. St. Eulalia’s would form a social network for the parish families.

Twomey did not merely inveigh against outside influences, he exhorted the parents of the community to take better care of their own children.  “Outside the home there are many cheap shows, the glare of the street and especially the terrible dangers oat night, all of which destroy childhood,” he warned in 1909. “When you have trained the children properly you have done right and you have nothing to fear.  Fail in that duty and you will always regret it.” 

Twomey continued to press parents in his parish to their duty. “You parents seem to forget,” he said in a 1914 sermon, “that you are responsible” for your children “and will answer to God for their conduct on this earth.  You parents are content to leave it with the school and the church to train them and educate them, and at home they learn nothing that is good.” Their children go to cheap dance halls and clubrooms, and soon to worse places, “and you wonder why it is so. You are to blame, and no one else, and you will have to answer to God for your neglect.”  He urged the parents of St. Eulalia’s to stop neglecting their children “before it is too late.”

He concluded one memorable Mass in August 1912 by stepping before the altar to tell his parishioners that every Saturday and Sunday he had to break up groups of gamblers on O Street.  “I have just broken up a crowd of gamblers here on O Street, near our church.”  He regretted having to tell his parishioners that “here, in our ideal community, where we are striving so hard for law and order, boys and young men, our own boys as well as boys of other families, are beginning a life that will lead them” into crime.  No one in the parish or the city had stepped forward to help him, but he pledged to fight on alone.  “It is only for the future of these young men that I am seeking.”

            How to ensure that these young men would have opportunities other than the life of crime?  Twomey was still determined to build a social center for the parish.  He had the opportunity to create one in the guise of a school.  In 1881 the American Catholic bishops had called on each Catholic parish to have its own parochial school.  Boston was slower than other dioceses to build parochial schools, partly because the city already had a strong public school system, and by the first decade of the twentieth century many, if not most, of the teachers were Catholics.  Teachers at the Perry School in City Point (founded in 1905) would walk the students to Gate of Heaven for their first communion classes and on holy days of obligation; after Twomey’s arrival they would come to St. Eulalia’s, and Twomey would be invited to officiate at their graduations. 

 

The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth

Twomey saw that St. Eulalia’s needed a parish school. Five hundred children marched in the St. Eulalia’s May Procession in 1911, more than half of them candidates for first communion.  Twomey had been in Newburyport in the 1880s, when the parish priest had invited the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth to open a school.  Twomey had been responsible for the boys’ department, but had worked closely with the sisters from Kentucky. Their school, with more than five hundred pupils, was so successful that two Newburyport public schools closed.  Even more impressive, twenty of Twomey’s pupils had been called to the priesthood.

            In April 1911 Twomey broke ground for a new school behind the church, on O and 3^rd Streets. He used some left-over materials from the old Mechanics Hall on Broadway, and found willing volunteers among the skilled workers and local laborers in the parish.  Though Twomey hoped to have the school open in September 1911, it was not until September 1912 that Sister Mary Innocent arrived from Kentucky with four nuns arrived for the first classes at the Nazareth School.  The nuns had their convent at 848 East Fifth Street. More than three hundred students enrolled when the Nazareth School opened on September 11, 1912.  Enrollments continued to climb.  There already were two public schools east of L Street (the Perry and the Pope), and while the city of Boston built other schools in South Boston, it would not build another in City Point because of the Nazareth School.

            The Nazareth School was the fourth Catholic school in South Boston. St. Peter and Paul, South Boston’s oldest parish, had opened a school in 1860, and the Sisters of St. Joseph had opened St. Agnes School at Gate of Heaven in 1879.  St. Augustine’s School opened in 1896, and in 1898 a German school, affiliated with the Church of the Holy Trinity in the South End, opened on F Street. 

The school building had an assembly hall which could be the parish center he had hoped to build.  It could accommodate eight hundred people—five hundred attended the first New Year’s reception in the new parish hall on January 1, 1912.  Determined to keep indoor amusements out of City Point, Twomey knew that the parish youth still needed entertainment outlets.  St. Eulalia’s would provide them.  He installed a two-lane bowling alley and a pool-room in the school’s basement, which would be open every night until eleven. Pool was a nickel a rack, bowling ten cents a string. He hired Richard J. Cushing, a teenager whose academic record made him leave South Boston High, and who was struggling at Boston College High, to manage the bowling alley and pool room.

 

Cushing:  The Early Years

Cushing, from 808 East Third Street, later said that neighborhood parents knew only two paths—from home to church, and from the church back home.  But he himself “wasn’t a pious lad.  I was not much for being around the church save to do manual work.”  He “mowed lawns, stoked fires, shoveled snow, swept and mopped floors, opened the church in the morning and locked it up at night.”  He broke his arm repairing the church roof, and Father Twomey turned his stentorian eloquence on him when he used outdoor paint inside.  “You’ve ruined the rectory!”  Father Twomey berated him.

Cushing went on to the priesthood.  He nearly became a Jesuit, but at the last minute decided to stay in Boston, attending St. John’s Seminary, and in May 1921 celebrating his first Mass at St. Eulalia’s.  Years later, as the Archbishop of Boston (1945-1970) he was known both for his unique oratorical style, and his ability to raise money.  Both traits he had honed with the example of Twomey, whose booming voice became familiar in South Boston, and whose energetic engagement made St. Eulalia’s a center of the community.  Years later, asked how he had become such an effective fund-raiser, Cushing remembered that “St. Eulalia’s was always yelling for money, maybe that’s where I got the idea.”

 

Fire and Rebuilding

A vibrant parish, St. Eulalia’s celebrated its fifth anniversary in 1913 with dancing and whist, a concert, and a speech by Lieutenant Governor David Walsh, soon to become Massachusetts’ first Catholic governor and first Catholic U.S. Senator.  Twomey might have looked back at five successful years, but was always looking ahead to the next challenges.  Some challenges he could anticipate, others he could not.  In February 1916 a fire nearly destroyed the church.  As the sanctuary roof collapsed, only the heroic efforts of Boston’s firefighters prevented the walls from collapsing.

Twomey and the people of the parish set out to rebuild , and to make it a magnificent church.  Architect T.G. O’Connell planned the reconstruction.   C.J.F. Wilfert painting elaborate recreations of European masterpieces on the walls and ceilings.  Sculptor A.P. Nardini created an altar complete with relief carvings in marble of the Life of Christ, copied from Ghiberti’s Italian masterworks, said to be the first copies of Ghiberti in America.  Nardini also designed the side altars, the shrine to St. Joseph, to Our Lady of Lourdes, and to the Sacred Heart, styled like grottos.  Electric lights on the six columns surrounding the altar brought out the relief work.  On the ceiling were bold copies of the masterworks of Titian, Van Dyke, and Tintoretto.   With the trim of stucco, Corinthian pillars topped with gold, artwork, stained glass, the new St. Eulalia’s was richly decorated

While Twomey’s priority was the refurnishing of the church and the building a school, he also sought a permanent home for the priests and nuns of the parish.  He rented an apartment on Broadway near N Street, but in 1913 he bought the mansion of Judge Joseph Fallon at the corner of M and Broadway.  Fallon, chief judge of the Boston Municipal Court, and the first Irish-Catholic judge in Massachusetts, had bought the mansion from ship builder Harrison Loring.  Twomey turned the mansion into a rectory, converting the carriage house into a chapel. With a church and a school on Broadway and O, and a rectory on M and Broadway, St. Eulalia’s was becoming a more visible presence in City Point.  

            The success of the Nazareth School lead Twomey to expand its educational mission.  The Episcopal Church was closing its orphanage on N Street and East Fourth;  Twomey purchased it in 1917 to turn into the Nazareth High School.  On the top of the old Episcopal orphanage, visible to ships entering Boston’s shipping channel, Twomey placed a 15-foot statue of Sacred Heart of Christ, facing toward Gate of Heaven Church.  In the schoolyard was a statue of Mary, which the children crowned at the conclusion of each May procession. Sister Mary David and a growing band of sisters opened the ninth grade. 

            An immediate success, the school required more sisters to staff it.  Twomey thought their quarters on East Fifth street were inadequate, and having some sisters housed in the school’s attic threatened their safety.  In 1927 he built a new rectory, on the corner of Broadway and N Street, and moved the sisters from Fifth Street to the old rectory.  For the next forty years the sisters would live in the old Loring/Fallon mansion. The rectory Twomey built is still home to St. Brigid’s clergy, as well as the clergy of Gate of Heaven, and the office of the auxiliary Bishop. 

            By the end of St. Eulalia’s first decade, the community had built a new school, opened a high school for girls, rebuilt the church after a fire, and kept the community mobilized to prevent the building of amusement parks or the opening of saloons in City Point.  The Nazareth School provided an education, sending the boys after eighth-grade to South Boston High or another school;  girls had the option of attending the Nazareth High School.  

 

“A graceful harmony of lines and features”: A New Pastor and  New Church

            After a quarter century at St. Eulalia’s, Twomey in 1932 was transferred to Gate of Heaven.  He immediately began building a high school in his new parish.  St. Eulalia’s was fortunate to receive as pastor the Reverend Patrick J. Waters, a professor of dogmatic theology at St. John’s Seminary. Though a college professor, Waters from the day he arrived was dynamic, engaged with the community, and committed to continuing the work Father Twomey had so well begun. 

Waters could not help but notice that the grammar school’s plumbing posed a health problem to teachers and students, and the eighty-year old high school showed signs of its hard use. He asked the Cardinal’s permission to replace the antiquated plumbing and heating systems and renovate the high school.  But O’Connell refused, telling Waters that “the present is no time to increase parish mortgage and debts.”  In fact, some of the parish’s assets were in a bank closed by the Depression.

But in February 1933 a fire destroyed St. Eulalia’s Church. Seventeen years earlier firefighters had been able to save the building, and Twomey had rebuilt it as a splendid church. Now it was left a ruin. 

Father Waters held Masses in the school hall while undertaking the building of a new church.  This one would be up the hill, on Broadway, next to the rectory Father Twomey had built. Cardinal O’Connell approved Waters’s plans, and renamed the parish St. Bridget, for his mother, though he also knew the parishioners would welcome the name.  By the time the cornerstone was laid on November 5, 1933, the new church’s name was St. Brigid.  Waters had the Cardinal’s coat of arms placed above the door, and on March 17, 1934, Reverend Richard J. Cushing returned to celebrate the first Mass in the new St. Brigid’s Church.

Designed by architect Maurice P. Meade, built by Charles Logue Building Company at a cost of $80,000, St. Brigid’s Church seated over 1000 people (it now seats 700), has a choir loft, and a heating system which also supplied the school next door.  Built in the Gothic Revival style, the red Harvard brick, the granite steps, limestone trim, and dark oak doors give, according to Father Charles Kane, “an overall view of grace and charm” on the outside, on the inside “a graceful harmony of lines and features.”  Earlier churches in South Boston—St. Peter and Paul, St. Augustine’s, and the massive Gate of Heaven, which was being built at the same time St. Eulalia’s parish was being created—are massive and imposing.  They were built by a church creating its place in the new society, marking out its territory with visible symbols.  St. Brigid’s, though, is the church of a confident and secure people, who have made this country their home.  Waters built a church to be a home, not a monument.   It does not dominate the landscape, it is a vital part of it. 

Inside the church impressive stained glass windows tell the story of the faith, from King David, author of the psalms, in the organ loft, to the veiling of St. Brigid above the altar.  In the west transept Mary is crowned “Queen of Heaven,” and in the east Christ ascends into heaven.  Cushing donated the sanctuary, with its elegant woodwork and furnishings, in memory of his family.  The woodwork, the statues of St. Joseph and St. Ann (the mother of Mary) help foster a spirit of serene security in the church. 

Despite the hard times of the 1930s,the worst financial crisis in the country’s history, the parish paid off its debts.  In 1935 Father Waters turned his attention to the new church’s basement, where he created another full church, St. Eulalia’s. Here he placed the marble statues of St. Joan of Arc, which Twomey had donated to honor the parish’s young men who fought in the World War, and of the St. Eulalia, patron of the old parish. The altar stone from St. Eulalia’s, scorched in the fire, was saved to be the altar stone in the new church below St. Brigid’s.

 

The Nazareth Schools

Following this, Father Waters undertook necessary repairs and upgrades to the school buildings.  Despite his constant warnings about the physical state of the Nazareth Schools, despite the Depression and looming threat of world war, the students and the sisters of the school were engaged in the joys of youth.   Six hundred people attended the annual card party on November 27, 1934, and the following month Father Waters enrolled 43 candidates in the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin.  A debating society, a school orchestra, football and baseball games in the schoolyard, and a literary magazine, the Nazareth Review, which the Quill and Scroll and the Catholic School Press awarded first honors in 1939.   Father Waters in the fall of 1941 received the thanks of all the students for installing playground equipment in the Nazareth Schoolyard, on the site of the former St. Eulalia’s Church.

The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth inspired scores of girls by their example to enter the order.  Agnes Ann Fuhs and Evelyn Hurley, both Nazareth School graduates, entered the Sisters of Charity and eventually returned to teach in the Nazareth School.  Sister Evelyn, called Sister Alice William for her parents, taught in Mississippi before returning to Boston in 1950;  Sister Agnes Ann taught at Newburport’s Immaculate Conception School before returning to the Nazareth School.  Sister Agnes Ann’s father Frank Fuhs was the church custodian for nearly 32 years. Sister Evelyn’s father was a Boston city councilor. For these young women and their classmates, the Sisters of Charity were exemplars with their lives of service in teaching.  At the time, the Sisters of Charity were examples of professional women engaged in meaningful service, and young women looking for fulfilling lives would turn to teaching or nursing through religious orders.  At the time, career longevity among teachers was much longer from sisters than for women teaching in the public schools, and only in the religious orders would the teachers be under the supervision of other women, rather than male principals or superintendents.  By 1940, there were one hundred sisters teaching in the parochial schools of South Boston, and in 1950 there would be 119, far out-numbering the number of priests in South Boston.

 The Sisters of Charity inspired some young women to devote their lives to service in the schools;  they shaped many others into responsible and spiritual adults.  Nazareth graduate Louise Day Hicks (class of 1934; her classmates jokingly wished her for Christmas 1933 “A little more pep, vim and vigor,” and said her new year’s resolution was to “conform to every traffic law”), eventually graduated from law school, served on the School Committee in the 1960s, was elected to Congress in 1970, and in 1975 became the first woman to chair the Boston City Council. 

The parish also prepared many young men for the priesthood, following the example of Richard Cushing, who was ordained a bishop on June 10, 1939, and became the sixth Archbishop of Boston in 1945.  One of Cushing’s first acts as Archbishop was to elevate Father Waters to Monsignor. 

The parish’s first thirty years had been a time of steady growth, despite adversity.  Two disastrous fires had damaged and then destroyed St. Eulalia’s church, but the parish had rallied to repair and rebuild, and the parish had added an elementary school and a high school.  Sons and daughters of the parish went on to become sisters and priests, and St. Eulalia’s and then St. Brigid’s had formed the center of the parishioners’ social lives.

 

“The fruits of pain, of weakness, of trial”: Post-World War II

St. Brigid’s first decades were times of trial and calamity, with fires, economic Depression, and two World Wars.  The years after the Second World War would be more prosperous for the nation and the community. But Father Waters noted that “Prosperity has not enriched the world as adversity has done.  The best thoughts, the richest life lessons, the sweetest songs that have come down to us from the past have not come from lives that have known no sickness or adversity, but they are the fruits of pain, of weakness, and of trial.” The decades of prosperity tested how well the parishioners had learned the lessons taught in the decades of adversity.

After the war, the federal government rewarded returning veterans with a college education and with loans to buy homes.  It also built a highway system to ease automobile transportation, and built housing for veterans.  The impact on South Boston was direct—the D Street Housing Project, built for veterans, demolished the entire Holy Rosary Parish in 1942, including the church; the building of suburbs connected by highway to jobs in the city reduced South Boston’s population from about 55,000 after the war, to 45,766 in 1960. 

The population shift was more pronounced in the lower end; City Point remained a stable neighborhood, partly because of the strength of St. Brigid’s and the Nazareth School.  But other changes were going to impact the community.  Archbishop Cushing recognized the importance of education, particularly with the G.I. Bill guaranteeing veterans a college education.  To prepare returning veterans for college, Cushing opened Newman Prep in the Back Bay, and in the years after the war the Archdiocese opened or expanded other Catholic schools— Boston College High School moved from the South End to Columbia Point, Archbishop Williams High School opened in Braintree, Fontbonne was opened in Milton and Mt. St. Joseph’s expanded in Brighton.  In South Boston the aged St. Peter and Paul School was turned into Cardinal Cushing Central High School for Girls.   These newer schools could offer more amenities than the antiquated N Street school, built before the Civil War. 

The Second World War also brought more women into the workforce, and expanded the roles of women in professions.  After the war, young women hoping for a life of rewarding service, a life of the mind, and a life independent from the secular world had role models in the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth.  After the war, more professions were open to women, and the salaries of teachers and nurses outside the religious orders increased exponentially. The number of young women called to the religious orders declined, and schools like Nazareth would have to rely for teachers on more lay people, who would require larger salaries than did the Sisters of Charity.    In 1960, 131 nuns and three laypeople taught in the parochial schools of South Boston; by 1970 there were 82 nuns and 34 laypeople. 

Monsignor Waters recognized the inevitable.  In 1963 he announced that Nazareth High would close. To ensure the least possible disruption, the freshman class enrolled that year would be able to finish their high school education at Nazareth.  One of the last graduates of Nazareth High School wrote that when she thought of her school, she thought of “friendship, loyalty, and respect.”  These are the essential qualities in any community, and the Sisters of Charity had instilled them in the students of the Nazareth School.

 

“the people of God endure”

 

As Waters closed the Nazareth School, he also announced plans for a new elementary school, a new parish center, and a new convent.  Selling the old convent on M and Broadway for $21,500, Waters planned a new elementary school, St. Brigid’s, on the corner of O and Broadway, and in 1966 Cardinal Cushing returned to dedicate the newest school in South Boston.  The parish center behind St. Brigid’s school was named for Monsignor Waters, and on the site of the old Nazareth High School the parish built a new convent for the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth. 

By this time Monsignor Waters was turning more administrative duties over to his curate, the Reverend James Cullinan, who succeeded Waters as pastor. Father Cullinan was only the third man to be pastor of the parish. It fell to Cullinan to implement the changes of the Second Vatican Council.  The mass would be said in English, not Latin, the altar was moved closer to the congregation, the sanctuary was extended outward.  Father Cullinan expanded the sanctuary, bringing the sacred table closer to the congregation, but maintained the old sanctuary’s architectural integrity.  He had half a dozen pews removed from the front to accommodate the expanded sanctuary, and removed pews along the east side to make room for an organist and a crying room for small children.  All these changes were done in keeping with the architectural style of the church. An extended altar rail across the front of the sanctuary reflected the architectural style of the old rail. Though the architectural fashions of the 1960s were radically different from the trends of the 1930s, Cullinan modernized the church without altering the feeling of the worship.  The changes were evolutionary, not revolutionary.

The Second Vatican Council redefined the nature of the church. No longer would the Catholic Church’s mission be to bring all others back into conformity with its teaching; rather, the church would see itself as a pilgrim church, seeking a reunification with God and doing so along with other churches.  In the early twentieth century, Catholics would not venture into a Protestant church, let alone a synagogue.  But relations between Boston’s Catholics and Jews had improved under Cushing’s leadership (Cushing called his Jewish brother-in-law “the best Christian I know.”)  The Second Vatican Council called for a spirit of ecumenism, which Cushing had already begun in Boston, with prayer, collaboration in service to people, dialogue with theologians, and meetings of different Christian communities all with the goal of establishing better understanding between all God’s people. 

The role of parish priests also was changing.  Pastors no longer had life-time tenure;  instead, they would have fixed terms of service, subject to renewal by the bishop.  Only three men served as pastor during St. Brigid’s first seventy-five years; over the next twenty-five years, St. Brigid’s would have four pastors. 

When the parish observed its sixtieth anniversary in 1968, Cardinal Cushing, too ill to attend, sent his greetings, and spoke of the definition of a parish.  “The parish, in simple terms, is the church here and now existing among a visible portion of the people of God.”  The parish was the whole church in a community.  “Priests may come and go,” Cushing said, “but the people of God endure and from them the Lord himself will one day demand his rightful reckoning.” 

Cushing spoke of his own ties to the parish. So many bonds connected him “to this place and its people that I cannot begin to mention them all.”  He had “preached and prayed” in historic cathedrals and renowned basilicas, “Notre Dame in Paris has heard my voice, and indeed the great St. Peter’s in Rome itself; but there is only one place where in the most intimate and family sense I am at home, and it is here at St. Brigid’s. From this altar I said the last farewell to my good father and devoted mother;  from this church indeed the path began that has led so far over so many years; it is for me a blessed place entwined with memories that gather forever about my heart.”

 

 

Years of Crisis:  1970s

 

Father Waters and the St. Brigid community continued to watch for disruptive changes in the neighborhood.  The zoning board routinely informed Waters of plans for businesses in the parish, and Waters would weigh in when appropriate, bringing parishioners to City Hall if necessary.  For many years he blocked an oil tank farm on First Street, or the granting of liquor licenses east of M Street.   Earlier in the century, politicians like Fitzgerald and Curley had known better than to challenge Twomey or Waters;  now even Catholic politicians felt empowered to test their muscle against the church. 

But they did not usually win.  “Knocko” McCormack, brother of Congressman John McCormack, tried to open a night club in the parish. Waters stopped him.  “If they have influence in Washington,” he said in a sermon, “we’ll go to Washington and tell them we have influence too.”  John Powers, the state senator from South Boston (and first Democrat to preside over the state senate), secured funding to build the causeway around Pleasure Bay, and to build the Band Stand in Marine Park, also revived earlier attempts to build an amusement park at Marine Park.  Waters blocked it.  “The Pastor runs the show here,” one constituent, and parishioner, told Powers.  “You can say that again.” 

Because St. Brigid’s parish remained relatively stable during the 1950s and 1960s, by the 1970s the City Point community seemed to have more political influence than other neighborhoods.  The Archdiocese under O’Connell had wisely refrained from entering into political questions; the church refrained unless policy questions would directly affect the church, or unless fundamental moral values were at stake.  This was wise, particularly since by the 1970s, with Catholics in a majority in Boston, taking political stances would have required pastors to favor one Catholic over another.  In City Point, most political figures were parishioners, and some notably ran against one another for public office.  State Representative Joe Moakley ran against State Senator John Powers in 1960; Moakley ran against Louise Day Hicks for Congress in 1970, and defeated her in 1972. 

The 1960s and 1970s were turbulent and difficult times in Boston. The city embarked on a bold plan of urban renewal, demolishing neighborhoods such as the West End and Scollay Square, and planning similar projects for parts of South Boston. The Boston Redevelopment Authority also cast its eye on South Boston, but a mobilized community prevented encroachments into City Point.  A high-rise on Columbia Road and G Street was all the B.R.A. could accomplish in South Boston. 

But the public school system would be a different matter. Boston’s public schools in the mid-twentieth century had been designed to train most students for blue collar jobs (boys attending South Boston High would major in sheet metal work, other neighborhood high schools had their own manual training focus) while a smaller elite would go for college preparation at either Boston Latin or Boston English. Louise Day Hicks, elected to the school committee in 1961, was a leader in the effort to reform this school system, but very quickly was caught up in the issue of racial discrimination in the Boston Public Schools.  This issue polarized the city and caused all of South Boston to be wrongfully characterized as racist and unfriendly to outsiders. 

Though St. Brigid’s priests offered solace to parishioners suffering the effects of busing, the crisis damaged relations between the church and some members of the community. In the interest of supporting racial desegregation, the Archdiocese instructed its parish schools not to enroll students transferring from the public schools to avoid the desegregation order.  Enrollments in parochial schools had already been falling;  this refusal to allow transfers hurt both the parochial school system and its relations with parishioners.  In September 1974, police disrupted a peaceful demonstration in M Street Park.  For protection the crowd moved to St. Brigid’s churchyard, but found the church locked.  Some blamed the church for locking them out, though Father Cullinan explained that for several years he had to keep the church locked to prevent vandalism.

The 1970s were a calamitous time in South Boston, which lost a third of its population between 1960 and 1980.  The population of the parochial schools fell from 5514 in 1960 to 1936 in 1980.  In 1960, 131 sisters and 3 lay teachers had formed the faculty of the South Boston parochial schools, by 1980 there were just 90 teachers, 47 of them lay people. The decline was even more precipitous in the public schools, many of which had been declared surplus and were being abandoned by the 1980s.  The Pope School, the Tuckerman, the Lincoln, the Gaston, the O’Reilly, the Thomas N. Hart and Benjamin Dean, all were closed, though the city built two new elementary schools, the Tynan and the Condon. 

 

“A New Life”:  1980-2000

However, the institutions in St. Brigid’s parish—the school, the social activities, scout troops, and the priests and sisters who were an integral part of the community—kept the parish from having the same devastating loss of parishioners as other parishes in South Boston.  St. Brigid’s during these times of trouble was a bulwark against the forces pushing other Bostonians out of the city. In the early 1980s, after the trials of the 1960s and 1970s, a new generation of parishioners in the 1980s began the quiet task of turning things around. 

One of the most significant steps was the dedication on September 13, 1981 of the first Vietnam War memorial in the United States, at M Street Park.  Created by a group of Vietnam Veterans, who had begun organizing for a memorial in 1978, the group defied the city’s expectations by raising $38,000 in four months to build a monument to the twenty-five South Boston men who had died in Vietnam.  Father Thomas Fleming, a Vietnam veteran, insisted on beginning the dedication with a Mass at St. Brigid’s.  That September day in 1981 began a tradition which continues.

The Vietnam Memorial also followed a South Boston tradition of military service.  After a Mass on January 1, 1918, South Boston’s Boy Scouts raised a flag outside St. Eulalia’s bearing 215 stars, each star representing a parishioner serving in the armed forces. Father Twomey noted that the admonition to “love our neighbors as ourselves” presents an obligation to serve the nation in times of conflict.  Young men from South Boston continued to honor this admonition.  The Sisters of Charity’s historian noted the Nazareth school’s surroundings, with Dorchester Heights to the west, Admiral Farragut “guarding the approach from the Atlantic” to the east, with a flag in every classroom, and said of the Nazareth pupils what had been said of an earlier generation of Bostonians, “Liberty is in the very air they breath.” 

In August 1918 Father Twomey offered a prayer at a Marine Park ceremony, this time raising a flag with more than 5000 stars, one for each young man from South Boston serving in the armed forces.  Lieutenant Governor Calvin Coolidge noted that more men from South Boston had stepped forward to serve than in any other community of its size in the nation. 

In January 1945 Father Waters counted 765 parishioners serving in the armed forces; sixteen had died.  The young men who stepped forward in the 1960s were following a tradition, and the men who stepped forward to honor them in the 1970s and 1980s have ensured that the tradition will continue.  Beneath the names of the men who gave their lives in Vietnam, the memorial simply states, “If you forget my death, then I died in vain.”

The dedication of the Vietnam Memorial was an important moment for the parish, the community, and the nation.  South Boston had seen bad times in the 1970s, but the men dedicating the memorial were quietly taking back their community and assuming their own roles as leaders in it.

Father William English noted that in 1982 more of the young people coming to be married in the parish were planning to remain in the parish, and the community that remained was committed to staying.  The population stabilized at just under 30,000 in 1980, where it remained for the next thirty years.  Another innovation of 1983 was the creation of an intramural basketball league, with children from the third to the eighth grade able to participate, on teams spanning the age gap.  This brought together children and their families for weekly games in the gym at St. Brigid School.   As a symbol of the importance of families to the neighborhood, at a time when family values seemed to be under attack, Fleming placed a marble statue of the Holy Family behind the church, facing 4^th Street. 

Father Fleming also created Cushing Hall in the church basement, a place for meetings and social events after Masses.  During his tenure Fleming created the Cushing Club, which for two decades was a successful and entertaining fund-raising dinner, an annual gathering of more than two hundred parishioners.

            As the parish prepared to celebrate its 75^th anniversary in 1983, Father Fleming called for a parish mission, saying that solutions to the problems of the time—“isolation and lack of control over our circumstances”—were rooted in “the richness of our faith.”  South Boston felt these problems of isolation and inability to control circumstances most acutely during the 1970s.  Fleming reminded the community that the church was not simply a place for rituals, but “a living and growing body whose treasures and beauty can never be exhausted.”

Monsignor John McNamara became the pastor in 1988. Monsignor McNamara, ordained in 1952, had spent twenty-five years as a chaplain in the Navy, rising to the rank of Rear Admiral and serving as chief of chaplains from 1985 until his assignment to St. Brigid’s.  McNamara was only the second Catholic to be the Navy’s chief of chaplains;  the other was John O’Connor, the Cardinal Archbishop of New York. St. Brigid’s was McNamara’s second parish assignment in nearly fifty years of the priesthood.  After four years at St. Brigid’s, Monsignor McNamara was ordained as Auxiliary Bishop of Boston in 1992, administering the Merrimack Valley Region.  Following Bishop McNamara, Reverend John P. Culloty came to St. Brigid after serving as a campus chaplain at Framingham State. 

These were years of slow revival in South Boston.  The revival owed much to the community of citizens centered in St. Brigid’s Church.  The citizens actively engaged in their community caused their elected officials and leaders of industry to take notice.  The St. Brigid’s community mobilized against threats to the quality of their urban lives.  From St. Brigid’s came a generation of political leaders with values which often made them stand out in a rapidly changing world. One of the marks of their political leadership was defending the long-term interests of the community. Father Twomey had resisted attempts to turn Marine Park into an amusement park;  Joe Moakley blocked attempts to put a World’s Fair on Columbia Point and the Harbor Islands in the 1960s, and William Bulger secured funding to rebuild the sidewalks and install historic lighting fixtures at Castle Island, and to improve the beaches of South Boston. Twomey had called on parents to take better care of their children;  Bulger in the 1960s pushed through the first law in the country requiring teachers and social workers to report suspected child abuse.   Twomey and Waters had kept a close eye on development in South Boston;  City Councilor James M. Kelly, a graduate of the Nazareth elementary school, and president of the City Council for eight years, was ever vigilant in neighborhood zoning issues.  

            These political leaders had many differences—the church wisely refrained from making endorsements, but from the church these public servants learned basic lessons of public conduct.  All these public servants continued the tradition of watching out for the interests of the people in the community, living their faith not by preaching but by their actions in the public arena.  Joe Moakley said his basic political philosophy was to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

This remained such a powerful message that when Joe Moakley died in 2001, a host of political adversaries dropped their hostility to come together to mourn him at St. Brigid’s.  President George W. Bush and former Vice President Al Gore sat in the front row, the first meeting of the two contenders in the 2000 Presidential election since inauguration day;  former President Bill Clinton, Senators Edward M. Kennedy, John Kerry, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, future Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Governors Michael Dukakis, William Weld, Paul Celluci, and Jane Swift  were a few of the dignitaries who gathered in St. Brigid’s to hear the Cardinal celebrate Mass, William Bulger eulogize Joe Moakley, and  the children of St. Brigid’s sing church hymns Congressman Moakley had chosen, including “A New Life.” 

           

“The church . . . lives on”

During the closing years of the twentieth century, the Archdiocese began the process of reorganizing its parishes to make better use of its resources.  Declining numbers of nuns and priests, and declining attendance at mass, made the church reconsider how best to fulfill its mission. 

Boston’s declining school-aged population meant fewer students, and the loss of nuns meant that the schools had to pay teachers.  Helen McNamara became St. Brigid’s first lay principal, and with the retirement of Sister Evelyn Hurley in 1995 (she was 80, and had taught first grade for 45 years) St. Brigid’s lost its last teaching Sister of Charity.

Professional lay teachers and administration meant rising salaries, and increasing tuition. While the parish school had always experienced a drop in enrollment in the seventh- and eighth-grades, when some students were admitted to the exam schools or to Catholic High Schools, the opening of the South Boston Harbor Academy in 2000 meant some students would leave in the fifth grade. Changes in assignment policy at the Boston Public Schools also made the Perry School an alternative for parents.  Five hundred children marched in St. Eulalia’s May Procession in 1911;  in 2007, there were just five hundred children in the three remaining parochial schools in South Boston.  In 1998, five South Boston parochial schools educated 1399 pupils;   just ten years later, only two schools remain, with fewer than 500 students.

But knowing the importance of the St. Brigid School, with its rich curriculum and committed teachers, parents in the 1990s rallied to protect it. An enthusiastic group of alumni organized to “Pay back the Naz.” Their first efforts in 1996 resulted in much-needed improvements to the convent, and support for the school, ensuring its continued strength and service to the children of City Point. For the school’s 90^th anniversary in 2002, parents, alumni, and teachers gathered for a celebration at Marine Park, a venue preserved for them thanks to the efforts of Father Twomey and the community of faith that had long overseen the needs of City Point.

These efforts to stabilize the City Point neighborhood came as some of South Boston’s young people were suffering the ravages of drugs and despair.  Father Culloty at St. Brigid’s recognized the particular role the church could play in addressing these issues, and helped to create the Catholic Youth Ministry, a collaborative effort among the parishes of South Boston.  Reaching out to young people, those who had grown up in the church and those who had not, the Youth Ministry reminded them that God was present in their lives. 

In the first years of the twenty-first century, the Archdiocese continued to face the dilemma of maintaining institutions created a century or more earlier.  The elegant and elaborate churches built in the latter years of the 19^th- and first decade of the 20^th were no longer suited to the parish communities that surrounded them.  St. Peter and Paul, South Boston’s oldest parish, closed in 1996.  St. Augustine’s and St. Monica’s were merged into one parish, and St. Augustine’s Church closed in 2004, though the historic St. Augustine’s Chapel opens for Saturday afternoon Masses.  

St. Brigid’s community had already begun working with other parishes to create joint programs in confirmation and other areas, and the Archdiocese in 2004 brought Gate of Heaven and St. Brigid’s together formally, in a unique arrangement.  Father Robert Casey, who came to St. Brigid’s in 2000, became the pastor of Gate of Heaven.  All the priests from both parishes live in the St. Brigid’s Rectory, and the old Gate of Heaven rectory and parish hall (which had originally been the church) were sold to help pay for the restoration of Gate of Heaven Church. Father Casey pushed further collaborative efforts to reduce administrative expenses for both parishes, but more importantly to foster a spirit of the parish as a community. 

Under the guidance of Father Casey the parish also undertook significant, though not always obvious, renovations to the parish’s buildings and grounds.  Regrading the parking area and fixing leaks in the roof were necessary but mundane and invisible changes.  But in addition a new garden space was created between the church and the rectory, with a statue of St. Brigid in the center, donated by a parishioner in memory of Bishop McNamara.  A new parish office for both Gate of Heaven and St. Brigid parish was built in the convent on N Street. 

Inside the church new flooring was installed, along with a new heating and air conditioning system.  The interior was painted in colors that evoked earth, sky, and life--the walls a light brown Sierra Ridge, the ceiling a rich blue, and the sanctuary a deep green, suggesting life, and also the color of Ireland.  To bring the parishioners to a closer connection with the sacrament, the altar rail was now completely removed.  Cushing Hall in the basement and St. Eulalia’s Chapel were both renovated, bringing new life to the worship space and to the parish.

It is fitting that St. Brigid, which began as a mission of Gate of Heaven, now houses the priests of both parishes. After the national turmoil of the clergy-abuse scandal, which struck the Boston archdiocese particularly hard, the parish community was prepared to join the new archbishop, Sean O’Malley, in healing the church. 

The St. Brigid community faces new challenges in its second century. The neighborhood’s character is changing dramatically, with more than half of South Boston’s population between the ages of 20 and 40, and fewer families in the parish. 

The parish and the community endured through a century of challenge and conflict.  Father Twomey had mobilized the community against unwanted development, had warned about the dangers of alcohol and gambling, and had brought the parish together for social activities.  Cardinal O’Connell had said at the Archdiocese centennial that the “faith of the immigrant” had withstood a century of reviling, “the faith of his children must stand the test of indifference and flattery.”  These challenges of indifference to God and succumbing to the flattery of the world continue to challenge the faithful. 

The faith of the people of St. Brigid parish sustained it through the good times and bad of its first century.  Through fires and wars, through the Depression of the 1930s and the forced busing crisis of the 1970s, St. Brigid parish endured.  Cardinal Cushing once paid tribute to “all the priests who have served” St. Brigid’s, calling them “good shepherds of a goodly flock” whose “labors have borne fruit a hundredfold.”  The men and women of the parish, the pastors and the priests, the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, the students and the parishioners built a parish which survives. “The apostles live and die, their successors live and die,” Father Twomey had said in 1910,  “the church . . . lives on.” 

 

 

 

Special thanks to Father James M. DiPerri; Father Robert Casey;  Father John P. Culloty; Dan McCole; Adele Eloise Barbato; Kristin Kelly; Caitlyn Morley; and Daniel Ryan.