What Happened This Week at St. Anthony Parish
Autumn comes, the radio show this week and our parish does not have a blimp
One of the things I am fascinated by is that in New England it almost seems like there is a big switch. Once September hits, the cooler weather seems to appear. Now we are in Autumn and it seems that almost overnight the Fall weather appears.
Sometimes, I think of our parish as the B.F. Goodrich of Catholic parishes. Whenever anyone thinks of the parish in the Allston/Brighton area the focus is on St. Columbkille’s which is the Brighton parish on Market Street, a main thoroughfare. St. Anthony’s is in a neighborhood and is off the main roads. Holton Street is a side street so small that in order for two cars going in opposite directions to pass each other, one has to pull to the side and let the other pass.
If you remember the B. F. Goodrich commercials, because their name was so much like Goodyear, many mixed the companies up. The commercial featured a game show where a man was going for a million dollars. He had answered all the questions right about innovations from one tire company which of course was B.F. Goodrich. The money question was “Which company has the blimp?” Of course, he said Goodrich in which he lost all his money as it was incorrect.
Recently, on the front page of the Pilot of all the schools they could have featured they chose St. Columbkille’s and in a recent column in the Pilot about the funeral celebrated here of our previous pastor the focus was a window in our church of St. Columbkille.
So I get a kick out of the Archdiocesan focus on that parish specifically and not on ours. To be fair Wes Cipolo did a great job on our discussion group we had here also for the Pilot. So, we have been featured once ourselves.
I love to say that we are a stone’s throw from the Charles River but please do not throw the stone. We are also about half that distance from the Massachusetts Turnpike or as those not from Boston call it—I-90.
So we are not in an easily to find area. At one time, it was a neighborhood filled with families but many developers came in and changed it fromto a more transitional one for university students and post-graduates starting out in the working world. So the neighborhood has an interesting flavor.
International community
The Brazilian Community is different. They have many families and so we have a full-fledged sacrament preparation program in Portuguese.
They also have a devotional system that is so powerful focused on prayer, the Eucharist and processions.
All of this happens far from the beaten track. People visit for Mass from all over the country and the world, yet, our basic parish is one large Brazilian Community and a smaller English speaking one. I say English speaking because the English speakers can be from this country or others. Parishioners are from Nicaragua, Nigeria, Uganda, Philippines, India and of course Brazil, I assume even more places.
Radio
I received a great phone call from someone regularly about our radio program. Who greatly enjoys it, however, I find we don’t have the financial support that would be helpful.
This week on the radio show, I will be speaking with Colin Miller, author of We Are Only Saved Together ©2024 from Ave Maria Press. You can hear it on Mondays to Fridays at 3pm in Boston 950am WROL or WROLradio.com and after that on the podcast at CatholicAudioMedia.com
This coming Sunday the homily will focus on my least favorite Bible verse Mark 9:38-48. We will see what I put together.
Come by the parish for our chanted Mass on Sunday at 10:00 am
Fr. Robert J Carr is pastor of St. Anthony Parish in Allston, MA
The parish podcast is at https://catholicaudiomedia.com