RHODE ISLAND
The Professorial Shock-Jock
[with video]
Early last November, the Rev. Father Bernard A. Healey, present pastor of Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, posted photos on the parish web site of the church sign, with its trademark crimson outline with gold lettering, blown face down by a wind gust.
Located in the affluent, bayside town of East Greenwich, a suburb minutes south of Providence via I-95 and Route 4, Our Lady of Mercy (O.L.M.) Church is the spiritual home to over 2,000 area households. Its adjacent Our Lady of Mercy School educates students, grades K-8, from the parish and surrounding communities.
Having lived on either side of town of East Greenwich, R.I. for almost my entire life, I was a parishioner at O.L.M. for 15 years, from 1997 to 2012. Long before then, I attended the O.L.M. parish regional grammar school for grades one and two, from fall 1985 through spring 1987. By my late youth in the late 1990’s, I was attracted by the comparatively solemn, traditional-styled liturgies and choir music that the parish had adopted in its liturgies (this would become one of the church’s “selling points” among area congregations). While never featuring the totally traditional, altar-pushed-back, pre-Second Vatican Council Mass entirely in Latin, its celebrations occasionally included rituals and customs somewhat uncommon in post-1960s Catholicism, leading me to a deeper level of fascination with the faith. For most of my years at O.L.M., I never quite fathomed what else this seeming spiritual hamlet – in some ways apparently so removed from the wicked, everyday world with all of its celebratory beauty and splendor – truly represented.
The church’s trademark sign being blown over by gusts of wind indicated that a choppy storm was upon this parish, very soon.
At some point in either 2010 or 2011, I was curious about the why the pastor, the late Rev. Monsignor John W. Lolio had still not set up a parish web page. Most other parishes had begun doing so in the late 90s, and O.L.M., a particularly large parish, and the spiritual home of the sitting Rhode Island governor in the 2000s, Donald Carcieri, was unfamiliar to even many lifelong Catholics from either end of this very small state. So I performed a google search for “Our Lady of Mercy, East Greenwich, R.I.”
The search instantly revealed the stories of Helen McGonigle and Jeff Thomas. As two O.L.M. grammar school students in the late 1960s, both were molested and repeatedly raped by the Irish missionary priest, Father Brendan Smyth. Formerly assigned to O.L.M. parish from the mid to late 1960s, Smyth had long garnered international notoriety. The following Northern Irish Television Network broadcast — which clearly features the Rhode Island church — demonstrates this:
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