"It's been a great life," says Father Dumphy

BY TANYA CONNOR 

THE CATHOLIC FREE PRESS 

Priests living at Southgate at Shrewsbury are retired, but “we’re still priests,” says one of them, Father Charles J. Dumphy. Despite physical limitations, he takes part in Mass there and takes his turn being available to hear fellow residents’ confessions. 

“I’ve eaten, I read the paper and had my pulse taken by Sister Mary Ann,” he told The Catholic Free Press one morning. Sister Mary Ann Bartell, a registered nurse who is a Carmelite Sister of the Eucharist, provides healthcare for retired priests.  

“She comes in almost every day,” Father Dumphy says. “She comes in here for refreshment – to see the old people. Great lady!” 

Now 93, Father Dumphy has a lifetime to remember, and he shares some of it, including his characteristic humor. 

“I was born in Springfield because I wanted to be close to my mother,” he quips. “I was only 5 when my parents moved to Worcester because my father was working for Internal Revenue in Boston.” His older brother was also born in Springfield, and their younger brother and sister were born in Worcester, he says. Their father was from Holy Name Parish in Springfield, their mother from Ascension Parish in Worcester.

Father Dumphy says he grew up in Ascension Parish, and attended Ascension Grammar School for grades 1-3, and St. John’s Grammar and High schools for grades 4-12. Students walked to school and home for lunch.  

“You knew everybody,” he recalls. “I think sometimes we had four or five mothers. If Mrs. So-and-So saw me doing something, she’d correct me.” 

While a student at the College of the Holy Cross involved in the Massachusetts Air National Guard, Father Dumphy says, he was advised to leave school for seminary if he wanted to be a priest. Otherwise he might need to do a couple years of service first. So off he went to St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore. 

“Baltimore had (seminarians) from all over,” he recalls. “There was one from Denmark,” two from Japan, one from China. They were called by diocese for their mail. So he was always the last called because he had no diocesan affiliation, he explained. He’d gone to seminary in 1950 without arranging it with a bishop. That year the Worcester Diocese was formed out of the Springfield Diocese. Bishop John J. Wright, Worcester’s first bishop, asked him to decide whether he wanted to be a priest for the new diocese, or to find another diocese. The seminarian asked for Worcester and the bishop officially assigned him to continue at St. Mary’s Seminary.  

Father Dumphy and others were ordained on May 19, 1955, at St. Paul Cathedral. 

Being transferred from one parish to another was always of interest to the priests. 

Father James Kelly would go to the Post Office Thursday night to get an advance copy of The Catholic Free Press that announced the priest transfers, Father Dumphy recalls. This was “illegal,” he maintains, since then, as now, the newspaper came out on Fridays.  

“We started the rumors together,” he quips. 

Father Dumphy recalls how he learned of one transfer. When he was a curate at St. Catherine of Sweden Parish in Worcester, Father Edmond T. Tinsley called him. 

“He’s talking about my transfer,” Father Dumphy remembers. “I said, ‘I’m not being transferred.’” But then the housekeeper brought him the bishop’s letter saying that he was being transferred! 

He was sent to St. Stephen Parish in Worcester, then St. Paul, Blackstone; St. Joseph, Auburn; and St. Joan of Arc, Worcester, as a curate.  

In 1963, while still serving as a curate, he became diocesan chaplain for Scouting. Bishop Wright started the Catholic Scouting program after Scouts, who had no parish troop, came to his door raising money, Father Dumphy says. 

From July 1968-June 1976 Father Dumphy was diocesan director of the Catholic Youth Council, which Bishop Wright also started. 

“One of their big events was a parade down Main Street in Worcester,” for which parish youth groups made floats, Father Dumphy says. 

He says clergy saw “the kids are the future” because of Bishop Bernard J. Flanagan, who succeeded Bishop Wright, and “was always available for the youth,” attending cheerleaders’ banquets and distributing basketball trophies. 

 “Dealing mostly with the youth – it kept you thinking young,” Father Dumphy says. “They were so vibrant, dreaming things were going to happen. And they did.” The youth converted him more than he converted them, he says. It was the time of Vatican Council II. 

“We’re listening to the laity,” he says. “The laity were taking over things they knew more about,” in areas like finance and church physical plants. 

Transitioning back to parish life, Father Dumphy worked with adults more. He was administrator of Prince of Peace Parish in Princeton; co-pastor of St. Joseph, Leicester; and pastor of Our Lady of the Rosary, Clinton; St. Louis, Webster; St. Ann, North Oxford, and Blessed Sacrament, Worcester, then senior priest at St. George, Worcester. 

“It’s been a great life,” he says. “It’s amazing how people responded. … They were sort of honored that you would ask them to do this or that. … There’s great faith in all these parishes. You’ve got to work” with and for parishioners. “It’s their parish.” 

He says the Church and the world of his earlier days and his present were and are imperfect, but “God is still working.”