Diaconate candidate shares journey with identical twin

By Bill Doyle | CFP Correspondent
 
John McManamon will be ordained a deacon on Saturday, May 18, at 10 a.m. at St. Paul Cathedral and he believes it was predestined.

His identical twin brother Phil is already a deacon in the Archdiocese of New Orleans, and he is scheduled to place the dalmatic vestment on him at the ordination.

“It will be very special,” John said, “because he and I are very close. I know our parents wanted us both to be priests. So having us both become deacons is about as close as we can get and I’m sure they’ll be proud.”

“I am overjoyed, excited and proud,” Phil said.

Phil didn’t try to convince his twin to become a deacon because he knew it was more a matter of feeling a calling.

“My heart was hoping it would be inevitable so I’m glad it worked out that way,” Phil said.

The McManamon family met brothers and sisters from St. Benedict, a monastery in the village of Still River in Harvard, when the brothers and sisters traveled to Illinois to sell their books and raise money. The twins went on to spend their high school summers helping the brothers at the Massachusetts monastery milk cows on their dairy farm.

The McManamons’ parents, Patrick and Alice, intended to dedicate their lives to service to the St. Benedict Abbey after they retired, but their father died when the twins were seniors at Aurora Central Catholic High School in Aurora, Ill.

His mother still wanted to live close to the abbey so the family moved to Holden and John went on to graduate from Anna Maria College.

After graduating from high school, Phil spent two years at the St. Benedict monastery to explore becoming a priest. Their sister, Kathleen, became a sister for the Order of St. Benedict and spent time with the community at St. Scholastica Priory in Petersham. Eventually, she went to work for the Venerable English College, a seminary in Rome.

Unfortunately, she developed Alzheimer’s disease and had to return from Rome just before the pandemic hit. John has been taking care of her for more than a year at his home in Milford.

“She’s sort of aware that I’m becoming a deacon, but she’s not quite sure who I am,” he said.

John, 63, lives with his sister and son Patrick. He also has a daughter, Renee Lucas.

John was impressed that his late parents had wanted to dedicate themselves to the church. Becoming a deacon was something that he began considering as a teenager and he became more inspired to do so after his twin brother was ordained a deacon in the archdiocese of New Orleans in 2015.

“When he did it,” John said, “I saw the path he took and I got to see what it looked like to be a deacon and the life that he was living and what he was doing in the parish and for his people. That made it a little easier for me to think about.”

 When Phil told the family that he had entered the diaconate program, John remembers thinking, “Oh darn it, he beat me to it because I was thinking about it. Now, they’re all going to think I did it because he did it and I really didn’t.”

Nevertheless, John was pleased to attend his brother’s ordination in New Orleans.

 The twins are close, but Phil has lived in Louisiana since 1980 when he attended St. Joseph Seminary College for a year.

 “But every time we get back together, it’s like we’ve never been apart,” John said. “We just pick right up where we left off. We’re always on the same page in kidding with each other. We have very similar personalities and humor. It’s like having a copy of yourself, a best friend.”

Even though the twins have lived far apart for more than 40 years, they remained on the same wavelength. They both found jobs in the computer industry - John in software development and Phil in cyber security and computer networking.

For the last few years, John and his son have visited Phil, his wife Barbara and their three children in Kenner, La., just outside New Orleans for a week or two around Thanksgiving.

Two years ago, he served as a lector for the Thanksgiving Day Mass and last year he was an acolyte. No announcement was made that Phil’s brother was on hand and the twins got a kick out of the reaction from the parishioners, who couldn’t figure out how Phil could be in two places at once.“For us, it’s like having a duplicate,” John said. “We do think alike.”

When they were young, John used to tease his brother that he was four minutes older than him. While growing up, they’d finish each other’s sentences without even thinking about it. They would switch seats with each other in their classroom so their teacher would think John was Phil and that Phil was John.

“Little things we could do to trick people, we enjoyed that quite a bit,” John said.

That probably wouldn’t work these days. They still look a lot like each other and they both wear eyeglasses, but John has more hair on the top of his head.

John entered the diaconate program five years ago, taking classes at his alma mater of Anna Maria College and the Office of the Diaconate for the Worcester diocese.

At 10 a.m. the day after the ordination, John will give the homily at a Mass of Thanksgiving at his home parish for the past decade, Sacred Heart of Jesus in Milford.

Father Richard A. Scioli, CSS, pastor of Sacred Heart of Jesus will preside. Fathers Gregory J. Hoppough, CSS, and Laurence V. Brault, pastor at St. Gabriel the Archangel Parish in Upton, will concelebrate the Mass. Father Brault has been a mentor since they met 40 years ago when he was the associate pastor at St. Anne Parish in Shrewsbury.

“It will be Pentecost so it will definitely be on the theme of the Holy Spirit,” he said, “and that spirit being alive at my ordination and being alive at the church and alive in all of us.”

John is serving an internship at St. Peter Parish in Northbridge and there will be another Mass of Thanksgiving for him there at 11 a.m. May 26.
John has high hopes as a deacon.

“I want to try to bring as many people to God as possible,” he said. “They can bring me and I can bring them to Christ. I want to serve my church and help the pastor in his duties, but I really want to help save souls. My mother and father were helping to save the souls of their kids while raising them and I want to do that for whatever family and parish I join.”