From worker to friend: Driver remembers days with Bishop Reilly

By Tanya Connor
The Catholic Free Press

The stranger became his boss – and close friend.

This is the story, filled with several stories, that Robert F. Pike, and his wife, Frances E. Pike, of St. George Parish in Worcester, tell about Bishop Reilly.

Mr. Pike formerly worked at the Chancery and at the bishop’s private residence in Worcester, helping Bishop Harrington, Bishop Reilly’s predecessor, and Bishop Rueger, auxiliary bishop, with maintenance, lawn care, and “a little bit of everything.”

One day a man in clerical attire appeared at the door of the house.

“Who is this priest?” wondered Mr. Pike. Aloud he asked, “Can I help you?”

“Who are you?” came the reply.

It was Bishop Reilly himself.
Mr. Pike said nobody had told him exactly when the new bishop was coming.

It wasn’t just Bishop Reilly who came unannounced, however. Mr. Pike said he got repeated calls from the police to go check the house when the alarm was set off – by the wind rattling a door – when Bishop Reilly was not home.

The bishop would tease Mr. Pike later, “Were you out late last night?”

Sometimes when Bishop Reilly was home, he called Mr. Pike, upon hearing someone messing up the American flag hanging outside.

“By the time I got there, they’d be gone,” Mr. Pike said; the bishop, whose size could make him appear intimidating, had already turned on a light and banged on a window.

“If you saw that big image in the window, you’d think twice,” Mr. Pike maintained. “But ... he was a gentle giant.”

What was it like working for him?

“The money was bad, but the jokes were good,” replied Mr. Pike.

“What do you say we take a ride?” Bishop Reilly would say.

“You never knew where you were going,” Mr. Pike said. “Sometimes we’d go back to Rhode Island” to see the bishop’s family or do something else. “I don’t think I ever had a bad day with him. He’d crack jokes. He came from a big family. I came from a big family.” He and the bishop would “see who could tell the biggest” story.

When the bishop had a meeting “it was up to me to get him there,” Mr. Pike said, adding that Bishop Reilly, being from Rhode Island, didn’t know his way around the Worcester Diocese, at least not at first.

“Bob, can you take me ...?” the bishop would ask.

“Bishop, it’s your car,” replied the driver; they’d go wherever the boss wanted.

“It was an honor and a privilege to take him to these places,” Mr. Pike said. But the bishop never took him on visits to the pope - “I missed out on the good stuff.”

Wherever they did go, “instead of you being the straw left out, he’d bring you into the conversation,” Mr. Pike said. Bishop Reilly didn’t exactly bring his chauffer into the conversation, but “he made sure that everybody knew I was with him.”

“He was a very thoughtful person,” Mrs. Pike noted.

Some of that rubbed off on people who worked at the Chancery, her husband added. Co-workers previously just talked to him about what needed to be done, instead of holding real conversations, he said. But Bishop Reilly brought them together more; under his friendly leadership “we were all working together – he opened the doors.”

He brought Vincentians out for their St. Vincent de Paul gatherings too, the Pikes said.

“Whenever we needed a Mass, he would do it for us” before diocesan St. Vincent de Paul Society meetings, said Mrs. Pike, who was the Society’s executive director from 1997 to 2016.

Mr. Pike said the Vincentians would ask, “Are you going to have the bishop?” If he was coming, instead of “having five people, we’d have 25. He was a drawing card.”

“He was so well liked because of his personality,” explained Mrs. Pike.

When some Vincentians wanted to do something and others resisted, Bishop Reilly would say, “You tell them I said so” and “they never refused him,” Mr. Pike said.

After Bishop Reilly retired, Mrs. Pike said, her husband would call to see how he was doing, and they became good friends.

Mr. Pike said he’d ask the bishop, “Have you seen so-and-so?”

“No.”

“How would you like to go?”

If the bishop wanted to see the person – usually a retired priest – Mr. Pike would take him.
Mrs. Pike reminded him how, when they encountered the retired bishop somewhere, “he was always so happy to see you.”

Replied her husband, “It was a two-way street; I was glad to see him.”