THE RHODE ISLAND CENTURY

4.26.99
Sentinelle Affair divided Catholics

By JOHN HILL
Journal Staff Writer

Woonsocket is a city proud of its Franco-American heritage. They can talk your ear off about Mount St. Charles Academy, the Precious Blood and St. Ann Churches and the Jubliee Franco-Americain.

But ask about the Sentinelle Affair and ebullience evaporates.

''I really shouldn't talk about that,'' is an answer you'll probably get more often than not.

It is seven decades in the past, but to this day the bitter infighting over how best to defend the community's French-Canadian heritage still has the power to touch the children and grandchildren of those who lived it.

By the time the affair ended in 1929, five dozen Roman Catholics had been excommunicated, the city's French-Canadian community had been riven and many of the faithfuls' faith had been shaken.

named after La Sentinelle, the newspaper their leaders published, were a group of conservative Catholic French Canadians who made a last and ultimately futile attempt to cool the heat of the local American melting pot.

The battle was a collision of two powerful forces in American culture. One was old _ the insular mill-village outlook epitomized by the thriving church-centered society Woonsocket's French-Canadian immigrants had built up over the preceeding decades.

The other force was new _ assimilation and the emergence of what today would be called mass culture, such as trolleys, trains, cars and radio, which brought the outside world into every corner of the Blackstone Valley.

''The fight was for French, to keep the French language and culture going,'' said Gerard Hemond, whose father Phydime, was one of the main writers for La Sentinelle.

''They believed if you lost your language, you lost your faith,'' Hemond said. ''In Quebec, if you left the province, any other part of the country they're all Protestants.''

''They were lawyers, doctors,'' he said of the Sentinellists. ''They weren't just a bunch of rowdies looking to stir things up.''

that set off the five years of strife would seem to be a minor fiscal policy issueMDBO today: how should the Diocese of Providence collect and distribute collections raised in its parishes?

The forces of assimilation were personified by Bishop William A. Hickey. In his history of the Sentinelle Affair, Richard S. Sorrell wrote that Bishop Hickey was trying to meld a diocese of Irish, Italian, Ukrainian, Polish and French-Canadian national parishes into a single, cohesive _ and English-speaking _ Catholic whole.

But that ideal collided violently with the French-Canadians' unique and separate image of themselves. Throughout their history, Catholicism, the French language and Quebec nationalism have been practically fused.

It is called MDUL'la MDUL survivance,' an idea that goes back to colonial Quebec and its conquest by the British in 1763. In the decades after that military defeat, the French-Catholic people of Quebec tenaciously maintained their cultural identity and their Frenchness.

To Quebec's French Canadians, keeping their faith, their language and their culture was the ultimate victory. The English may have political control of the land, but the souls of the people were still French.

When Quebecers began migrating to New England in the 1860s, they brought that creed with them. Speaking French was far more than a quaint family tradition, it was a ongoing symbol of their unconquerable spirit. Its success was a source of intense pride and the product of eternal vigilance.

''After all, the United States, like British Canada, was largely Protestant,'' observes the Museum of Work and Culture's'','' a study of French Canadians in Woonsocket. ''Moreover, most Catholic Americans were Irish Catholics and thus part of an alien, English-speaking institution.

''In Woonsocket, French Canadian immigrants believed that if they were to protect their heritage, it was necessary that they establish French-Canadian Catholic parishes, with French-Canadian priests an eventually French-Canadian bishops,'' the essay continued, ''and that they send their children to French-Canadian schools, where instruction would be bilingual.''

of the century, French Canadians had more than thrived in Woonsocket. They had made the city their own.

In its history of the Museum of Work and Culture notes Woonsocket was known as 'MDULla ville plus franc' _ the most French city in the United States.

So when the Irish _ and English-speaking _ bishop of Providence declared that non-French-speaking students would also attend Mount St. Charles Academy in Woonsocket, and that collections raised in Franco-American parishes would go to non-Franco-American charities, it unleashed a firestorm.

Franco-American Catholics had done more than add some distinctive restaurants to the city. Though they were mostly wage-earning mill workers, they had built huge stone churches, schools, an orphanage and a convalescent hospital.

''They were working people and a third of their income was going to the church,'' according to Jean Picard, the great-grandnephew of Elphege Daignault, Sentinelle leader.

stone churches such as Precious Blood, St. Ann and Holy Family had been built as monuments to the strength of their parishioners' faith.

But from 1924-1929 they would become forts and sometimes battlefields in the Sentinelle Affair.

Woonsocket wasn't the lone eruption. Throughout New England, from Danielson, Conn., in 1895 to North Brookfield, Mass., in 1901, French-Canadian Catholics had reacted with boycotts and picket lines when faced with the appointment of non-Francophone priests in their parishes.

Confronted with such impassioned opposition, some bishops had relented.

But what the Sentinellists didn't realize in 1924 was that those days were over.

had been simmering on for a few years before it broke into the open in Woonsocket in 1924. Militant advocates of MDULla survivance, led by former City Solicitor Elphege Daignault, began organizing against diocesan fund drives.

They opposed one to raise money for Mount St. Charles Academy because Bishop Hickey had announced non-French-speaking students would be taught there.

They were upset further when, of the 24 charities to benefit from a diocese-wide charity appeal were announced, only two were French-Canadian.

The diocese had established a policy of setting fundraising goals for each parish and the Sentinellists saw this as taking away one of the basic tenets of their society _ the local parish free to serve its members as it saw fit.

''Hickey came in and said, 'Look, we're going to change,' '' Hemond said. ''He never even sent anyone to explain, he just rolled the thing on. 'You do what I say or else.' He had control.''

Daignault founded La Sentinelle, 'The Sentinel,' and in November of 1925 he took over direct editorial control.

The newspaper was distributed throughout New England and its articles would carry headlines _ in French, of course _ such as ''Judas is not dead and he has brothers.'

Hemond's father helped write and run the paper, and his son recalls that his father's passion didn't let up when he came home.

''That was all we heard about at the house,'' he said, ''that was his complete life. He didn't paint the house, he didn't fix the car.''

In early 1927 Daignault and 60 supporters filed a lawsuit in Superior Court challenging the authority of the Diocese of Providence to take money from individual parishes. The group also adopted a tactic that had worked in the past _ boycotts of church collections.

Not everyone agreed with the Sentinellists, but they had a significant following. At Holy Family Church, the diocese was provoked into responding. One Sunday during a pew rent strike in July 1927, the priests stopped people and asked for their contributions before a Mass began.

what Sorrell calls the high-water mark of the movement, the fall of 1927.

After the Holy Family Church incident and when a priest perceived as favoring the Sentinelles was removed from St. Louis Church, the Sentinelles drove home their claim of oppression by the diocesan leadership.

Estimates are that a September 1927 rally at St. Louis Field may have drawn 10,000 people.

''One rally I went to had 2,000 people,'' Hemond recalled. ''I remember St. Louis Field. They filled the baseball park; there were as many people standing as sitting.'' Hemond said.

But in October, the Superior Court dismissed the Sentinelle suit and its signers were warned of possible excommunication.

In January 1928, the diocese kept up the pressure when Bishop Hickey announced that those who were not contributing as they could were in a state of mortal sin.

And in February some of the movement's leaders were refused communion.

twice to plead his case and while he was there in April 1928, the excommunications of everyone who joined in the lawsuit were announced. They were given a year to acknowledge the authority of the bishop and repent.

''The excommunication was not a brand of shame,'' Picard said. ''People would look at this person and say 'This guy is holding fast, he's one who is not giving up.' ''

Hemond said excommunication was an unfair punishment, threatening people's souls over an argument about fiscal policy.

''After we had built our own churches, he [Bishop Hickey] wanted to take from each one,'' Hemond said. ''He said that was a sin, that was a political position.''

But excommunication ended it. Sorrell said the Sentinellists wanted to change the way their church was run, not to leave it.

When the diocese transformed the controversy from one over accounting procedures to one of the fate of a person's soul, the Sentinellists chose their faith. By February 1929 all but four had repented.

Hemond's father _ whom Sorrell said had torn the excommunication order up in front of the priest who delivered it _ held out until May 1929, but in the end he too came back to the fold.

was a young altar boy at St. AnnMDBO Church on the Sunday seven of them repented.

''For penance they had to ask forgiveness,'' he recalled. ''You just had to be forgiven. It was a short statement. I remember the pastor, Father [Camille] Villiard, he became a monsignor in Pawtucket later. The beauty of what transpired was they all asked for forgiveness, and then he went to the pulpit and said 'Now the family is complete.' That was it.''

Hemond said the extreme action of excommunication left a bad taste in many mouths.

''That's where people lost a lot of faith in the chain of command,'' he said. ''The bishop excommunicated them for doing something that was more or less a political thing.''

Hemond's father was the last to repent. He even got a month's extension to decide and finally relented on May 17, 1929.

''He had to go over to a priest and say some form of words, agree not to do it again,'' Hemond said. ''He was worried what it [excommunication] might do to his children.''

agrees that the fight against assimilation, though noble, was doomed, and maybe even rightly so.

''World War II really broke it down,'' he said of the idea of ethnic insularity.

''You went in the Army, you were mixed in there with guys from all over. You found everyone is pretty much the same. They're not that different from you are.''