History of St. Paul Church

Fr. Hickey and a Changing Parish

The new pastor was the pious and careful Rev. Augustine F. Hickey. Born in Cambridge, he had studied at the North American College in Rome where he acquired a great devotion to Pope Pius X. Ordained in 1906, Fr. Hickey spent many years as archdiocesan superintendent of schools and was always attentive to that aspect of the parish's work, though the Church's liturgy remained his greatest treasure.

Fr. Hickey proved himself as prudent in real estate as his predecessor. Soon after taking the helm at St. Paul's, he sold two unused lots on Ellery Street (using the same realtor with whom Fr. Orr had purchased them almost twenty years before). In particular, although school enrollment was declining, he purchased additional property in order to provide more school playgrounds. In this way the parish acquired the house east of the school on Mt. Auburn as well as several houses on De Wolfe Street, which were later used as a parking lot. He also put permanent windows into the lower church and repaired the convent.

The only building he did not improve was the Newman House. After the Rectory displaced its lodging, the Catholic Club used 8 and 10 De Wolfe as addresses. Slowly the Newman House became less active, and what was called the "Clubhouse" became a parish house. In 1939, 10 De Wolfe was razed for a playground without any mention of Harvard students. The diminished campus ministry, never a particular focus of Hickey's, left a vacuum which the St. Benedict Center filled during the next decade. The student chaplaincy was always assigned to an assistant, but Hickey was willing to intercede at the Chancery for Harvard students who needed Catholic letters of reference for research in Europe or who sought permission to read indexed books (like Gibbon's history and the novels of Fielding, Richardson, and Steme)--although he was not always successful.


As the Harvard Summer School grew, a number of clerics and religious took part in the courses and special programs, both as students and teachers. The parish benefited as visiting priests (including Rev. Fulton Sheen of Catholic University in 1927) filled in as summer replacements. Priests who came to do graduate work during the scholastic year helped with the parish Mass schedule, a resource which has continued to assist St. Paul's even today.

Shortly after he was elevated to domestic prelate in 1937, his own attempt to distribute a small parish bulletin was stymied. The monthly bulletin would just have been four pages the size of a holy card, outlining parish activities and important feast days--alerting the faithful to feasts was always part of Hickey's liturgical mission--but O'Connell's chancery refused him permission, telling him emphatically to "concentrate all efforts on the Pilot which contains all news and sufficient instruction.

Harvard University's expansion did not cease with the building of the Harvard House system in the 1920's and 1930's. Further Houses were added and, as important for the parish, the university acquired apartment houses and other residential property on a large scale. The university cannot be blamed for the demographic shift, since most areas of Boston witnessed a population movement of younger and more affluent families to the suburbs during the post-war period. Harvard Square's distinctive history is that the suburban emigration was accompanied by institutional expansion rather than urban decline or the immigration of new groups.

The parish census numbers show that the community was still growing at the time of World War II, but it was already aging. In fact school enrollments, both parochial and public, had been declining from 1914, just as the new church was being planned. Though baptisms surged during the post-war "baby boom," the number of parishioners peaked in 1947 with 6637 Catholics in the parish boundaries. After 1955, the flight to the suburbs (in many cases no farther than Belmont) accelerated, and by 1970 the Church served only half as many parishioners as it had for the first half of the century. Although it is not clear when and whether students were counted in the rolls, the parish certainly regained strength under Fr. Boles in the late seventies and since then the number of "souls" has stayed somewhat over 3000.

During Fr. Hickey's forty-year tenure, he was assisted by a number of fine priests, of whom Rev. William G. Gunn (1918-1937) was one of the longest in residence. A noticeable change came after World War II, when the rectory was filled by a completely new set of assistants: Rev. John E. Kenney (1946-61), Rev. Charles B. Murphy (1947-60), Rev. John J. Sullivan (1946-54), and the eventual successor as pastor, Rev. Joseph I. Collins (1946-71).

Msgr. Hickey retired at age 81 on Jan. 18, 1965, and became the first occupant of Regina Cleri, the archdiocese's home for priests in the West End. A small, devout, and proper man, Fr. Hickey was seen as rather intellectual by some parishioners and aloof by some students. He preferred to work quietly, rarely making appeals for funds. However, his formal and introspective nature did not stop him from generously helping those in material need or putting energy into his great love--the liturgy. Although in general his long administration of the parish reflected the nominal stability of the pre-conciliar period, he was an early and active advocate of participation by the laity in liturgy. His greatest legacy to the parish is the work he accomplished with Theodore Marier in building congregational singing and eventually in founding the Boston Archdiocesan Choir School. A founder and original board member of the Cambridge Community Federation, he also served as a member of the Cambridge Housing Authority and a director of the Cambridge Red Cross.