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July 3, 2025
By Tanya Connor | The Catholic Free Press
St. Mary’s was not the first parish established in the Brookfields, but its church building is the oldest.
How old has been the subject of research - and speculation.
A look back is timely, since on Tuesday this week the Brookfields’ parishes were merged to form one new parish with a new name: Blessed Carlo Acutis.
The new parish is to use Sacred Heart of Jesus Church in West Brookfield and St. Joseph Church in North Brookfield. Final Masses were celebrated at the other two churches – St. Mary’s in Brookfield, the oldest, and St. John the Baptist in East Brookfield, the newest.
Priests came from other places to minister to Catholics in the area as early as the mid-1800s, but the first parish – St. Joseph’s – was established on July 20, 1867, according to Father John J. McCoy’s “History of the Catholic Church in the Diocese of Springfield,” published in 1900. Father Edward Turpin was the first resident pastor of North Brookfield and its missions.
Brookfield was set apart as a parish in May 1885, with Father Cornelius J. Foley as its first resident pastor. The Brookfield parish also served East and West Brookfield – for decades.
Father Michael J. Murphy, who became pastor in 1889, built the church in West Brookfield. For the East Brookfield church, he remodeled a school building, enlarged it and adding a steeple. He also repaired and added to the church in Brookfield.
In 1865, before there was a parish in the Brookfields, Father William Moran, pastor of All Saints Parish in Ware, had bought the building that became St. Mary’s and moved it, according to Father McCoy and a 2011 write-up from Sacred Heart in West Brookfield. This write-up tells the following story from Robert W. Wilder, “Brookfield’s unofficial town historian in the late 20th century.”
“The original sections of what is now St. Mary Church date from 1717 when Brookfield’s second meetinghouse was constructed in the general locale” of the first meetinghouse, which had been destroyed by Indians in King Philip’s War in 1675. The site was about where Foster Hill in West Brookfield is now.
The 1717 meetinghouse was a Congregational church as well as a political center.
In 1747 settlers in the town’s eastern and western districts debated about whether to build a larger meetinghouse. Some took down the second meetinghouse and reassembled it near the town common in 1754. An appeal of this “clandestine move” to the General Court failed.
“In 1828 ... Unitarians replaced the Congregationalists as the dominant religious body in town and acquired all of their assets,” including this second meetinghouse.
In 1849, residents bought it and moved it again.
In 1865, Father Moran bought it and moved it to its present site on Lincoln Street.
Over the years, other priests expanded and renovated St. Mary’s Church.
“But,” the write-up says, “according to Mr. Wilder, the frame, floor joists, roof rafters and much of the wall and roof sheathing have survived since 1717. ... While there has been speculation that some of the materials used in the construction of the second meetinghouse ... may have been salvaged from the building destroyed in 1675 by King Philip’s warriors, such claims may never be authenticated.”
Father Joseph D. Rice, who was administrator of the Brookfield parishes before starting medical leave Tuesday, said there is a beam in St. Mary’s from the church attacked in the war of 1675. He said he can tell by how it was cut with an ax, rather than a bandsaw, a tool which wouldn’t have been used until much later.
In June 1950 Sacred Heart in West Brookfield, long a mission of St. Mary’s, became a separate parish.
The tables were turned when, in 2011, St. Mary Parish merged with Sacred Heart and became its oratory. The parish was then named Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, and used both church buildings until St. Mary’s Church was officially closed Tuesday.
Also closed Tuesday was St. John the Baptist, a mission of St. Mary’s before it was made a parish on July 2, 1952. Father Joseph H. Carey became the first pastor.
“He was the right man at the right time,” according to a 2002 write-up by Father George A. Charland, then pastor. “He would walk around the parish with his dog and got to know his parishioners.
“When it was decided that the old church was inadequate, Father Thomas Lonergan was sent to be the fund-raiser for the new church. He was loved and people rallied behind him financially.” He came in 1963 but was transferred in 1968 just after the ground-breaking.
Father Joseph A. Moynahan succeeded him and built the church on Blaine Ave. that was “beautiful and liturgically correct since it followed on the heels” of the Second Vatican Council, Father Charland wrote.
“To create an atmosphere of permanence in this era of transition and better to underline the stability of our faith, the hardness of stone was selected for the altar, tabernacle and baptismal font,” Father Moynahan wrote in the program for the church’s dedication on April 20, 1969. “Upon the altar is offered the permanent Bread of Life; through the tabernacle is distributed the unchanging body of Christ; from the font of baptism is dispensed the eternal grace of Christ. The variation of human emotion and expression ... is best shown in the softness and pliability of wood. Thus the impact of marble, bronze and carved wood should without extravagance make for the publication of inner truths – they cannot help but provide inspiration for the higher things of life.”
“The new church will not only provide a more functional and inspiring place for divine worship but, standing here by the wayside, it will also be a symbol of the faith and generosity of a people who have willed that the house of God be a worthy ‘dwelling place of the Lord of hosts,” said a letter from Bishop Bernard J. Flanagan, main celebrant, in the dedication program.