A Home to Prayers of Healing and Hope

The telephone rang early Wednesday morning in the hushed rectory of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basilica, the old Catholic church on Mission Hill. Phones are always ringing in old churches in working-class neighborhoods, but this caller, a priest, had a singular request.
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Times Topics: Edward M. KennedyHe said that the Kennedy family — that would be the Kennedys of Hyannis Port, Washington, the world — wondered whether the funeral Mass for Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who had died just hours earlier, could be said at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. Would that be all right?

The Rev. Philip Dabney, the associate pastor, was stunned. All he had done was answer the phone, and now his life had changed. “I said, ‘Sure,’ ” he recalled. “I was so taken aback. But you know how grace works.”

Soon Father Dabney was working out the details with the senator’s aides.

No air-conditioning? We’ll send over several industrial fans.

Unsure about the sound system? ABC, the television network, will be on it.

When the priest noted that the sidewalk in front of the church was in the midst of being repaired, one of the aides said, “It’ll be fixed.”

By the next morning, Father Dabney said, “they were laying the cement.”

Here came a crew to spiff up the lamp posts and trim trees. Here came another crew to wipe away anything unsightly on brick. Remember that graffiti along St. Alphonsus Street? Gone, as if by divine intervention.

But there were matters at hand beyond the aesthetic. Matters of illness, and hope, and faith.

The priests here are Redemptorists — missionaries who built this commanding Romanesque church in 1878. Known locally as the Mission Church, it holds a special place among Boston Catholics because of its shrine to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, which is bordered by two vases filled with canes and crutches. According to the church’s official history, these strange but beautiful bouquets “provide testimony to the multitude of cures and graces granted through the intercession of Our Lady.”

In the generations since the church’s founding, several hospitals have cropped up within walking distance. Father Dabney said that many patients from these hospitals come to pray before the shrine, sometimes leaving petitions in a glass bowl.

“They’re looking for some sort of comfort,” he said. “The nurses in the hospitals all know about this place.”

And so it was, a few years ago, that Senator Kennedy began coming here, after his daughter, Kara Kennedy, began treatment for lung cancer. According to the priests here, he spent time reflecting and praying with the Rev. Edward McDonough, who for years was known in Boston as the Healing Priest.

Father McDonough died in February 2008 at the age of 86. Three months later, Senator Kennedy learned he had brain cancer.

That summer, a few parishioners reported to the rectory that they had seen the senator and his wife, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, in the church. There was no Mass, and no entourage. Just a white-haired man and his wife, reflecting for a few moments in an old, working-class church on a hill.