WARWICK — Shortly after signing the deal on their new school building in May of 2023, Chesterton Academy founder Michael Casey arrived at the former St. Francis School to begin the work of repurposing the abandoned school—and was surprised to find it wasn’t quite as abandoned as he had imagined. “We were hanging the new sign on the front of the building, when all of a sudden I noticed this small group of people in the parking lot, praying” he recalls. “I had no idea what was going on. I walked over to them and they apologized and started to leave, but when I asked them who they were, I started to get a little choked up.”
As Casey learned, he had just met the First Saturday devotional group from St Francis Parish in Warwick, a community which had outlived the parish itself.
“We had been meeting for our Fatima devotions at the church for decades,” says “Coach” Francis McGuire. “We were heartbroken when our parish closed, but we refused to let it interfere with our praying. We’d drive to St Francis and pray and sing outside in the parking lot, or in our cars if it was a bad day. It was just so important to us to make sure that we kept the devotion going.”
Their commitment made quite an impression on Casey, as well.
“It was just such a moving story, and I thanked all of them for their prayers. I’d had a feeling that there was some bigger reason that we had been able to close on buying the school property as quickly as we did, and as soon as I met our ‘Prayer Warriors,’ I understood. So, I gave them the key code so they could let themselves into the chapel to pray instead of having to sit outside. They still come back every first Saturday.”
The Chesterton Academy Prayer Warriors do more than just pray, however; several of them also volunteer at the school, assisting with clerical work and other odd jobs.
“We’re just so glad that the church building is still here and still being used for a Catholic purpose,” says Annette Fay, now a parishioner at St Timothy Parish. “It could have so easily been torn down and become just another parking lot or retail space on Jefferson Boulevard. I was so afraid that was what was going to happen that for a while I used to avoid driving down the street because seeing the empty church would make me start crying.”
Fay initially joined St. Francis Parish in 1972 and was able to watch the small parish grow. “They installed pews shortly after I joined the parish,” she recalls. “For a while at the beginning, we just had metal folding chairs. What ended up becoming the church was actually intended as an auditorium for the school—they started building it and then realized they weren’t going to have enough money for a separate church building, so they had to install the altar in there. It’s still the same altar there now.”
“Every time I come here, it feels like I’m coming back home,” she says.
McGuire has an even longer memory of St. Francis, having started attending before it was even recognized by the diocese as a parish.
“When I first moved to Warwick, I had been attending St. Rose of Lima because I thought that was the closest parish to me,” recalls McGuire, who now attends St. Joseph Church in West Warwick. “St Francis was a missionary church at that point being run by the Congregation of the Sacred Heart. One day, one of the Sacred Heart fathers came and knocked on my door and asked where I went to church. I told him and he said ‘Well, you’re actually living in our area, so you’re going to have to switch to St. Francis.”
“Pastors could be a little territorial back then,” he says with a chuckle.
Over time, McGuire began to feel quite at home in his new parish, assisting with CYO sports and religious education (as detailed in an earlier RI Catholic article). He even had his own set of keys and was allowed to continue using the church building for the first Saturday devotion for a short period of time after the parish closed.
Prayer Warrior Sheila Ehrens (who attends Our Lady of Mercy in East Greenwich) is grateful both for the chance to visit her old parish and also get to know the members of the new community that has sprung up there. “It’s a fabulous group of kids,” she says. “We get to pray with them, go to Mass with them, listen to them sing in the choir—and they have such wonderful musical talents. It’s truly a joy to go to Mass here.”
Ehrens even became the Confirmation sponsor for one young Chesterton scholar, bridging the sacramental life of the erstwhile St. Francis Parish and the new school community founded in its place. Parish and school closings have always been an unfortunate fact of life for Christian communities—it is worth noting that the Chesterton campus also includes an even older building which formerly belonged to the Swedish Baptist Church and which was purchased by St. Francis Church in 1946 for use as a rectory as the Swedish presence in Warwick declined.
What is less common is for these properties to find a new function within the faith tradition that started them.
“I’m just so grateful to God that this church didn’t get razed,” says Ehrens. “This was my parish. It was my life. Chesterton Academy helped to save that for us—and I’m not going to stop praying for this school until my last breath.”
