By Victor Greto
WILMINGTON — Tom Pietrantonio was only 11 years old in 1937 when he entered St. Bonaventure’s seminary in the Bronx.
He was excited. His older brother Victor already was there, and the Capuchin friars who ran the place were the kindest clergy he knew.
“When I went to church, I never saw the priest,” Pietrantonio recalled. “He was high up there on the altar. But the friars were so kind with people.”
His father, a baker, and his mother — immigrants from the Abruzzi in Italy — paid $5 a month for his instruction.
He’s never really left.
“It was difficult for my mom,” says Pietrantonio, 81, who has lived and worked at the St. Francis Renewal Center off of Silverside Road in Wilmington for 34 years.
“But my father looked at it differently, and she went along with it.”
Pietrantonio suffers from an advanced case of pulmonary fibrosis — his lungs are losing their ability to transfer oxygen into his blood stream.
Hardly able to move without wearing himself out and constantly breathing in oxygen, he will be permanently transferred to a friary in Beacon, N.Y. on Thursday, where he will be cared for around the clock.
“If he hadn’t entered the Capuchins at 11, he’d be a billionaire,” said Eileen Schmitt, who has attended Mass at the friary and known Pietrantonio for two decades.
“He can solve any problem there is. I look around my house and say, in his 70s, he installed the gas fireplace for me, he supervised the building of my porch. There’s not much he didn’t have a hand in doing around here.”
Encomiums pour easily from the people “Father Tom” has affected over the decades.
“He never set himself apart from us, never preached at us, only to us,” said Carolyn Mercadante, who has known him for 25 years. “We celebrated with him births, deaths, all of our life’s passages. He never set himself up above anyone else. He’s a priest of the people.”
Pietrantonio’s departure will leave the friary with five friars, said Father Edmund Walker, the local superior.
The friars assist at parishes and religious sisters’ convents, including celebrating Mass. They sponsor a retreat center, where individuals and groups come for prayer and spiritual renewal.
“He’s well-loved by many people in the area,” Walker said. “Commenting on personality and traits is nice, but what’s more gripping are details of what a person did, or has done or is doing.”
Pietrantonio is all about details, of his childhood, his carpentry skills, and, above all, his simple ministry, which includes as much building and repairing as it does consoling souls.
He grew up working in his father’s bakery on First Avenue between 118th and 117th streets, not far from the Harlem River in east Harlem.
His job was to make sure the bread was stacked properly in the showcases. And he delivered the bread on Saturdays in a cart made by his mother’s father.
“He made it out of two carriage wheels, a metal box that he had banged out and a chair spindle” used to push it, he said.
It was from his grandfather that he learned to love woodworking; he made Pietrantonio a saw horse his own size so he could learn.
And they shared a special ritual, hidden from his father: his grandfather would combine an onion with salt, bread and American cheese — a major no-no to his dad — and share it.
“It was our thing,” Pietrantonio said. “It tasted good because of that.”
Pietrantonio tells that story because it shows the inextricable mix of kindness and woodworking skills that he took with him into the friary, and which he practiced as recently as a couple of months ago.
“As soon as Tommy and I got to talking he put me to work,” said Wayne Pledger, of the time they met in 1977.
A sub-deacon, Pledger served Mass with Pietrantonio from 1993 until the priest stopped last year.
They have worked together on multiple projects at the friary, repairing and replacing the plumbing, wiring, and redoing much of the woodwork.
“It’s the way he works,” Pledger said. “If you can help, great, and people come out when they can and things are built and done and happen. It happens to people in their own homes, too. It’s a real community.”
After four years at St. Bonaventure’s, Pietrantonio became a friar at 16. He spent several years in the Bronx, and recalls playing baseball out back, sewing the ball back up after it was hit to pieces.
“It was those little knick-knacky things I liked to do,” he said, “and that spread out to the people, who saw my ability.”
They began asking him to help them with things around their homes.
Recently, he built a hutch and table out of a couple of 6-foot-long pews. He made a standing crucifix for St. Margaret of Scotland Church in Bear. and he made 38 personalized 7×11 inlaid crosses for his friends.
Ordained a priest in 1949, he will be celebrating 60 years in the priesthood next year.
Pietrantonio has worked at several parishes in New Jersey, including Orange, Hackensack and Hoboken, as well as friaries in Staunton, Va., and Geneva, N.Y.
He requested his Wilmington assignment, but had to wait three years before it was granted.
“I heard of the place, and that they were going to fix it up,” he said.
Perfect.
“He did an enormous amount,” said Stephanie Malleus, who has known Pietrantonio for 25 years. “It’s a great old house, the monastery. He has maintained and upgraded that building practically single-handedly.”
Has the world changed much during his eight decades?
“All of it is a continuation of what’s been happening since Cain and Abel,” he said.
And he’d do it all over again. Go down the same path. But perhaps with more of the wisdom he’s gained along the way.
“I’ve learned to be less demanding, more loving, willing to except difficulties and love the people who have them,” he said.
It’s like the time a couple who came to the friary to ask if he would bless and baptize their child.
“A priest wouldn’t do it because they didn’t go to church,” he said they told him.
He simply turned that priest’s argument around.
“The baby now is the cause of your going back to church,” he told them when he baptized the child.
Sometimes wisdom can be as beautifully simple as that.