Friars Max and Anthony
Friar Maximilian Mary Bernwinkler, OFM Conv., a
somewhat timid yet hard-working fifty-nine-year-old Franciscan priest, was
known to most people simply as Friar Max. By 1995, he had been pastor of Most
Holy Trinity Church in Williamsburg for seven years. The people of the parish
loved him greatly. He was dedicated to his ministry, a powerful preacher, a
reverent presider at Mass, a genuine “people person,” and truly a gentle soul.
Friar Max was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland.
Before entering the Franciscans and taking a religious name, as was customary
in the 1950s, he was known to family and friends as Tommy. His earliest
experience of the Catholic faith was instilled in him at St. Joseph Monastery
in Irvington, West Baltimore. “The Monastery,” as it was locally known, was a
historic church administered by the priests and brothers of the Congregation of
the Passion of Jesus Christ, commonly known as the Passionists.
Irvington was a neighborhood of tree-lined streets,
single-family houses, and row homes, populated largely by stable,
multigenerational blue-collar and middle-class families. The Monastery and its
religious, social, and cultural life were central to many of the Catholic
families who lived there. So strong was that parish identity that many
residents would simply say they were from “the Monastery” before saying they
were “from Irvington.”
Tommy carried that Catholic identity throughout his
early years, including his time as a student at downtown Baltimore’s Calvert
Hall College, a high school conducted by the De La Salle Christian Brothers,
from which he proudly graduated in 1954.
Friar Anthony Mary Abruzzo, OFM Conv., was born the same
year as Max and raised in Lackawanna, New York. Before entering the Franciscans
and taking his religious name, he was known to family and friends as Vinny.
After his initial years in the Order, and throughout most of his active
ministry, he would come to be known simply as Brother Anthony. His home parish
was St. Anthony of Padua, a proud Italian-American parish whose congregation
included families drawn to Lackawanna by its growing steel industry.
Vinny’s own family was among them. In 1913, his
grandfather had come with his family from Rosburgo, a small seaside village on
Italy’s Adriatic coast. He found work in the mills of the Lackawanna Steel
Company and later with the industrial giant Bethlehem Steel, which took over
the Lackawanna company in 1922. Vinny’s father followed in his father’s
footsteps and spent his entire working life in those same mills.
Vinny chose another path. After graduating from
Lackawanna High School in 1954, he left behind the smokestacks, pollution, and
industrial grit of his hometown and entered the Conventual Franciscans.
That same year, Tommy Bernwinkler left Baltimore to do
the same.
The two eighteen-year-olds met as novices at Mount
Saint Lawrence Novitiate in Becket, Massachusetts. The isolated retreat in the
mountains of western Massachusetts presented both young men with a world far
removed from the urban neighborhoods in which they had been raised. For Vinny,
it was especially removed from the steel mills and industrial landscape of
Lackawanna. Yet neither young friar ever entirely lost the character of the
place from which he had come.
At the conclusion of their novitiate year, on August
15, 1955, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Tommy and
Vinny professed their first temporary vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.
On the day of their profession, they also adopted their new religious names:
Tommy became Maximilian Mary, and Vinny became Anthony Mary.
Tommy chose Maximilian in honor of Father Maximilian
Mary Kolbe, OFM Conv., a confrere who had been imprisoned and put to death by
the Nazis at Auschwitz only fourteen years earlier. Among the friars there was
already a strong belief that Father Kolbe would someday be canonized by the
Church and recognized as a saint.
Vinny chose Anthony primarily because of his devotion
to St. Anthony of Padua, one of the most beloved Franciscan saints in the
Catholic world. The name also honored his home parish and the generations of
his family who had worshiped there since his Italian grandfather arrived in the
United States in 1913.
Both young friars chose to add Mary to their religious
names as an expression of their devotion to the Blessed Virgin and their desire
to place themselves under her protection.
Their common devotion to Mary, something they often
discussed during that year, centered particularly on the powerful words of her
Magnificat in the Gospel of St. Luke: “He hath put down the mighty from their
seat, and hath exalted the humble.” Both young friars had decided to make those
words a central theme in the way they hoped to live their religious lives.
They then continued their formation together as
classmates at St. Hyacinth College and Seminary in Granby, Massachusetts, a
venerable institution founded in 1927 to educate young Franciscan friars, many
of whom would eventually serve predominantly blue-collar and working-class
parishes in communities stretching from Alabama to Maine, particularly
throughout the eastern United States.
Both were members of St. Hyacinth’s graduating class
of 1959. The following year, they were stationed together as student friars for
an apostolic year at St. Francis High School in Athol Springs, New York.
Athol Springs, a few miles south of Buffalo, was a
quieter community than industrial Lackawanna immediately to its north. For
Anthony, the assignment brought him close to home again. For Max, western New
York was an entirely new world. Here he encountered for the first time the
massive industrial landscape along Lake Erie, where smoke and grime from the
steel mills could be carried by the winds sweeping in from the lake.
At the time, St. Francis served as a residential high
school for boys, some of whom might later enter the Franciscan community
themselves. Max and Anthony spent their apostolic year serving as teachers’
aides, assisting seasoned friars who had taught at the high school for years,
and they also worked as dishwashers in the residents’ dining room. It was an
enriching year of service together, but afterward their paths began to diverge.
Max continued his studies for the priesthood at St.
Anthony-on-Hudson Seminary in Rensselaer, New York, the theological school of
the Order. Anthony’s vocation, however, was that of a religious brother. Rather
than continue with seminary studies, he chose to prepare himself for a life of
service through nursing.
Anthony enrolled in the nursing program at Boston
College. While studying there, he lived with fellow Conventual Franciscan
friars at St. Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr Church in nearby Chelsea, a gritty,
densely populated working-class city across the river from Boston.
In 1964, after completing his theological studies at
St. Anthony-on-Hudson in Rensselaer, Friar Max was ordained to the priesthood
by the local bishop, the Most Reverend William A. Scully, at the Cathedral of
the Immaculate Conception in Albany, just across the Hudson River from the
seminary.
His first assignment as a young priest took him to
Bessemer, Alabama, and the Church of St. Francis of Assisi, a parish founded by
the Conventual Franciscans in 1940 to serve Black Catholics who had often been
neglected in the Birmingham area and throughout that part of the country. He
would often say the four years he spent in Bessemer were among the most
rewarding of his life, and it was there his real seminary training began.
In the same year Max completed his theological studies
and was ordained to the priesthood in Albany, Anthony completed his studies at
Boston College’s Chestnut Hill campus. He graduated from B.C. summa cum laude with a Bachelor of
Science in Nursing.
That summer, both friars began the first major
ministries of their religious lives. Max was assigned to St. Francis of Assisi
Church in Bessemer, Alabama, while Anthony was assigned to the Conventual
Franciscan missions in Costa Rica.
Anthony departed the friary in Chelsea and traveled to
New York, where he sailed aboard one of United Fruit’s Great White Fleet
“banana boats,” bound for Puerto Limón, Costa Rica. Although United Fruit no
longer regularly operated passenger service aboard its ships, the company had
continued a tradition of transporting Franciscan friars free of charge to
destinations in Costa Rica. Many of these religious men were serving in company
towns and among the families of United Fruit workers, and their presence was
beneficial not only to the people they served, but also to the company’s image
and business interests.
Anthony arrived in Puerto Limón on the Caribbean coast
a few days later and then set out on the long and tedious overland journey to
his ultimate destination, Golfito, a remote village on the country’s
southwestern Pacific coast. By then a well-established Franciscan mission site,
Golfito would become Anthony’s home for the next ten years. There he helped
establish a medical clinic serving the poor and needy of the surrounding area,
particularly families who worked on the banana plantations.
Those ten years in Costa Rica enabled Anthony to put
into practice the medical training he had received, but more importantly for
him, they offered the opportunity to live a missionary life devoted to serving
the poor and needy in an isolated and underdeveloped part of the world.
