Rev. Andrew Connolly, 92, Long Island priest, activist has died

The Rev. Andrew Connolly, a Long Island priest for decades, volunteered with Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, and had a lifelong commitment to the poor and marginalized.

But when he got his first priestly assignment, it was to one of the wealthiest parishes in the nation — Rockville Centre.

So Connolly did something unorthodox at the time — he started visiting the low-income Black residents in an off-the-beaten path section of the tony village, and Puerto Rican members of the community who lived in apartments above stores.

“He organized people from the parish to learn about all this — this hidden part of the village of Rockville Centre,” said the Rev. Bill Brisotti, who worked for years with Connolly in a Wyandanch parish.

Connolly, who died on Friday at age 92, was the last surviving priest of the final ordination class in the Diocese of Brooklyn before a new diocese was carved out of it in 1957 — the Diocese of Rockville Centre, made up of Nassau and Suffolk counties.

He helped transform the impoverished, mainly Black community of Wyandanch, served for 17 years in the diocese’s mission in the Dominican Republic and was a courageous figure in the struggle for civil rights, fellow priests and parishioners said.

“He was a giant of this diocese from its very inception,” Brisotti said.

Connolly was instrumental in helping Wyandanch build a library, a day care center, an ambulance company, affordable housing and a shelter for the homeless, according to Brisotti and others.

He would accomplish some of this while sometimes riding around town on a motorcycle with a cutoff sleeveless leather jacket. He even served on the local school board.

“Almost everything that has happened in Wyandanch from years ago … Fr. Andy had something to do with it,” said Sandy Thomas, a longtime parishioner at Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal Roman Catholic Church in the hamlet, where Connolly served for 16 years.

Another longtime parishioner, Larry Schroeder, said, Connolly “really changed the whole face of Wyandanch.” The parish is the poorest in the diocese.

Connolly grew up in St. Albans, Queens, and his family later moved to New Hyde Park. He attended Bishop Loughlin High School in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where he played basketball and worked on the student newspaper.

One day while riding the subway to school in 1945, he found a copy of Day’s Catholic Worker newspaper someone had left behind, Brisotti said.

He soon visited Day’s Catholic Worker house on the Lower East Side, a month before his 15th birthday, he told The National Catholic Reporter in 2015.

Day herself greeted Connolly at the door — and immediately put him to work making sandwiches for the poor. They became lifelong friends.

Bishop John Barres, head of the Catholic Church on Long Island, said Connolly’s work with Day and her movement “fine-tuned his understanding of the connection between the Eucharist and our prophetic Catholic social justice teaching and drove his deep passion for the people he served, especially those of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal in Wyandanch and El Cercado in the Dominican Republic."

By 1956, Connolly was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Brooklyn, which underwent the split the next year. He was soon sent to the parish in Rockville Centre.

His duties included activism that was not always welcome. Connolly publicly fought against a village urban renewal program “whose aim was to get rid of as many Black families as possible,” he told the NCR. “I was ordered by the bishop to get out of the battle, and I refused. He did nothing further.”

As part of Connolly's resistance to racial segregation, he refused to attend parish fundraisers and other events held at a local country club that banned Blacks and Jews, Brisotti said.

Connolly later served as the founding principal of Holy Trinity High School in Hicksville, but after two years concluded it wasn’t his calling, he told NCR. He asked the diocese to send him back to parish work or special work in race relations.

He got both. The diocese sent him to Wyandanch.

It was 1968. He told NCR that “Wyandanch had the largest concentration of Black families on Long Island at that time. Just a few months prior to my assignment, there were riots in Wyandanch, and buildings were burned to the ground. I was determined to work with the Black community on the multitude of problems the community faced. I walked the streets, spoke with the people and went to every publicized community meeting.”

He had long sought an assignment overseas to work with the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers in poor countries, and by 1984 the diocese finally granted his wish in part: He was dispatched to the diocesan mission in the community of El Cercado near the Dominican Republic's border with Haiti.

After Connolly returned home for good in 2002, he worked with the Hispanic community on Long Island. He eventually moved into an upstairs apartment of a house in Copiague owned by one of his unofficial "adopted" sons, Louis Krieger.

Krieger was 16 and living in the streets of Babylon when Connolly took him under his wing and turned into an unofficial foster father for the rest of his life.

“He was a father to me, not just a priest father but a father father,” said Krieger, now 60. “I grew up with a very troubled childhood, and he sort of raised me up to become a decent man.”

A memorial Mass will be celebrated on Sept. 24 at 11 a.m. at Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal in Wyandanch.