Father Ben Franzinelli: Monsignor, social activist, baseball lover

By Ray Brewer (contact)

Friday, June 1, 2012 | 2 a.m.

After missing a religion class during my elementary school days in favor of playing in a Little League game, the teacher asked me why I was absent. I told her I had a baseball game.

And then it came:

“What do you like more: God or baseball?”

I told her, in all innocence, baseball.

That resulted in a trip to Father Ben Franzinelli’s office and expectations of a stern lecture.

It turns out he was as big a baseball fan as me. He turned on the Chicago Cubs game and we talked about sports for a few minutes before he shuffled me back to class.

That’s when I started realizing there was a lot to like about this man, who in 1975 was the founding pastor at Holy Family Catholic Church at Harmon Avenue and Mountain Vista Road.

As I grew older, I learned there was even more to Franzinelli than his love of baseball or a priest who mesmerized parishioners on Sunday with his legendary sermons, surely always mentioning to honor the Blessed Mother.

He was a social activist who championed the less fortunate, was the state’s first Catholic priest to hold political office by being elected to the State Board of Education and made national news for coordinating a benefit concert with Bing Crosby to raise money for the new church. It made People magazine.

Father Ben — as many of us longtime churchgoers at Holy Family still call him even though he was elevated to monsignor years ago — on Thursday celebrated the 60th anniversary of his ordination into the priesthood. On Saturday, the church’s 4 p.m. Mass will be celebrated in his honor and followed by a pasta dinner celebrating his amazing tenure. (Full disclosure: I’m helping coordinate the dinner.)

He’s 90, a bit frail and requires a full-time nurse to help with the basic daily activities — which includes scouring daily news from his iPad and sending way too many emails to members of the Medjugorje Information Center he founded in the late 1980s. He is still a sharp thinker and never hesitates to share his opinions with the many visitors who regularly stop by. He’s technically retired from the daily responsibilities of being a priest but still holds regular Mass at his house and typically co-celebrates on Saturday afternoons at Holy Family.

When he walks toward the altar in the procession to start Mass, the smiles of the parishioners speak volumes. He pauses to greet familiar faces. After Mass he’s like a rock star, mingling with a long line of people — able to address them by name and remembering stories from yesteryear.

“They aren’t smiling because they are happy to see me,” he jokes. “They are smiling because they see how old I am and think they’ll live that long, too.”

Franzinelli operates like he did in his younger days — well, with the exception of driving. An Army ambulance driver in World War II, he still has a license, but considering his reputation as a reckless driver even in his younger years, his car remains parked.

Those of us who know him best consider him stubborn, in the best possible way. He’s a passionate fighter for social justice.

Those values were framed during the 1950s when he was a young priest in North Carolina. When he asked a black youngster to serve as his altar boy for Mass, several in the church walked out before services began. When he found a churchgoer suffering from a stroke and ordered paramedics to drive her to the all-white Catholic hospital, they looked at him like he was crazy. The woman was from India and had dark skin, and when she was given a room, white patients didn’t want to share the bathroom with her.

Soon, he was transferred to his native New York, where he had enrolled in the seminary in 1946 with the guidance of the priests of the Fathers of Mercy.

“My mother made me visit them on Good Friday,” he said. “One of the priests came down the stairs and asked, ‘Benny, what are you doing here?’ Just kidding around, I told them I was here to join up with you guys. They were ecstatic and said their prayers were answered. They were yelling and screaming in excitement, and I was thinking, ‘No, no, no.’

“All of a sudden the priests were coming out of their rooms and saying how wonderful this was. I was just kidding, but they wouldn’t hear of it. I walked out of there with the warmest feeling because those guys wanted me.”

He found his way to Las Vegas in the early 1960s, hoping the dry climate would help him recover from pneumonia and bringing with him his passion for social justice.

The town is a better place because of him. And, for the children of West Las Vegas in the early 1970s, it had nothing to do with his being a priest. In 1968, when he became the pastor at St. James the Apostle, which had a predominantly black congregation, Franzinelli noticed the neighborhood children didn’t have the same resources as the rest of Las Vegas. So, he ran successfully for the state school board.

“The only reason I ran was because of minority education,” he said. “Those kids weren’t getting the right things.”

A few years later, he used those community connections to help build a new church on the east side of town — Holy Family. My family was still relatively new to the area from Steubenville, Ohio, and we became one of his first parishioners. Initially, while funds were being raised for our building, we held Mass at a saloon on Boulder Highway or in parishioners’ homes. The folks at dinner Saturday night will vouch that those were good days.

He would always preach to us boys about considering a life in the priesthood. For some, it would be a tough cross to bear, but for Father Ben, it’s the only way of life. Two would become priests, answering the call just like their mentor, Father Ben.

He retired in 1996 but still lives a few steps away from the church, in a home with little air conditioning and filled with plenty of photos, awards and religious statues accumulated over the years from loyal followers.

There is no doubt he is a man of God. And this week when I visited him, we also talked about baseball.