(Photos: Robert Miller)
GO WITH GOD: Parishioners applaud the Rev. Peter Colapietro’s final Mass at Holy Cross yesterday. (
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There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
The Rev. Peter Colapietro was doing an impressive job of holding it together yesterday as he celebrated a bittersweet last Mass at his historic Times Square parish — until opera singer Aprile Millo gave a shout-out from the balcony and launched into an unexpected rendition of “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”
As the standing-room only crowd joined the Metropolitan Opera soprano in serenade, the stoic, self-deprecating priest crumbled, and the tears flowed.
It was a fitting farewell for the 6-foot, 325-pound, bourbon-loving, larger-than-life Bronx native who — for more than two decades as pastor of Church of the Holy Cross parish on West 42nd Street — has stood shoulder to shoulder with a wild cross section of New Yorkers, equally at ease with drug addicts and the homeless as with the city politicians and celebrities with whom he hobnobbed at Elaine’s.
Known simply as “Father Pete,’’ Colapietro has been reassigned to St. Monica’s on the Upper East Side as the New York Archdiocese enforces a long-standing rule that pastors get only six years, with an option of an additional six, at any parish.
“It was heartwarming and heartbreaking,” Colapietro said of yesterday’s Mass, which began with him being escorted in by the Department of Sanitation pipe-and- drum band and ended with a standing ovation.
Since his arrival at Holy Cross in 1992, he has helped shepherd the gritty, financially strapped parish into a haven for more than 600 parishioners, replete with a thriving food pantry and a $6 million renovation.
He fondly recalls his hairy early years: the churchgoer who hurled a beer bottle at him in the middle of Mass, the guy who tried to kill himself in a front pew, the day he disarmed and comforted a suicidal actor Mickey Rourke.
“I think it was a pretty good run,” he mused.