First things first. Freedom of conscience and expression, along with the right to pray or not to pray as one desires, are some of our most important rights. Limitations on these rights should only be tolerated when there are compelling and important reasons to do so, such as balancing one person’s rights against the rights of others to not be unnecessarily inconvenienced by such expression.
That said, the recent issue brought to light by John DePetro of WPRO on Monday evening and continuing for the full three hours of Tuesday morning’s broadcast touches on these sensitive, delicate issues the way a hammer touches on butterflies. According to DePetro, wearing his metaphorical reporter’s hat and dutifully recording his adventures on his iPhone, Brook Village Retirement Home in North Providence recently “banned a small group of residents from praying the rosary in the common area after one resident complained.”
On DePetro’s radio program at least one caller thought the group in question consisted of as few as three residents.
Apparently the small group would gather in the common room at 11:30 AM on Mondays and watch The Holy Rosary with Mother Angelica and the Nuns of Our Lady of the Angels Monastery on EWTN, the Global Catholic Television Network, praying along and out loud. Another resident, Wanda Hughes, complained about the prayers which she called “an in your face ritual.”
As a result, the manager of the facility, Carol Conti, has apparently told residents that they could no longer pray the rosary in the common room.
Now is this true? Conti has made no statement to the media as of this writing, and the one resident who spoke to DePetro on the matter, besides Hughes, wasn’t really sure if prayers were allowed or not. This is the resident in DePetro’s video who says that Wanda Hughes has a vendetta against Catholics, and called them cannibals, because they eat the body and blood of Christ. He’s hardly unbiased and he wasn’t sure about the status of the prayers at all.
DePetro claimed on the radio that Wanda Hughes threatened to call the ACLU. In fact, she says just the opposite in her letter, at least the part she can be seen reading in DePetro’s heavily edited video. She specifically says, “It should not be an ACLU case.” When relating her conversation with the retirement home’s manager, Hughes claims to have said, “…the Constitution allows everybody freedom of religion…” but “The fact was that they were pushing their belief on everybody.” This hardly seems like the position of an anti-religion zealot.
Wanda Hughes seems like a very direct and honest woman in the video. She looks somewhat afraid of another resident who yells at her through the intercom while she’s talking to DePetro. The resident shrieks, “She’s what’s wrong with this building. You’re evil!”
Consider this a moment. Here’s DePetro, capturing a moment of this woman being bullied on video, and yet he’s so fixated on the idea that some residents inside the building are not allowed to pray the rosary he doesn’t even care. Wanda Hughes, whether she’s an atheist or simply not a Catholic, doesn’t factor into DePetro’s calculations. He’s on a bigger story, one that needn’t concern itself with the safety and comfort of an elder woman in a retirement home.
In DePetro’s mind, Catholics in particular and Christians in general, are under attack in this country. DePetro is happy to link the Holiday/Christmas Tree non-troversy of the last holiday season to the Cranston prayer banner, to the Woonsocket Cross, and now to the possible and unconfirmed banning of a rosary prayer group in a North Providence Retirement Home. When a guest called in and compared this imaginary pattern of events construed as attacks against Christians to historical attacks against Jews under the Third Reich in 1930’s Germany, DePetro did nothing to correct her.
The terrible thing is that because of DePetro’s ham handed intrusion into this tiny little issue that can and probably will be resolved to the satisfaction of all the parties involved if left to the residents and the management, Wanda Hughes will most likely become the victim of terrible abuse both online, through the telephone and in person. Already one person commenting on the story at 630WPRO has called Wanda Hughes an “idiot” and another has said, “As far as the complaining resident, that is what a lot of old people do if they have no friends, no family and no loved ones. They are bitter and go after the other residents that actually have a life. There are just mean people out there.”
And believe me, this stuff is mild compared to what’s coming if this story continues to be hammered on. DePetro knows full well the kind of threats and bullying people face when they speak up and out against religion and religious privilege, yet to further his false narrative of there being an atheist conspiracy against freedom of conscience, this second-rate shock-jock is willing to throw an elderly woman under the bus.
The man screaming through the intercom at Wanda Hughes was right. There was an evil in the building, but it wasn’t Wanda Hughes, it was the guy with the iPhone.
Following up, based on a report from ABC6 here in Providence:
“Seniors at Brook Village say they were banned from praying the rosary in common areas, but the company that owns the property is now saying the whole thing was blown out of proportion.”
and
“The property manager would not comment, but the company who owns the building now she was only trying to de-escalate the situation. They claim there was never any real ban in place.”
Also, there’s this tweet from DePetro:
“Update on #rosary ban..management company tell me after “a 2 week break”, Seniors at brook village can pray rosary in community room.”
Hopefully that will be the end of this.
Here’s a link to the video DePetro shot.
To be honest with you the comments on this story are actually pretty tame. Everybody is an idiot in this story: the woman should not have made a stink about a group of seniors using the common area for half an hour once a week to do the rosary, the residence should not have entertained the complaint, the seniors should not be bullying her (although they do have a right to be upset but should have expressed that in a more constructive way), and John DePetro should not have been an instigator.
The woman also does insinuate that she may want the ACLU to get involved. She said it “shouldn’t go to that level,” leading one to believe that if the residence hall doesn’t cave to her demands, she would take it to the ACLU despite this not having anything to do with the Constitution or civil rights.
Update:
John DePetro tweeted me this morning to correct an error. He was carrying and iPad, not an iPhone when he filmed his visit to the nursing home.
What’s truly sad is Mr. DePetro has to stoop to such lows to garner attention. I mean really, inventing a dispute at a nursing home? What’s next, two neighbors fighting over a dog that keeps digging a hole under a fence and eventually impregnates the dog next door?
Not that self aggrandizing DePetro needs any more attention than he can garner for himself but he didn’t ‘invent’ this dispute and someone must have brought it to his attention otherwise it never would have been a story.
DePetro is a blowhard. Has no facts – No one listens to him – irellevant turkey!
I stand corrected, maybe he didn’t manufacture this dispute, but he blew it well out of proportion.
John who? Do some people actually still listen to this gay bashing fool who has been expelled from a better MA radio station? Its amazing that felons (Buddy C) and losers/cheaters like John Boy continue on as public jokes once they get a new life at WPRO radio.
i agree that the footage was heavily edited. It obviously didnt show the producer buzzing each and every residents’ buzzers and him taking a picture of the list of names of the residents on the buzzers. isnt that harrassment?!???!