By Dennis Polselli | From BayLines Express, May, 2023
This may be an unusual column for Bay Lines, but I think the subject is familiar to you all. Lately I’ve been reading a book: Caution Blind Priest Driving The Story of Father Thomas J. Carroll Changing Public Perceptions of Blindness by Rachel Rosenbaum and all I kept thinking as I read this well researched book is — why hasn’t anyone opened this cause for Sainthood in the Archdiocese of Boston? To the Blind Community not only in Massachusetts, but across the country, Father Carroll was a giant of a priest.
The last person associated with Blindness to be canonized was a woman named Margaret of Castello declared a Saint by Pope Francis on April 24, 2021. If that date is familiar, it’s because the declaration came on the 50th Anniversary of the passing of Father Carroll on April 24, 1971. St. Margaret, born into a royal family, was totally Blind from birth and had additional disabilities. because she was an embarrassment to her parents, they hid her from the public. She was instructed in their faith by her parents’ chaplain While she was shut up in the chapel for twelve years in Castello. Margaret learned to beg for her food, was taken in by neighbors in the community, and eventually became a Dominican nun, visiting sick and imprisoned people every day. I wrote extensively about her in the Fall River Diocesan Newspaper, having been ‘introduced’ to her by Mary Jane Owen when she headed up the National Catholic office on Disability in 1998.
Rachel Rosenbaum’s book could be the beginning of the extensive investigation into Father Carrol’s life that has to be undertaken to detail his life and virtues. She draws on extensive documents – stories and letters about him, as well as notes, and speeches that Father Carroll delivered. After graduating from Holy Cross College, where he studied Greek, Latin and Philosophy, Thomas Carroll was ordained in 1938. Father Carroll’s first assignment was not to a parish, but to be the assistant Director of The Catholic Guild of the Archdiocese of Boston. During and immediately after World War II, he worked extensively with blinded veterans in Connecticut and Pennsylvania. In 1947, he was appointed Director of the Catholic Guild for the Blind upon the retirement of Father Connolly. He served until his sudden death in 1971. Father Carroll was a pioneer, implementing the first Orientation and Mobility program teaching safe cane travel and inspiring the creation of the profession of Orientation and Mobility instruction taught as a graduate program at Boston College and other universities in the country.
And then there was of course, the major stuff of his life, the 1954 establishment of St. Paul’s Rehabilitation Center for the newly blind and Senior Blind at St. Raphael’s Hall in Newton, where he lived in a basement apartment until his death. It was posthumously renamed the Carroll Center in his honor in 1972.
Drawing on techniques in the Army for rehabilitating Blinded Veterans, Father Carroll went on to develop a wholistic approach to rehabilitation that involved both personal service and research through analysis of large-scale change. His comprehensive residential sixteen-week rehabilitation curriculum toward maximum independence and dignity involved far more than learning cane travel. Residents learned Braille, housekeeping techniques, typing, handwriting, visualization techniques, using woodworking tools, analyzing their attitudes, and had individual and group counseling.
His book (Blindness: What It Is, What it Does, and How to Live With It) on rehabilitating the newly Blind was internationally acclaimed. In my opinion, it is not only monumental as a work for the Blind but theological in its concept of death of the sighted life, the psychological phases leading to a Resurrection to life of sorts, a life of independence and fulfillment.
Father Carroll was ecumenical before Pope John the 23rd declared the Ecumenical Council in 1962. He advocated for Liturgies in English as early as the 1940s. Early on, he changed the name of the Guild to “The Catholic Guild for all the Blind.” Because he believed in serving blind people regardless of their faith. He employed and befriended African Americans and Jews. Father Carroll participated in the Civil Rights movement, refusing to stay in hotels that were not integrated, and marching with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and John Lewis in the 1965 Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery Alabama.
Known and respected nationally and internationally, Father Carroll was named to many Boards and Commissions and lovingly eulogized by many in his field. He was posthumously named to the “Hall of Fame; Leaders and Legends of the Blindness Field,” curated by The American Printing House, in 2002.
I kept thinking while reading Rachel Rosenbaum’s book that it really is time for the Archdiocese of Boston to pen the cause for this priest’s beatification and Canonization to Sainthood. This is not something we will see in our lifetime. St. Margaret of Castello was declared a Sain 701 years after her death, but I would like to think that we would at least be able to say that we were present at the outset of the process through our advocacy for this Great priest.