It is a nondescript winter Tuesday night in the third week of Ordinary Time, the gray expanse of not-Lent, not-Easter, not-Advent, not-Christmas that makes up most of the church calendar. No holy day of obligation, no palm, no ashes, no prospect of pageantry to draw the crowds.

Still, a respectably ample group of parishioners has slid into the wooden pews in the cozy, Norman-style confines of St. Brigid's church, to attend "a parish enrichment evening."

The pastor stands before his congregation in a plain black clerical suit. Officially, he has the honorary title of monsignor, but there are monsignors and there are monsignors. Some seem to enjoy sweeping grandly into a room, wearing the monsignor's red-fringed cassock and bright red sash. This monsignor doesn't even own one. In the bulletin, his name is at the bottom of the staff list, not as monsignor but simply as Rev. Francis X. Gaeta. Everyone calls him Father Frank.

"Parish is wonderful, because parish is people," Gaeta begins. Then he likens this parish in Westbury to the synagogue and the community in the Galilean hills that shaped Jesus. "This community transforms us and makes us into something we could never be by ourselves," he says. "Our spirituality is not just all by ourselves. Our spirituality is in community."

In that spirit, Gaeta asks people to think of moments when the parish has touched them. He begins by recalling an experience of his own in 1990, on his first Good Friday as pastor. The Italian community had staged its outdoor passion play, ending with the death of Jesus at St. Brigid's school, a few blocks from the church. Then the Hispanic community had carried a life-sized statue of the dead Jesus through the streets to the church, where others had been inside, enacting a contemporary version of the Stations of the Cross. The Hispanic parishioners had carried the statue into the crowded, darkened church, lighting it up with their vibrant, emotional faith.

"It was one of the most extraordinary, liberating, life-giving moments of my whole life," Gaeta tells them. "Then I understood what it is to be in a multicultural parish."

To give others a chance to share their recollections, deacon Phil Matheis -- 79 years old but still full of puckish humor and always ready to trade cracks with Gaeta -- carries a wireless microphone around the church. Anne Josey takes the mike and tells of the day Matheis baptized her grandson, who was born weighing only a pound and a half. One woman tells of her granddaughter wanting to bring her puppy to a blessing of the animals at St. Brigid's: "She says, `Maybe if God gets His hands on him, he'll last longer.' "

Gaeta introduces the guest speaker, a Jesuit priest named Thomas Sweetser, co-director of the Illinois-based Parish Evaluation Project. Sweetser has been in town only a few hours, but he has already gained a sense of the place, first from a bountiful, laughter-filled Italian meal at the rectory, and now from the enthusiastic, hands-raised worship style in the church.

"I have a feeling that you have a great spirit going here, right?" Sweetser says, stirring a ripple of applause. "I also have a feeling that your pastor has something to do with that. Am I right?" More applause. "What is it about you that you pray so well here? You pray a lot. You get a lot of practice."

In many parishes, people make little contact with those around them except for a perfunctory handshake at the sign of peace. Here, the contact clearly is warmer. For example, the people tell Sweetser, everyone automatically joins hands to pray the Our Father. "Wow!" Sweetser says. "The word is `Amen'," says Josey, whose loud, distinctive `Amen' has become a signature of worship at St. Brigid's.

Toward the end of the evening, Lillian Morris asks for the microphone and offers a summation: "Personally, I think nothing is perfect, but this is almost a perfect parish."

St. Brigid's may not be quite a perfect parish, but in atmosphere and attitude it seems a fitting place to serve as the focus for an examination of parish life on Long Island 30 years after the Second Vatican Council launched a major rethinking of what parishes should be.

There are 133 parishes in the Diocese of Rockville Centre, which covers Nassau and Suffolk Counties. Some are lively and engaging, some staid and cool. And while any number of them could serve as a window into modern Catholic life, St. Brigid's, with its crackling energy level, its intriguing mix of ethnicities, its enthusiastic and emotional liturgies, seems particularly engaging. It is a parish that draws people from great distances, a parish that people elsewhere seem to know about. During the next year, in an occasional series of stories about St. Brigid's, Newsday will examine the joys and sorrows of parish life through the stories of its people.

More than 50 percent of Long Island's population is Catholic, and for many of them, parish is a central focus of life. It is the place where Catholics, in the words of sociologist the Rev. Andrew Greeley, play out their distinctive "sacramental imagination," a tendency to see God as present in the world and to view the everyday realities of that world as revealing that presence. So Catholics place great emphasis on community and ceremony. Parish is where they bring together the stuff of their lives with the ritual that brings meaning to it all.

"If there is any doubt about how important the parish is to those who live in it, one must merely consider the outrage that inevitably erupts whenever the chancery tries to close a parish or a school or tear down a church," wrote Greeley, a sociologist and novelist, in "The Catholic Myth," a 1990 book that flowed from three decades of sociological inquiry into Catholic life. "The American neighborhood parish is one of the most ingenious communities that human skill has ever created."

But it is not a static community. Parishes are still working to figure out what they should be, 30 years after the Second Vatican Council initiated a movement toward more lay involvement. "Ownership" of the parish is shifting from pastor to people, and geographical parish boundaries are becoming less important as Catholics display an increasing willingness to travel outside of their home parish to find one that meets their needs. The available number of priests is shrinking, which accelerates the shift of responsibility to lay people. And the number of parish schools is declining as dioceses economize by establishing regional schools to serve several parishes.

"The American Catholic parish is in the midst of a paradigm shift," Sweetser wrote with Carol Holden, co-director of the Parish Evaluation Project, in "Leadership in a Successful Parish," a 1992 book. The project is an independent parish consulting group that helps parishes evaluate themselves and plan for the future. "The parish is at a most critical moment in its history."

At this pivotal moment, the parish is moving toward a firmer grasp of the concept that parish is people -- not just a building or a hierarchy, but the place where the people gather together to be church for one another.

In the house on Lewis Avenue where they have lived for 40 years, Bill and Mary Goode raised seven boys and five girls. Bill worked days at the Westbury post office and nights at Roosevelt Raceway's pari-mutuel windows. When he came home, Mary would head to her nursing job at Mercy Hospital in Rockville Centre. The demands of work and child-rearing didn't leave them time to be active in the parish. Once the children were grown, Mary became a eucharistic minister and, at Gaeta's request, started a hospital visitation ministry.

In late 1991, one of their children, Kitty Millan of Westbury, gave birth to a daughter, Megan, and the Goode children gathered for the baptism at St. Brigid's. Their daughter, Peggy Kilinski, came down from Schenectady with her husband, Paul, and their children, Jay Paul, 2, and Lauren, 7. On the eve of the baptism, Peggy put the children to sleep in the attic of her parents' home and returned downstairs to continue the reunion with her family.

Late that night, fire broke out in the attic, killing Jay Paul and leaving Lauren terribly injured. First Lauren and later her father were taken to the burn unit at Nassau County Medical Center, where Gaeta joined the family and kept vigil. "Peggy and Father Frank and I stayed until about five o'clock in the morning," Mary Goode said.

Over the next six weeks, as Lauren lay in the burn unit, the tragedy gripped the whole parish. Parishioners prayed for Lauren daily at mass and did what they could for the family. "I don't think we cooked one meal from October 26 to December 10," Mary said, her voice breaking. "Somebody sent a meal every night."

When this all began, the Goodes had not yet developed a close relationship with Gaeta. "Now he's like one of our family," Mary Goode said. "He came every single night to the hospital." When Lauren died, he sat with the family for hours, and later traveled to Schenectady to participate in her funeral mass.

Last year, Gaeta baptized two new members of the family: James, the second child of Kitty and Chuck, and Francis, the third child of Paul and Peggy Kilinski, who named him for Gaeta. For the pastor, accustomed to dealing with death, this numbing level of tragedy was something he had never experienced, and he realized there were no adequate words he could say. But it drew him close to the family. "I just developed a bond with them," Gaeta said. "Honestly, their faith was just so incredible that I'd go there to be restored myself."

All this had a profound effect on Chuck Millan, who had grown up Lutheran but began thinking about conversion. "He saw our faith at work," Kitty Millan said. The Easter after the fire, he was received into the Catholic church. Peggy's strength in coping with her grief and the parish's response helped all of them to grow in faith. "It changed all our lives so much," Kitty said. "We've all gotten so much closer to God."

The idea for a parish system arose in the Fourth Century, when the primary pastors, the bishops, could no longer adequately tend their growing flocks in outlying areas, away from the central worship center. The bishops divided the rural areas into parishes, each to be served by a resident priest. So the parish became the most local manifestation of Catholicism, where people gathered to celebrate the "dangerous memory" of Jesus, whose commands of selfless love and limitless forgiveness could be so costly to follow, and to participate in the mass, the central act of Catholic worship. In ways impossible to quantify, parishes have helped people to cope with life's unfathomable tragedies, to utter gratitude for its exquisite joys, to grapple with its most profound mysteries.

But there is no such thing as an average parish. Though they all offer the same sacraments and share the same mission, parishes can be very different -- depending on the pastor, the people and the synergy that they achieve together.

Vatican II and the 1983 Code of Canon Law moved the emphasis from pastor to people, making it clear that every member of the parish community, simply by virtue of baptism, has a share in responsibility for the life of the parish. But the pastor still sets the tone, for better or worse. The pastor is so crucial that some parishes have fallen into prolonged acrimony after a change at the top. But for 20 years, St. Brigid's has not only survived but thrived under two pastors with sharply different styles.

Arriving in 1975, the Rev. Fred Schaefer (now a monsignor) was the educator who gave lay people a real role and nudged them into the training they needed. He was the community-builder, developing liturgies for the different language groups that had come to populate the Westbury area. He was the prophet who stood up and told the difficult truth: The gospel of Jesus required the parish to reach out and help the refugees who flooded into Westbury from El Salvador in the 1980s. "He was a priest of the poor, and the poor knew it," said Joan Echausse, one of those who acquired a master's degree in theology with Schaefer's encouragement.

When Schaefer left in 1989 for St. Francis de Sales parish in Patchogue, feeling it was time for the people to hear the gospel preached in another voice, Gaeta succeeded him. The primary lay leaders are still people who received their theological training under Schaefer, and Gaeta acknowledges that reality gratefully. He also admires Schaefer's stand for the poor. "I think Fred was prophetic, and he just had a sense of the church and a beautiful compassion and love of the poor," Gaeta said. "I think he was right on the money." But stylistically, the two men could hardly be more different.

Gaeta has a far more emotional personality than Schaefer's, a more raucous sense of humor, a penchant for wide-open liturgies, a flair for the unusual. It was Gaeta who hired as music director a rock musician, Tommy Thorell, with a life story full of twists and turns and stunning epiphanies that rescued him from the fast lane. Gaeta led the way to save the parish school and nearly erased the parish debt. But his real genius lies in offering a wide variety of worship experiences, to attract different parts of the community. "Frank would say, `If it leads you to God, let's do it,' " said Manuel Ramos, one of the leaders of the Hispanic community.

But ultimately, parish really is people. "Frank is a moving force behind it," said the Rev. Michael Maffeo, one of the three priests assigned to work full time with Gaeta, "but if the people don't do it, it doesn't get done." With 23,000 Catholics, the parish is so huge the clergy can't handle it alone, even with four priests and five deacons - an unusually large collection of ordained staff in an era of dwindling clergy numbers. So lay people plan the liturgy, feed the poor, teach the faith to the children, comfort the elderly -- in short, make the parish go.

The people are extraordinarily diverse. The parish got its name from a Fifth-Century abbess, one of three patron saints of Ireland, because when the parish started in the 1850s, the Irish were Westbury's predominant immigrant group. But its ethnic makeup now reflects later waves of immigration: Italians, Mexicans, Salvadorans and other Spanish speakers, plus African-Americans from the South, Haitians, Filipinos and others.

That diversity produces emotional events such as the epic Good Friday pageantry and multicultural liturgies several times a year, bringing all the language communities together. "We're working so hard to make our diversity not something that separates us, but something that unites us," Gaeta said at the Thanksgiving mass. "My dear sisters and brothers, what we are doing here in St. Brigid's parish is what the whole world is supposed to be about."

A few weeks later, Gaeta gave a Sunday homily about a painting of the Last Supper. A young man just out of prison had come up to the pastor and presented him with the painting, which represented Jesus and his 12 apostles as black. Gaeta liked it and had it hung inside one of the entrances to the church.

During his homily, Gaeta told the congregation about the painting's origins and walked over to it. St. Brigid's, he said, is a black church. It is also an Italian church and an Irish church and a Haitian church and a Hispanic church and a Filipino church. As he spoke, the congregation started applauding -- far from the usual etiquette for a homily.

"It was a Moment," said Joan Echausse, who as lector proclaimed the day's Scripture readings. "You knew you're part of something where time is standing still."

Who would be Jesus? That was the problem that kept vexing Vincenzo Iannucci, until one day when the door of his Post Avenue delicatessen opened, and Jerry DeLucia walked in.

DeLucia and Iannucci are both from Italian families that originated in Durazzano, a small valley town in the shadow of Monte Taburno, northeast of Naples. In fact, there are roughly as many people from Durazzano living in St. Brigid's parish as there are in Durazzano itself.

Most of them live just west of the church in a section called Breezy Hill, named for an area in Durazzano. Several have businesses along Post Avenue, including Giuseppe Telese, who runs Joe's European Haircutters and owns a home on the oldest street in Durazzano. "To me, over here is like living in Durazzano," Telese said.

People from Durazzano stick together. DeLucia's father, Vincenzo, for example, was a construction foreman and helped new arrivals from Durazzano to find construction jobs. They also work to preserve Durazzano culture. In their home, Vincenzo and Margherita DeLucia and their children spoke Italian. "When I started kindergarten, I didn't know a word of English," Jerry DeLucia said. Now he and his wife, Anna, are doing their part. Their children, Margherita and Vincenzo, students at St. Brigid's school, speak Italian at home.

With that devotion to the culture, DeLucia was more than willing when he walked into the deli nine years ago and Iannucci asked his help in staging an Italian-style Good Friday pageant. Iannucci had cast every role but Jesus. Everyone was reluctant. "I said, `Yeah, I'll do it,' " DeLucia recalled. "He didn't believe me. I said, `Vinny, I'll do it.' He said, `But you have to carry the cross and you have to do this . . .' I said, `Vinny, I'll do it.' "

Every Good Friday since, DeLucia, the owner of a plumbing business and now the president of the Italian community at St. Brigid's, has carried the cross in the passion play -- preserving a bit of Italian tradition that has become a keystone of the legendary St. Brigid's Holy Week liturgies.

The question caught parishioners at parish enrichment night by surprise. "Are you any better than any other parish?" Sweetser asked. Some said no, apparently out of an egalitarian sense that that was the correct answer. But the negative sounded tentative. The people of St. Brigid's really do think other parishes could learn from them. And there's evidence that people elsewhere agree.

Traditionally, Catholics almost always went to church in the parish where they lived. But those who don't feel adequately "ed" emotionally and spiritually in their own parishes are more willing now to "shop" for a different parish. "I believe you have to do it, because in some places the church is dead, as far as I'm concerned," says Sister Joan Staudohar, who drives from Hicksville to Westbury to attend mass. "I want to be in a place where there's worship going on."

That's why Chuck Cutolo and his wife, Denise Pratesi, decided to buy a house in Westbury: to live near St. Brigid's. Cutolo is the former legislative director for U.S. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), and now works for Catholic Charities. Pratesi teaches English and theater at Deer Park High School. Their primary volunteer work for the parish involves the rock mass on Sunday evenings, which they say attracts young people who otherwise might not attend church.

"Many other parishes look to say no; this parish may not always say yes, but it looks for ways to say yes," Pratesi said. "There doesn't seem to be the fear of lay inclusion here that there is in so many other places. Here, they're asking you to be involved."

For all that, St. Brigid's has its share of financial and administrative struggles. It is also still learning how best to deal with its diversity, which is one of the parish's great strengths, but also a continuing challenge. Every weekend, in addition to nine masses in English, there are three in other languages: Creole, Italian and Spanish. Several times a year, such as the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the language groups get together for complex, uplifting multilingual liturgies, with sections in those four languages, plus some Tagalog, for the Filipinos. At the Guadalupe liturgy, for example, the Rev. Thomas Costa, new to St. Brigid's but not to foreign languages, preached in English, Spanish, Italian and French.

Costa's language skill is a major asset to the parish, but even he agrees with others that the multicultural liturgies are an imperfect step toward unity. "Multicultural masses aren't really satisfying to anybody," Costa said. Because the liturgies reflect so many languages, they don't provide enough of any one language to satisfy. "Probably the English-speaking people of the parish are more positive about them than any of the language groups." At a recent meeting of the parish liturgy board, where the issue of multicultural liturgies arose, Estelle Peck, the director of liturgy and family life, acknowledged that although the parish is trying its best, "At times, people feel like they're being patronized and they're getting a bone."

Beyond the liturgies, Gaeta and lay leaders say, there is still work to be done to knit the different communities together in a continuing way. "Unity is the ultimate goal, certainly, but we have a ways to go," said Stephanie Clagnaz, leader of the children's choir and a composer of some of the parish's liturgical music.

Ethnicity is not the only form of diversity at St. Brigid's. The parish is also inclusive enough to address the concerns of many constituencies: such as carrying in the bulletin an affirmation of the dignity of gay people and offering a liturgy for their parents, arranging a Christmas-time turn-in of violent toys, and providing statues and more traditional forms of devotion. Every parish has different constituencies to serve, but St. Brigid's seems to have a wider-than-usual spectrum and seems to invest more energy in addressing that diversity than do many parishes.

Its tent is big enough to include peace-and-justice liberals such as Cutolo and Pratesi, as well as conservatives such as Michael Posillico, a member of Catholics United for the Faith, a watchdog group that demands doctrinal and liturgical orthodoxy. Posillico, whose great-grandfather was one of the first Italians to migrate here from Durazzano, runs a disc jockey business with his twin brother, Marco.

Together with five or six members of his family, Michael attends mass daily at St. Brigid's, though he attends Sunday mass at a parish in Massapequa Park to hear a more conservative preacher. He likes some of what Gaeta has done, but he thinks St. Brigid's, like other parishes, uses too many lay eucharistic ministers to distribute communion, which traditional Catholics feel detracts from the respect for the sacrament. He also thinks too many churches preach too little morality.

"Many parishes today, including St. Brigid's, talk about love, love, love," Posillico said, sitting in his basement, amid the huge speakers, vinyl records and other paraphernalia of his disc jockey business. "My general complaint is priests in general should talk more about hell and about sinning."

Pratesi said: "That's precisely why we're here: a lot of eucharistic ministers and not a lot about sin and hell."

Tommy Thorell, St. Brigid's director of music, says the parish "doesn't lock anyone out." And he should know. Thorell came to St. Brigid's after a career in rock, a dramatic conversion, a new life in Christian music, a falling out with the Catholic church and an experiment as pastor of a storefront church. Then Gaeta hired him, when a more mainstream music director left.

"I'm not liturgically correct or traditional at all," Thorell said. At first, not everyone liked his caress-every-syllable crooning. "They thought, `Who's this guy? He's like this slick performer,' " Thorell said. But his singing is now a keynote of the parish's worship. "He's an entertainer, but he's also a man of prayer," Peck said. "It took a lot of guts for Frank to hire him."

This openness helps to draw people in and make the parish central to their lives. "St. Brigid's is a perfect example of a type of primal community," said the Rev. Robert McGuire, a Jesuit who has given retreats at St. Brigid's and runs the Spirit Life Center in Plainview, which offers healing and prayer in a variety of settings. "The primary life of many people at St. Brigid's is the church."

One of those drawn into the orbit of St. Brigid's is Ed Ward, executive assistant to Hempstead Town Presiding Supervisor Gregory Peterson. Ward's father died at age 40, when Ward was 11, and his mother's death in 1986 affected him deeply. He wasn't going to mass, and he wasn't coping well. "It was a low point, emotionally as well as spiritually," Ward said.

One day in 1989, near his mother's birthday, he was visiting her grave in Holy Rood Cemetery, which surrounds St. Brigid's. "I heard the bells ringing; I went over to mass," Ward said. What he heard was not hellfire, but love and forgiveness. "In terms of what I had been through, the loss of both parents, it was a punishing God I had grown up with," Ward said. "And here was this young, fresh, spiritually inspired guy, talking about the love of God."

The priest was John White. Over the next few weeks, Ward kept going to mass, and White always seemed to be the celebrant. Soon, Ward and White became friends. Though White has now been reassigned to diocesan Catholic Charities, Ward still drives from Seaford to attend St. Brigid's, where he helps run programs for young adults and is a regular at "The Six," the Sunday rock mass at 6 p.m.

That mass is one good place to see St. Brigid's unusually high energy. In many Catholic churches, liturgies are staid, predictable and proper, with hymns chosen from the same missalettes and song books that can be found anywhere. At St. Brigid's, for every Sunday and every special liturgy, Estelle Peck produces a pamphlet containing the songs and readings, and the worship itself bursts with spontaneity and high spirits.

Even the most solemn occasions turn out differently at St. Brigid's. In December, Gaeta offered a funeral mass for Doris Matheis, the wife of Deacon Phil. She had been as active in the church as her husband. So, when Gaeta met her casket at the door and draped it in the cloth used at funeral masses, he said: "Doris, we clothe your body with this white garment, which, by the way, you made, and did a very good job of it." Later, he produced from the pulpit a bishop's mitre that she had made for his St. Nicholas costume, put it on his head, then on the casket. Matheis, honoring his wife's request for a joke at her funeral, told one about the length of St. Brigid's liturgies.

The church, patterned after Norman country churches in France, holds fewer than 500 people, making Sunday masses look full and special liturgies look jammed. "What reinforces some of the theater of St. Brigid's is the structure of the church itself," Chuck Cutolo said. "It has this Old World, Mediterranean atmosphere to it."

With its diverse constituencies and ethnic groups, its imaginative clerical and lay leaders, St. Brigid produces an astounding level of activity -- as reflected in a Sunday bulletin that often runs 22 pages, compared with four to eight for the average parish. On one Monday evening in January, the peace and justice committee and the program for bringing adults into the church met; the rock band and the children's choir practiced; boys played basketball; the church itself had an Italian mass and a candlelight rosary; and the Haitian community offered religious education.

The liturgies are also joyful, filled with small physical symbols. On the feast of St. Patrick, Gaeta gives out shamrocks. On the feast of St. Joseph, it's zeppoles. On the feast of St. Brigid, Feb. 1, he gave out scrolls with a funny poem about Brigid. At the end of that liturgy, as he often does, Gaeta reminded parishioners that there would be food and drink in the parish hall across the street. Holding out his hand to elicit a response, he offered the cue: "We of course go from holy hour to . . ." The congregation, well trained, chimed in: "Happy hour."

And always there are jokes -- often directed at Gaeta, on such subjects as the plastic Santa he displays over the rectory door. But for all the laughter, it is a place of serious purpose.

"This parish absolutely is what the bishops had in mind when they talked about what a Vatican II parish is all about: word, sacrament and action in behalf of justice," said White, who served in St. Brigid's as a seminarian when Schaefer was pastor and later as a priest with Gaeta, and now sees dozens of parishes in his diocesan job.

If St. Brigid's vibrancy is a hallmark, it is also ultimately a parish, like others, where much of life revolves around the comfort of the routine. The central act of its worship, the mass, goes on day after day, with the same essential words and actions. Three times a day on weekdays and a dozen times over the weekend, the people of St. Brigid celebrate the mass. You can set your clock by people like Jack Renison, now retired from the plumbing and heating business, who is a past grand knight of the Knights of Columbus and current president of the Nocturnal Adoration Society, which several evenings a month keeps a prayerful vigil in front of the consecrated host, publicly displayed in the church. Most weekday mornings, Renison attends the seven o'clock mass, then says part of the rosary at church and part of it during his daily walk at Jones Beach. He is there because attending daily mass is a Catholic ideal, not because he expects anything out of the ordinary. But extraordinary things can happen.

In her hospital room after giving birth to a girl, Barbara Kellman was struggling to cope with the news that her daughter Carolyn had Down syndrome. A parade of professionals streamed through to offer advice.

"I said to my mother, `Mom, I don't want to see another soul come into this room,' " she said. At the time, Kellman attended Our Lady of Hope in Carle Place. But her mother, Marie Verzi, went to St. Brigid's, and she persuaded her daughter to receive one more visitor, John White.

"That was the beginning of a whole new world for me, because Father John sat with me for maybe three hours or four hours," Kellman said. "I thought I'd never stop crying until Father John came and talked to me."

When she brought Carolyn home, Kellman started going to the nine o'clock mass on weekdays at St. Brigid's. "I listened to everything they had to say, because my heart was so broken, and I needed guidance," she said.

Before Carolyn was a year old, Gaeta told Kellman about the children's Christmas pageant and said: "We'd love your baby to be the baby Jesus." The day of the pageant, Kellman's mother sat in the front row and watched Carolyn as an ornate star of Bethlehem slid on ropes from the choir loft to the front of the church, where Carolyn lay. Verzi could see her watching the star's progress -- a promising sign of Carolyn's development.

Carolyn became a regular at the monthly healing mass, and in the summer, during Kellman's vacation from her teaching job in Carle Place, she took Carolyn to the nine o'clock weekday mass. There, in the summer of 1992, Carolyn's life intersected with the lives of Harry and Jane McLoughlin.

McLoughlin, a supervisor at a large mechanical construction company, had just been laid off after 19 years, and his wife was losing her job, too. "I was in a very deep state of depression, and my wife said to me, why don't we go to the nine o'clock mass," he said. "I thought God had forgotten about us." But he agreed to go.

A few days later, they noticed a young woman in the pew in front of them, trying to control her squirming daughter. "Suddenly, this kid just jumps over her mother's shoulder and into my arms," Harry said.

Carolyn Kellman stopped screaming, put her arms around McLoughlin and kissed him. "When I got a good look at her and saw she was Down syndrome, I just broke down," he said. "This poor kid has to carry all this weight on her shoulder, and I'm just out of a job . . .Even though she had this affliction, God had given her the wisdom to know that what we needed at that moment was love. It was the most beautiful moment of our lives."

Kellman and her daughter are still regulars at the healing mass, and she also attends the charismatic prayer group. Carolyn is in the children's choir. In December, she played an angel in the Christmas pageant. Her brother, Steven, played one of the three "wise ones," and Barbara Kellman narrated. Even her husband, Howard, who is Jewish, often shows up at St. Brigid's. "He knows that the church means a lot to me," she said. McLoughlin later got his job back briefly, lost it again, got work repairing the World Trade Center after the bombing, and then was badly injured in an auto accident. But he and his wife, who later baby sat for Carolyn for months, have only to look at her to put their problems in perspective. "Jesus was in Carolyn that day when she came across the pew into our arms and brightened our lives at a time when we needed brightening," he said. "I don't know anybody who doesn't love that child."

Farmhouse Beginnings Of `The Mother Church'
Beneath the drawing of St. Brigid's church in the weekly bulletin, a caption labels it "the Mother Church of all Nassau County." It's not that simple.

People attended mass at a Westbury farmhouse even before 1850, the year that the new Archdiocese of New York bought land there, south of the Long Island Rail Road station. A lay building committee converted a farmhouse into a church. In 1856, Bishop John Loughlin of the new Diocese of Brooklyn dedicated it.

For a time, Westbury had to borrow a priest from a Glen Cove church built in 1861. St. Brigid's got a full-time pastor in 1892. "They put us rather late in terms of being a parish, because that was when the first resident pastor came here," said the Rev. Michael Maffeo, who was a substitute history teacher before his 1991 ordination and assignment to St. Brigid's, and now specializes in the parish's history.

The parish built a larger church in 1894, the current church in 1915 and the rectory in 1918. Soon after the completion of the current church, the old church building was moved across Post Avenue and became the school. But as the population grew, the school became inadequate. The Rev. James Sullivan, pastor from 1944 to 1954, led two major construction projects: a new school building on Maple Avenue, about a mile from the church, and a chapel to serve growing Carle Place.

When the parish celebrated in 1956 the centenary of the original church's dedication, the pastor was Msgr. Thomas Code, an Irishman with a strong singing voice and sharp sense of ecclesiastical politics. "Code was the epitome of the old-time Irish schmoozer," deacon Jack Falls said. "He was a delicate, gentle, wonderful individual with great compassion," said U.S. Circuit Court Judge Frank Altimari, who also saw Code's political skill. "He worked the room better than any person I evr saw."

But when the Vatican Council ended in 1965, with its call for renewal and greater lay involvement, Code was already elderly, and he did not speedily adopt all the council's reforms. "I think some of the changes may have been a little difficult for him, but he did what he had to do," said Jack Graham, a key lay leader. Code moved the altar so that the priest could say mass facing the people, but made few changes beyond that.

It was the arrival of the Rev. Fred Schaefer in 1975 that began bringing the parish into the post-Vatican II era, followed by Msgr. Francis X. Gaeta in 1989. "Fred very much embraced Vatican II," Graham said. "He was really the one who brought to the attention of the laity that St. Brigid's was not his church; it was their church. Frank has done a magnificent job in following up on that."

Diocese at a Glance

A look at the Diocese of Rockville Centre. All figures are from 1993.

Parishes: 133
Catholics served: 1.3 million
Infant baptisms: 21,524
First communions: 15,455
Confirmations: 15,814
Marriages: 8,867
Parish and regional elementary schools: 61
Students in parish and regional elementary schools: 27,079
Parish-run high schools: 2
Students in parish-run high schools: 1,409
Religious education for students in public schools: 103,297 students
SOURCE: P.J. Kenedy manual; Diocese of Rockville Centre