I’ve been documenting the St. Peter’s Fiesta in Gloucester for three decades now—but this time, the 99th year, as I’m recovering from my year of (successful) treatment for cancer, treatment that began just after Fiesta last year, was a special year. I like to attend the last night of the Novena, the end of the nine nights of prayer that open the celebration of Gloucester’s Sicilian-American Catholic commercial fishing community. The Novena is a smaller, quieter event before the madness of the Greasy Pole contest and the rest of the dazzling weekend festivities. This year the Novena offered a Mass, a gorgeous sunset procession down to the sea, and tearful speeches about loved ones lost over the past year—including seven people who died aboard the fishing dragger Lily Jean when it sank on Jan. 30. Standing remains difficult for me since cancer, and during the Mass, a mom kindly let me sit in the seat her 3-year-old had been using. I caught up with folks about how our families have been over the past year. I ate strawberry shortcake. I visited with longtime Fiesta acquaintances and some regular Gloucester friends. People prayed for me because of my cancer. I saw, but didn’t get a chance to talk to, the Crazy Hat Ladies, sisters who had looked out for me during my cancer. A nonna gave me a rosary and holy card for my cancer. People invited me to their homes. A woman commiserated with me about cancer repercussions and offered advice and gave me her phone number and offered to go to hospital with me. The keeper of the St. Peter statue told me that St. Peter had cured me. I felt the embrace of the Fiesta community, in all its inspirations and complications and love, and it certainly definitely heals me. Viva San Pietro! <3
St. Peter’s Fiesta in Gloucester, the city’s annual kickoff off summer, is a celebration of Gloucester’s Sicilian-American Catholic commercial fishing community, a yearly homecoming and family reunion.
The festival honors the patron saint of Roman Catholic fisherman. St. Peter is believed to have been a fisherman who became one of Jesus’s 12 apostles, or earliest and closest followers, and he’s traditionally celebrated as the church’s first pope. Gloucester’s festival takes place each year on the weekend closest to his feast day, June 29.
The festival was founded in 1927 after Gloucester fishing captain Salvatore Favazza commissioned a Charlestown sculptor to create a statue of St. Peter, which Favazza showcased in a storefront window and paraded through the streets of Gloucester’s waterfront Sicilian-immigrant neighborhood, the Fort, as the faithful shouted “Me chi samiou, dute mute? Viva San Pietro!” (Roughly: “Shout it louder, are we all mute? Long live St. Peter!”) The blessing continues to be shouted during processions and by Greasy Pole walkers and revelers throughout the festival to this day.
The religious tradition continues as women lead songs and prayers for the first eight evenings of the Novena at the Legion Hall, in an upstairs room where the festival’s St. Peter statue has been set up on a stage. On the ninth evening, a priest leads a Mass there, before men carry the statue out to the street, down to the sea at Beach Court for a blessing, and return it to the window shrine at the St. Peter’s Club on Rogers Street.
During Friday night’s opening ceremonies, the St. Peter statue is paraded back around the Legion Hall then to a temporary altar at St. Peter’s Square, next to the festival carnival. After an outdoor mass in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday morning, the statue of St. Peter and statues and icons of the Madonna and other saints are joined by marching bands and floats for a 2-mile-long procession through downtown Gloucester, stopping for blessings at shrines and churches along the way, before ending at the St. Peter’s Club.
