Rev. Charles R. Amico

Rev. Charles R. Amico always knew he would become a priest.

“At a very early age I would ‘practice’ saying Mass at home, and even at times put on a makeshift clerical collar,” he recalled earlier this year in an interview on the Western New York Catholic website.

The longest serving priest in the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo, he died Nov. 14, 2023 in Lackawanna after a short period of declining health. He was 95.

Father Amico was ordained Dec. 21, 1952, in the chapel of Pontifical Urban University in Rome, Italy, where he studied for seven years in its Propaganda Fide College.

For more than 60 years, he was a professor of philosophy, theology and homiletics at St. John Vianney and Christ the King Seminary in East Aurora, and at seminaries in Trinidad and Toronto.

He was the fifth of six children of Alfonso Amico, a cement mason, and Italian community leader Josephine Giovino Amico, who were among the first to arrive in Buffalo from Mussomeli, Sicily.

He was one of four in his family who took up religious vocations. Two older cousins became priests, as did his younger brother, Monsignor Richard S. Amico, pastor emeritus of St. Joseph Catholic Church in Niagara Falls.

Devoted to his family, he and his brother performed the invocation and benediction in 1974 when older brother Michael A. Amico was sworn in for his second term as Erie County sheriff. For many years, they officiated together at numerous special occasions.

“He would drop everything to be at his nieces’ and nephews’ and cousins’ family events – baptisms, confirmations, weddings and funerals,” his nephew Michael Ervolina said.

He was president of his graduating eighth-grade class at St. Louis School in 1941, and president of his senior class at the Little Seminary of St. Joseph and the Little Flower in 1945. After one year of college classes there, he was invited to Rome and studied with seminarians from more than 30 nations.

Festive decorations and a procession of horses greeted him as he came with his parents to celebrate his first Solemn Mass on Christmas Day 1952 in his father’s parish in Sicily.

He often said, “If the Pope himself had visited Mussomeli, the welcome could not have been more solemn.”

He completed his studies in 1953 and toured Italy with his younger brother, serving Padre Pio’s Mass and receiving his blessing.

In August 1954, he performed his first Mass in his own home church, Holy Cross on Buffalo’s Lower West Side. Delivering the sermon was Father Pius A. Benincasa, later auxiliary bishop of Buffalo, who trained him as an altar boy. For the next five years, he was a parish assistant at three churches, was a chaplain for the Christian Family Movement and directed a parish religious instruction program for 1,000 students.

In 1959, he accompanied Bishop Joseph A. Burke for an audience with Pope John XXIII and returned to Pontifical Urban University to receive licentiates in philosophy and theology and two doctorates.

After teaching for a year at Buffalo’s Minor Seminary, he became a member of the first faculty at St. John Vianney Seminary when it opened in 1961. For several years, he also conducted the annual solemn novena at Our Lady of Victory Basilica in Lackawanna each evening leading up to Christmas Eve.

Father Amico was one of six St. John Vianney faculty members who sent Bishop James A. McNulty a “statement of conscience” letter in 1968 opposing a recently-issued papal encyclical banning artificial birth control. Meeting with the bishop, they declared they did not intend to be disloyal, but wanted to express their opinion that married Catholic couples should decide the matter for themselves.

Father Amico was reassigned as an assistant at St. Joseph Parish in Niagara Falls, then returned to teaching at the seminary of St. John Vianney in Tunapuna, Trinidad.

In 1972, he became a professor of theology at St. Augustine’s Seminary in Toronto and taught at the University of Toronto. He started and directed the first training program for deacons in Canada.

He was recalled to East Aurora in 1990 to teach systematic theology at what had become Christ the King Seminary. He became professor emeritus in 2005, but didn’t fully retire until 2018.

Considered the patriarch of the Mussomelesi in the U.S., he developed and promoted the annual feast of Our Lady of Miracles of Mussomeli, which he first attended when he was two. He was principal celebrant at its Mass for the last time in September.

His former student Brandon Young wrote that he was “a gifted speaker, a voracious reader, a brilliant intellectual, a usually-reserved introvert … known for his unassuming wisdom, his holiness of life, and his gentleness.”

Until a month ago, he also performed Mass daily at Bishop Head Residence in Lackawanna, where he lived with other retired priests.

His brothers Michael and Richard died in 2015 and 2017, respectively. He was predeceased in 2002 by another brother, Dr. Joseph S., a noted oral surgeon, and in 2015 by a sister, Grayce Arena, a co-founder of Valu Home Centers.

Bishop Michael W. Fisher will lead a concelebrated Mass of Christian Burial at 11 a.m. Monday in St. Anthony of Padua Church, 160 Court St.