By Jay Sorgi • Posted December 5, 2024

When mentioning the name of Father David Machain, the staff at the home where he lives can’t help but immediately utter, “He’s such a nice man.”

That’s an understatement for anyone who meets the oldest priest in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. He turns 100 years old on December 30.

“There wasn’t one day in all these years that I’ve been sorry I was a priest,” Father Machain said about his 72 years of ministry faithfully serving countless Philadelphia Catholics.

Gratitude comes easily for him, perhaps because he has kept a three-word mantra since his birth in Pottstown and his formative years with seven siblings in Bethlehem.

“Que dios quiere. What God wants,” he said of his Mexican immigrant mother’s key phrase. “Whatever God sends me, I take.”

Such humility spawns from growing up in Depression-era poverty living in a two-room house along the Central Railroad freight line. As a kid, he got to know a priest from Spain who was expelled from Mexico during the persecution of the Catholic Church there.

“Father used to come out every Sunday. He was a friend of the family because my pops spoke English, and when Father needed something in English, he’d come to see my father about it,” Father Machain said.

“While he was visiting, he’d say to my sister Betty, ‘There’s something stuck in my pocket,’ and it was piece of candy (for her).”

Perhaps it was the priest’s sense of generosity combined with his faith that inspired Father Machain to discern the call to priesthood in high school, then head to St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, then located in Overbook.

Following his priestly ordination in May 1952, over the next 13 months he ministered at three parochial assignments in Chester, Reading, and Strafford – the last of which was a five-month tenure at Our Lady of the Assumption Parish. But apparently, he had been assigned to the wrong Assumption parish.

“I was supposed to be sent to (Assumption B.V.M.) at 12th and Spring Garden (streets in Philadelphia)” Father Machain said. By June 1953, he began his assignment at the Philadelphia parish.

“There were a lot of Puerto Ricans moving into Philadelphia and settling in that district, more or less. And so they sent me there for that reason, because I spoke Spanish.”

Father Machain remembered how the church was located not far from what at the time was called “Skid Row,” a place where many unhoused people spent their time.

“I used to ask the ladies in the kitchen to make some sandwiches ahead of time,” Father Machain said. “Whenever some poor fellow would come, the secretary would send him around back to the kitchen, and knock on a door and say, ‘Father sent me.’ They already had sandwiches ready.”

The young priest helped a group of religious sisters with a charity set up in the building’s basement to give food and clothing to the economically challenged. That afforded him an opportunity to know another Philadelphia transplant from Bethlehem who was born just 123 days after Father Machain, someone a lot more famous who had his own strong Catholic devotion.

“One of the men who used to stop by and visit was Chuck Bednarik,” Father Machain said of the University of Pennsylvania grad and Pro Football Hall of Fame center and linebacker with the Philadelphia Eagles, with whom he won two NFL titles. “He would stop by every so often, and he would say hello.”

Bednarik always left the church building a few dollars lighter, generously giving to Father Machain and the sisters’ efforts.

Six years at Assumption B.V.M. were followed by two more as parochial vicar and later nine years as pastor of St. Edward the Confessor at 8th and York streets, where another large Puerto Rican settlement grew.

So did the length of his homilies.

“I used to preach two sermons at Mass, one in English and then the same one in Spanish,” Father Machain said.

There weren’t as many encounters with the famous at St. Edward’s or seven other assignments later in his priestly ministry, including nine years as pastor of St. Paul Parish in Norristown.

But Father Machain speaks of grateful pride with one encounter that happened after two seminary classmates were ordained auxiliary bishops of Philadelphia in 1981 – Bishops Louis DeSimone and Francis Schulte – and a later class reunion with them in Rome.

“They were able to arrange for us for a special meeting with the Holy Father (St. John Paul II), and then he came down saying hello to each one of us and gave us each a special rosary that he had blessed. So I remember taking that home and giving it to my mother,” said Father Machain.

“We celebrated Mass with the Holy Father  … in his own private chapel.”

Over seven decades and tens of thousands of Masses later, gratitude to God for the many experiences of priestly ministry remains the dominant theme in Father Machain’s life of nearly a century.

“I’m thankful,” he said. “I don’t think I’ll be able to thank him (enough) at all. That’s how much.”