faith! - Frank Avignone

Frank Avignone finds it intriguing that as he nears the ninth decade of his life – he turns 89 in May – he is firmly planted at a church by the name of St. Martin’s.

That is because his experience with church life began at another St. Martin’s, though a Roman Catholic one in Amityville, N.Y., back in the late 1930s, early 1940s. “I was born a long time ago,” he says, eyes twinkling.

The son of Italian Roman Catholic immigrants, Frank spent his early years immersed in church life. He was an altar boy and a choir member, and even thought he might be headed to the priesthood at one point.

Among those who influenced his thinking were two nuns and a priest who ran the two-room school house he attended when his family moved to Indiana from New York after World War II broke out. His father, an optometrist by trade, was assigned work with an Indiana aviation company when the military had too many optometrists to assign.

The family lived in a large farmhouse on a farm outside Evansville, Ind., complete with horses, cows and German prisoners of war who had been sent to camps to work on farms in the area. “What an experience for a kid from New York.”

The tiny school that Frank attended included maybe 50 children. The priest and nuns who ran the school were exceptional. “I was mesmerized by the Mass, the music and these holy people,” he said of his time at St. John’s School, where he was confirmed.

Those influential faith leaders also played a role in helping Frank digest the grim news that came as World War II drew to a close – the dropping of an atomic bomb in Japan and widening knowledge about the Nazi prison camps in Europe.

“I was shocked,” he said after seeing the first newsreels revealing the camps. “I had nightmares and didn’t want to speak to anybody. Didn’t want to pray.”

As the war came to an official end, Frank’s family returned to New York. There, Frank attended a Catholic high school that was nothing like the loving two-room schoolhouse in Indiana. “It was like a Marine bootcamp with nuns.”

Frank’s father transferred him to an Eastern Rites Ukrainian school known as St. George’s Academy. His time there began his lifelong appreciation for people from all walks of life, all areas of the world. It also intensified his empathy for those who had endured World War II. “I had classmates with numbers on their arms. Young kids, who had just been collected off the streets and put to work.”

Memories of those classmates heighten his concern for what is happening today in Ukraine. His professional relationships with people from throughout Europe and the former Soviet Union also play into his concerns. “I have friends there,” he said of Russia, where he has lived previously because of his work as a nuclear physicist. “I am in two international coalitions.”

Frank has spent years building coalitions for the study of nuclear physics. Until the pandemic broke out, he maintained an apartment in Italy, where he traveled for work that began during his teaching career at the University of South Carolina. Frank is the Carolina Endowed Professor of Physics and Astronomy. He began teaching at the university in 1965, and continues to do so today.

His career as a nuclear physicist often cross-pollinated with the larger questions of life, including his faith life. He loves to tell a joke about an evangelical and a physicist arguing about the existence of God. The evangelical finds it impossible to comprehend a world that exploded into being from nothing, to which the physicist remarks: “What’s the matter? Are you telling me you don’t believe in God?”

Frank admits his faith is a bit cantankerous. “The Old Testament scripture doesn’t interest me very much,” he said. On the other hand, “I take the Gospels very seriously. They’re only 2,000 years old with more than one witness -- first and secondhand witnesses.”

Spoken like a scientist, Frank adds, “There’s just a lot more credibility for the Gospels.”

Frank’s faith also causes him to ponder being “a chosen people.” What type of God, he asks, “would create an enormous universe like this and have a chosen people?”

He knows that type of thinking may not sit well with everyone, but what he loves about being a part of the Episcopal Church is that using one’s mind is encouraged. Faith is not blindly followed in the Episcopal tradition, which he found his way to by way of his second wife, Ann Braithwaite.

Ann and Frank married in 2006 after the death of his first wife to a long battle with cancer.

“I may not have fallen in love with her in the first 15 minutes of meeting her, but I’m pretty sure I did in the second 15,” he says of Ann. Her arrival in his life came after, he said, he had finally decided “to live again.”

Their decision ultimately to marry meant folding St. Martin’s into their lives because the church was a critical part of Ann’s life. “I told her if I were to agree to go to St. Martin’s, it wouldn’t be halfhearted. That was in 2006, and here I am, a member of the family.”

Frank Avignone has been a member of St. Martin’s since 2013.