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| The Rev. Francis Gargani gestures toward back, where he was hit by thug with table leg when he went to parishioner's aid. |
The Rev. Francis Gargani's heroics left him beaten and bruised on the stone steps outside the Church of the Immaculate Conception.
But his daring action gave the parishioner just enough time to elude the wild-eyed thug, who was threatening to pummel her with a heavy wooden table leg - and who already had injured another man.
"I wasn't any kind of hero," Gargani, the second city priest to be beaten in a week, told the Daily News yesterday.
"I was trying to calm him down. I didn't realize how delusional he was," he said. "If I had known, I might not have tried.
"Thank goodness he hit me here," Gargani said, pointing at a massive bruise on his back where his unholy attacker had bashed him with the table leg.
"Thank God, it wasn't my head. He could have just hit my head and it would have been the end."
Just a few days ago, Brooklyn Msgr. James Kelly, 66, was badly beaten by a robber who broke into the rectory at St. Brigid's in Bushwick through a bathroom window.
Yesterday Gargani, 58, lowered himself gently into a chair in the church's rectory and described his own horrific encounter over the weekend.
He said he was walking back to the E. 150th St. rectory about noon Saturday when he saw the screaming man menacing an elderly woman on her way to Mass.
"I saw him swinging at her, and it just felt like something I had to try to defuse," said Gargani, who was not wearing his clerical collar.
Stepping between the woman and the ex-con, Gargani said he spoke calmly.
"Please, sir, nobody is trying to hurt you," he said.
As he spoke, he had no way of knowing that the thug allegedly had clubbed a 29-year-old man over the head minutes earlier - leaving him injured on the street.
"It's okay," Gargani continued, as the man flailed below the church's giant cross. "It's okay."
But the man lunged at Gargani, smashing a table leg as big as a baseball bat and twice as thick against the priest's back.
As Gargani stumbled back, his attacker banged the weapon against the church's metal railing, then fled up E. 150th St.
The injured priest hobbled in the other direction, entering the church through a side door.
Cops, responding to a 911 call from a church employee, found Bristol Edwards, 46, of the Bronx, clutching the table leg behind the rectory, police and the priest said.
Edwards, who has previous arrests for burglary and trespassing, was charged with assault and weapons possession, police said.
The 29-year-old man allegedly attacked by Edwards up the block from the church was in stable condition at Lincoln Hospital.
Gargani was treated by paramedics but declined to go to a hospital.
"He risked his life to save another person," said parishioner Gloria Santiago. "There should be more respect for people who give everything to serve the Lord."
But Gargani said he does not believe his attacker knew he was a man of the cloth.
"I wasn't attacked as a priest," he insisted, saying he had been wearing a T-shirt, shorts and sandals.
Gargani, who moved to the South Bronx four years ago and celebrates Masses at churches across the city, said he has no plans to leave the neighborhood.
"I love the neighborhood. I love the people here, and I would not stop because of this."
Originally published on July 26, 2004
