William Augustine Hickey (May 13, 1869 – October 4, 1933) was an American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as bishop of the Diocese of Providence in Rhode Island from 1921 until his death in 1933.
Father Hickey has...been a soldier camping in the homes of the sick and the poor under the white banner of the Church, fighting for salvation; has battled for Christ in the trenches of humanity. Not a day has passed over his head since our boys first left Clinton that he has not prayed for his people.[1]
In 1923, Hickey started an initiative to upgrade and build new high schools in the diocese. The diocese soon unveiled plans to upgrade Mount Saint Charles Academy, a secondary school in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. The academy had been teaching classes in French to accommodate the later French Canadian Catholic population in the town. However, it soon became clear that Hickey intended for the classes in the renovated school to be English only. Parishioners became angry that they were being forced to pay for this policy. Elphege Daignault, a Woonsocket lawyer, became a protest leader. In one swipe at Hickey, he labeled Irish-American clergy as “national assassins".[2] In 1924, the dissidents founded the newspaper La Sentinelle, to express their opposition. The dissidents were now called Sentinellists.[3][2]
Daignault and the Sentinellists first appealed Hickey's plans to Archbishop Pietro Fumasoni-Biondi, the apostolic delegate, or Vatican representative, to the United States. When that appeal failed, Daignault sued the diocese in state court in Rhode Island. The Rhode Island Supreme Court eventually ruled that it had no jurisdiction in church affairs. By this point, the controversy had gained publicity in French Canadian communities in the United States and Canada. The Sentinellists finally sent a delegation to Vatican City to appeal directly to Pope Pius XI, but he refused to see them.[4][5]
In 1927, Hickey excommunicated Daignault and other Sentinellists and placed La Sentinelle on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum., prohibiting Catholics from reading it. Eventually Daignault and the others recanted their opposition to Hickey and he lifted their excommunications.[5]
Hickey died in Providence on October 4, 1933, from a heart attack at age 64.[1]