While Brother Richard Coté, OMI, won’t admit to the RAM status until he reaches his 75th birthday in November 2024, nevertheless we’ll feature him as “soon-to-be-RAM” in this issue of OMI USA Newsletter.
Brother Richard is the eldest of three children born to Albani and Jeanne (Smith) Coté on November 26, 1949, in Manchester, New Hampshire. After graduating high school in 1967, he entered the Oblate Brothers’ Formation Program, in 1968. He made his first profession of vows in Godfrey, Illinois, in 1971.
His assignments over the years have taken him to serve in parishes in Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota and New Hampshire, sometimes as Director of Religious Education, sometimes as Business Manager, sometimes as a pastoral associate, and sometimes as all of these at the same time. He has used these same skills in Oblate retreat houses in New Hampshire and Connecticut, as well as in houses of formation in Massachusetts and in Tahiti. When asked what made him feel most “Oblate,” his reply was, “having spent four years in Tahiti, as Business Manager of the Major Seminary and as an itinerant religious education formator in the atolls of the South Pacific.” Oblates from the former Northern Province had gone to Tahiti in 1977 to help the archbishop of Papeete found and manage a Minor and a Major seminary for French-speaking Polynesia.
This island mission experience prepared him for the ministry he has been accomplishing since 2013 as Director of the Oblate Foreign Missions Office in Tewksbury, Massachusetts. The focus of this office is to help Oblates working in one of the most difficult missions in the world: Haiti. The former Northern U.S. Province first sent French-speaking Oblates to Haiti in 1942 at the request of the then Bishop of Les Cayes, on the southern tip of the island. Oblates presently staff 24 parishes in several dioceses; they also have established several primary and secondary schools, a pre-novitiate, a novitiate and a scholasticate.
Brother Richard is also the curator and historian at the Oblate Historical Museum at St. Joseph Shrine. The late Fr. Herve Gagnon, OMI, dedicated the museum in 1995 so visitors could learn about the history of the Oblates in the City of Lowell since the 19th century. Brother Richard has expanded the museum with other exhibits, such as one honoring the Mother of God, and an exhibit of Christmas scenes from around the world.
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