LEWISTON – John Labonte writes like an insurance executive.

Careful and ordered, the retired Prudential manager could fill a bookshelf with the background materials he gathered to write a just-published history of the area’s local Catholic churches.

He gathered past volumes of old, sometimes inaccurate, accounts published at parish anniversaries. He picked up documents when he could. He waded through microfilm of old newspapers.

And he didn’t suffer mistakes.

Sometimes the unchallenged info – from the consecration of cemeteries to the ordination dates of priests – simply rang untrue.

“I verified everything,” Labonte said. “I did not ever anticipate that it would come out this good.”

The result is an 88-page volume titled, “150 Years of Catholicism: 1857 -2007.”

The book includes histories of all 14 Lewiston-Auburn parishes. It also has articles on several other area churches and Catholic institutions including Saint Dominic Regional High School, Trinity Catholic School and St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center.

It’s a job of writing Labonte didn’t even want. However, the request came from his son, Mark.

The younger Labonte had been chosen to head the 150th anniversary of St. Joseph’s Church, the first Catholic church in the area.

Mark Labonte tried three times to bring other writers into the project. Each time, the requests fell through.

So, last August, he went to his father.

“I never wrote anything before but business letters,” John Labonte said. He’d planned to spend the winter working in his wood shop, enjoying his first free time since his retirement 17 years ago.

He took on the job, anyway, setting a Dec. 31 deadline for himself.

He dug into the research.

“It was fascinating,” he said.

One of the gems he discovered was an interview he found in the Lewiston Evening Journal with Albert Kelsey, who ran the Bates Mill for Benjamin Bates and the Franklin Company. Kelsey, a Protestant, disliked the violent anti-Catholic sentiment at the time and helped his company give St. Joseph’s Parish land for its first church, despite the apparent bigotry of his own bosses.

“He tricked them into signing over the deed,” Labonte said.

It’s the kind of information that Labonte favored. “I loved the research,” he said.

At the suggestion that he write another book, Labonte waved the air as if shooing flies.

“I’ve written enough books,” he said.