Nuns & Priests

I was raised Catholic.  I was raised as Catholic as you can get.  My mother was very devout and my father was a convert.  We lived in a Catholic community and I went to Catholic schools for 12 years.  So yeah, I’m Catholic.  And one thing my mother and that Catholic education instilled in me is love and respect for priests and nuns.

Don’t get me wrong, we had our fair share of priests we didn’t like or nuns who rubbed us the wrong way but that didn’t mean you could get by with not showing them respect.  And that didn’t mean that you didn’t thank God for them each and every day.

I will tell you that my mother’s best friend was a priest who took her on to raise when she was 14 years old.  This man, Fr. John Dickman served as a mentor, spiritual advisor and surrogate father for my entire family from the time he met my mother until the day he died.  He married my brother, my sister and I.  He baptized my two oldest children.  He buried both of my parents.  I named my youngest son after him.  I would tell people that I was naming my son John but we were going to call him Fr. Dickman for short.  I also told people that I would raise my sons in prayer that one of them would take Fr. Dickman’s place as a priest.

My father’s best friend was a priest.  Fr. Joseph Hayden was a Godsend in our life.  I know he was around our house while I was a teenager.  I don’t remember exactly how we met him but we loved him from the very beginning.  He and my father would talk for hours on end.  When my father was so very sick Fr. Hayden brought us the relic of a potential saint who just needed one more miracle to be canonized.  We prayed to her religiously.  Unfortunately, my dad was not her miracle.  When Daddy died Fr. Hayden eulogized him by saying he had never met a man with so much faith.  I was amazed.  My daddy was full of faith but not so full of the traditions of the Catholic Church so he was not one to run the church doors down.  I was so proud that a Catholic Church could see past that and to see the man Daddy was.  Years later Fr. Hayden moved to Peru and began doing missionary work.  When he retired he remained in Peru.  I have been blessed just knowing that man.  Oh, a funny story, when I was pregnant with my second child I mentioned to him that I didn’t have a boy’s name picked out.  With Fr. Dickman beside him he said “well, what’s wrong with John Joseph?”  If my second child had been a boy I would have named him Joseph.

But growing up in Catholic schools we were surrounded by nuns.  As much as we made the typical jokes about them we loved many of them.  My first grade teacher was Sr. Odelia.  She was legally blind but she could scope out a problem anywhere in that classroom.  To this day I still ask about her.  I should put her on my bucket list to go see her.  I am sure that she would remember me.

Growing up at the second Vatican Council was very confusing.  Our parents were taught one way, we were taught another.  Our parents asssumed we were being taught things that we really should have known about our faith and we didn’t know enough to inform them that we weren’t.  So we were taught about feeling good and thinking highly of ourselves and our parents thought we were being taught the Baltimore Catechism.

High school was much the same except we were on our own so much more.  We were learning who we were and were highly influenced by Sister Helen and Sister Sara and Sister Ruth Ann and Sister Ann Margaret and Sister Clara.  There were nuns everywhere.  But they were “new-style” nuns.  They were out of their habits and changed their names back to the names of their youth, for instance, Sister Ann Margaret became Sister Lynn.  These are the women who formed us all, good or bad, into the women we would become.  At first we feared them, then we learned to respect them, and then eventually to love them.  Even after all these years most of these women remember us for who we were.  I can remember a time that I told my mom I wanted to be a nun.  She quickly talked me out of it.  I probably wouldn’t have ever done it.  I’ve never been much of a joiner.  But there were times that I thought this was the kind of life I would like to live.

When my daddy died we had numerous priests on the altar.  That was always a good sign.  The more priests you had, the more nuns who were there, you knew that it was by their prayers that Daddy was going straight into heaven.  When I married both Fr. Dickman and Fr. Hayden were on the altar.  When Mom died we wanted Fr. Dickman to eulogize her.  He said he would not make it through it.  So we had Fr. Hayden give the eulogy.  He kept talking about Daddy and how happy he had to be that Mom was now with him.  What struck me funny was that we had several boyfriends of Mom as pallbearers.  I told my sister that those guys were elbowing each other asking “who’s Fred?”

Throughout the years we have always maintained relationships with priests mainly, but nuns too.  They have always been an integral part of our lives.  Jimmy tells stories about how his parents took care of the priests and nuns in Fancy Farm.  Jimmy tells how his dad planted extra watermelon or mush melons for the sisters.  He would tell how good that was because it got him better grades.  He always developed a relationship with the pastors at church, and if there were sisters around he would do for them as though they were family.

When Jimmy and I married, I think there were 5 priests on the altar.  The one who said Mass was Jimmy’s cousin, Fr. Leonard, who had always been a religious brother but was ordained a priest the week that we married.  Each one of those guys had a special place in our lives, in our hearts.  We knew that our marriage would last because we had all of those prayers going for us.

As long as I could, I sent my kids to Catholic schools, even though they were becoming smaller and more scarce.  We were lucky in that we had a nun teaching third grade when my older children were in school.  Her name was Sister Corda, and she was a Godsend.  Not just for the school, but for my little family as well. I loved it at how resourceful the sisters could be.  When I was a freshman in high school, one of the nuns, Sister Francine, taught World History.  You could guarantee an A in that class by bringing her green stamps.  But she had everyone fill out a little card with your name and address and your parents name and what they did for a living.  One day Sister Francine asked me to stay after class, took me to the back of the room, and had a shopping bag with a broken lamp in it.  She handed it to me saying that she knew my dad was an electrician and could he fix it.  I took that thing home and Daddy told me he was going to buy Sister Francine a new lamp because it would cost more to fix that one that to buy a new one.  Yes I got the A.

But Sister Corda found out that we were from Louisville and so many times when we were on our way she would hitch a ride with us to see her sister in New Albany.  It got to be where she was a member of our family.  But, she wasn’t like Sister Francine, she didn’t give out A’s unless you earned them.

Fancy Farm has such a legacy of priests and nuns and other religious.  I kept hearing about Brother Leo.  He was an elderly brother who had been an educator his entire life.  Once he retired he became interested in genealogy and compiled his information to Fancy Farm and beyond.  He was a phenomenal researcher.  He always made his way to Fancy Farm for the Picnic each year and one year I met him.  He had not been raised here, although his mother was from here.  He had spent a year here as a child.  But he considered Fancy Farm home.  For the 150th anniversary of the founding of the church he compiled a history of St. Jerome Church.  He had no computers to work with.  He spent an awful lot of time in libraries but also people’s homes.  He asked the families that were still in Fancy Farm about their families.  They gave him family pictures and the details of the family that had come before them.  And Brother Leo organized and archived this information.  And he kept everything.  Some of the everything he kept was in duplicate and triplicate.  No telling the money he spent just on copies alone.

For the 175th anniversary of St. Jerome Church I was asked to update Brother Leo’s history book.  His was out of print and this seemed like a good opportunity to put something out.  I got in touch with Brother Leo and he graciously offered me all of his research.  He said that it all belonged to Fancy Farm anyway.  Let me tell you about that experience.  I found out that Brother Leo, who lived in Texas, would go to St. Louis every summer.  This is primarily where he was raised and where he had entered his order.  So, St. Louis was home.  But every summer he scheduled his trip to Fancy Farm from St. Louis.  Every year he would get on a Greyhound bus and head south.  When I found this out I cringed.  This man was in his 80’s and traveling by bus.  My mother would have killed me if she knew that I knew that this man took a Greyhound when I could easily take a day off of work and go get him, and take him back.  It’s only 2 hours away.  So, I got in the habit of going to go get him when he was ready to come to Fancy Farm and when he was ready to go back.  It enabled him to stay an extra day in Fancy Farm on both ends, and be able to see his many friends and family.  When he offered me his research I found that he had it stored in St. Louis.  He suggested that we bring a trailer or something because there was a lot of things.  Well, I will tell you that I rented a van to go get it.  There were 43 banker’s boxes of research.  43!  That van was loaded down.  I’m serious.  But that research made my job so much easier.  And it is still around for the 200th anniversary of St. Jerome Church.

I could tell stories like this for hours on end.  And a lot of the people I know could tell these stories as well.  Let’s just say that being able to have these people in our lives has made our lives so much richer.

I will tell you one more story.  St. Jerome is luckier than most because for the last 7 years we have had a wonderful priest as our pastor.  The thing I love most about Fr. Darrell is also the thing that makes me maddest at him, you don’t know what he’s going to say about anything.  When my daughter was getting married and wanted to have a “mini-mass” and I was digging my heals in for a full mass (not a high mass mind you, just a full one – what’s a mini-mass anyway), Fr. Darrell took her side.  He said that it was probably a good idea for her.  Or how he sat down with my son and his wife on the death of their daughter and cried right alongside them.  But the thing that really stands out to me about him is when he first got here.  I think that the diocese does the priests in Fancy Farm a disservice because they assign a new priest in June.  The Picnic happens in August.  That poor priest gets here and doesn’t have a clue what hit him.  Fortunately, the picnic just comes together and really all Father has to do is pray for good weather (yeah, right).  But the year that Fr. Darrell moved to Fancy Farm was also the year that my brother-in-law died during the One Mile race on picnic-eve.  And for Fr. Darrell to be able to handle such a sudden death, in such a large family, still amazes me.  He did a phenomenal job.  How he could know someone only by the stories that others tell about him still bewilders me.  But over the years I have watched him do that time and time again.

Although all of the priests and brothers and sisters that I have had in my life might have come to me because of what they were but these people have stayed in my life, and in my heart because of who they were.  They have each touched my life and my heart.