Tuesday, 3/19/13
Back when we all had Christian names we had like second
birthdays on our feast days. I hope I am not offending St. Joseph by turning
the spotlight from him to four
fine men who share his feast day today.
Father Joe English, who was our Epiphany pastor for thirty
years, was an immense man who was something to see when hundreds of pounds of
him leaned over the pulpit driving home God’s point. For all his size, he slept
in a narrow bed, with a white tin hospital tray on wheels as his only other
furniture. Once a week he sped over to the rectory of an Irish classmate where
he read book after book, eating his way through bags of apples. Cardinal
Glennon said, “Joe was perfectly named. He had a better command of English than
any man alive.”
Joe Kelly belonged to the Christian Church, and as sometimes
happens with those people, he did a better job at being Christian than we do.
He taught be to drive, saying Protestant prayers all the way. After being
landed into a nursing home, he became the dearest friend to every old fellow or
girl there.
I had twenty-nine nephews and nieces. A Joe among them would
every afternoon phone his blind sister for a chat. He was the family contact
for a homosexual cousin who had secluded himself. When a nun found four hundred
empty apartments she could let out to families of Aids patients she went to
Joe, a lawyer, for help. When she became ill, she turned the operation over to
Joe.
Father Joe Obrien, another big man, was a prisoner of the
Japanese for five war years, then, bearing no grudge, he worked among them the
rest of his life. When I knew him
in the early fifties he was driving a very small Japanese car. If asked how he
fit into it, he’d explain that with it they had issued a shoehorn. “Well, that’s
funny, but how do you get out of it?” “Easy. They always have a little midwife
on call.”
No comments:
Post a Comment