In this episode, I conclude a series of episodes about my life of ministry in my local Catholic Church. I discuss the struggles I had with our new inexperienced pastor in my experience of a miracle worthy of canonization of a saint.

Hi, this is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 42 of Contemplating Life.

This week I’ll continue with more stories of my many years of volunteer ministry for Saint Gabriel Catholic Church. This week we discuss the challenge of adjusting to a new pastor and my experience of a miracle.

Standard disclaimers: I’m not trying to evangelize or preach to anyone. I’m just telling my stories. Also, this is my best recollection of events from over 20 years ago. I may have some of the details wrong or out of sequence but this is what I remember… the way I remember it. I believe I served briefly on the Board of Education. They not only covered the management of the school but the CCD Sunday school program as well as RCIA and other adult education programs. Naturally, my interest was in RCIA and adult education.

The biggest transition after leaving the finance committee was that we had a new pastor. A relatively young priest named Father Bill Marks was assigned to St. Gabriel. He was a tall, blonde, handsome man who somewhat resembled a young Robert Redford.

Let me talk about clergy assignments for a moment.

In my earlier faith series of episodes, I talked about getting private tutorship from Father Paul Rehart at St. Christopher Parrish when I was about six years old. He was the youngest of 3 priests assigned to that parish. While having three clergy in one parish was rare, the standard was 2. There would be an experienced priest assigned as pastor and a young priest newly ordained as an associate pastor. One typically did not get to be a pastor until they had served a considerable time as an associate.

As I was growing up in St. Gabriel we always had 2 priests. When I returned to the church in my late 20s we also had 2. Father Paul Landwerlen was the pastor and Father Conrad Camberon was the associate. Father Conrad was eventually moved and assigned as pastor of another parish but I don’t remember which one. We then had Msgr. Fred Easton lived at our parish rectory and celebrated mass but his regular job was as the Judicial Vicar of the Archdiocese. He didn’t have any other duties at the parish except to celebrate the sacraments.

The Catholic Church as a whole is suffering from a severe lack of new priests so the days when you could have 2 or 3 per parish are long gone. These days, one priest might have to serve multiple parishes.

As our story approaches the turn of the century, that shortage is just beginning to be felt. Father Bill Marks had only briefly served as an associate pastor before being assigned full pastor at St. Gabriel. Having Father Bill assigned as pastor so early in his career was quite unusual.

Having listened to Father Paul Landwerelen preach for a decade, I was looking forward to someone with a new perspective. I got something new all right but it wasn’t anything I could use. Father Bill would tell stories that we knew could not have happened to him and he would tell them as if he was the originator of the story. He would say something like, “I was on a flight to Chicago this week to visit my family and…” he would describe an encounter with a famous person. The likelihood that he would encounter such a person on a flight from Indianapolis to Chicago was near zero. I’ve heard that there are magazines that clergy can subscribe to that contain articles and anecdotes that you can use for a homily. But the idea behind it is that you’re supposed to stand up there and say, “I read this article with an inspiring story I want to relate to you.” Instead, he was taking these articles and making himself the center of the story.

Sometimes it was an old joke that I’d heard many times before but rather than say, “Did you hear the one about the guy…” Again he would tell the story as if it had happened to him.

There were other instances in which his duplicitous nature caused me great trouble.

In addition to our weekly bulletin that was printed and distributed after Mass each Sunday, we had a monthly newsletter with feature articles about the activities in the parish. Sometimes it was a thank you article from a parishioner whose spiritual needs have been met perhaps during the loss of a loved one or an extended illness in which parishioners helped out.

There was a woman who came to my RCIA class who converted to Catholicism and wanted to get involved. She went to Father Bill and said that she wanted to be the editor of the monthly newsletter. He suggested she form a small working committee and come up with a proposal on how to revamp the newsletter and make it more useful. She put countless hours into that committee putting together a proposal. Just before she was ready to present it to him, I had a conversation with him and learned that he was going to cancel the monthly newsletter. I later ran into the woman and said something like, “I guess your newsletter ideas didn’t go anywhere. I’m sorry to hear that.”

She said, “What!?”

I told her I had heard the newsletter was being shut down. She was furious. She had not yet presented her proposal to Father Bill. She was livid that her work was for nothing and was dead on arrival. She ended up leaving St. Gabriel and I don’t know but I think she may have left the Catholic Church completely.

There were also major changes he made in the staff. Many of them affected my friend Judy who was the parish secretary and bookkeeper. Under Father Paul, Judy had a great deal of responsibility. In any other parish, I think someone with her responsibilities would have had the title “business manager” which many parishes had. Saint Monica parish had a man named Jim Welter who I greatly admired. His title was business manager and pastoral associate. A pastoral associate is someone who is a priest but deals with many of the spiritual needs of the parish. It’s the kind of thing that an associate pastor used to do. Our pastoral associate was Sister Timothy Kavanaugh. I think that the titles business manager and pastoral associate could have fit Judy considering the work she was doing. I had often been disappointed that Father Paul had not given her a title that more closely reflected what she was doing.

But Father Bill was offended that a lowly secretary was running the parish. The clashes between Judy and this new inexperienced pastor are not mine to tell. I only mention these things here because they so deeply affected me. It hurt me personally that someone who had dedicated so much of her life above and beyond her job description to work for the parish was being so devalued. She eventually resigned and took a position as an administrative assistant at the Church Federation of Greater Indianapolis. I continued to work with her as her favorite computer consultant for several years in that position.

Judy wasn’t the only staff person who was driven out. We had a part-time staff person named Joan who served as Youth Ministry Coordinator. He redefined her job description such that the position required a college degree. She didn’t have one so it was his backdoor way of firing her. When she filed for unemployment, he contested it in court. He said she was free to apply for the new position of course ignoring the fact that he knew she wasn’t qualified under his new standards.

He went into court with his priestly collar on and testified that he didn’t fire her and therefore she didn’t deserve unemployment. The judge practically laughed in his face and ruled against him. When a man of his position testifies under oath to something with his hand on the Bible and the judge rules against him it says a lot about the kind of person he is.

The obvious fabrications from the pulpit, his disrespect for the staff, and his manipulation of volunteers created an atmosphere where it was impossible to respect anything that he said or to receive any sort of spiritual direction from him.

All of the incidents I’ve described and others I haven’t described affected other people. They were people I cared about but they didn’t affect me directly. I kept telling myself he hadn’t done anything to me personally so I shouldn’t react too strongly. But it was becoming more and more difficult to stay involved in the parish I loved.

It came time for the parish to buy a new computer. I consulted with him and others on what they should purchase. I don’t recall the details of the controversy that arose around that purchase. It all boiled down to the question, “Had the computer been ordered or not?” I was told that it had been and had made major preparations to get it set up and configured. I think I recall we were in a time crunch. Again I don’t remember all of the details but I remember having to make a lot of arrangements that turned out to be unnecessary because the new machine had not yet been ordered.

When I confronted him about it, he argued over the sentence, “It has been ordered.” He argued over the meaning of the word “has” which reminded me of Bill Clinton. Clinton had made a statement under oath during a deposition in the sexual harassment civil trial which came out in public after the Lewinsky scandal. Clinton famously said, “It depends on what your definition of the word ‘is’ is.” Clinton was so duplicitous and chose his words so carefully that he could argue over the meaning of the word “is”.

The idea that my pastor, a man of the cloth, and an ordained priest of God in the Holy Roman Catholic Church could be a deceptive, manipulative, bender of words similar to William Jefferson Clinton completely destroyed any hope that I could work with the man in the future.

I tried repeatedly to get an appointment with him to discuss some church business and he kept blowing me off. When I finally did get to sit down with him, he admitted he was avoiding me because he knew how disgruntled I had become. I told him he was making value judgments. I did have important things to discuss with him. After discussing them, I gave him an earful. I told him that I was done working in any administrative capacity.

I told him I couldn’t keep up with his lies and cover for him when he got caught. The only way to avoid that was to avoid having to deal with him at all. Then I wouldn’t have to worry about whether or not something he told me was going to burst someone’s bubble and drive them away from the church when they discovered they couldn’t trust the priest.

I did spend some time crunching budget numbers for the school because the principal there, a wonderful woman named Barbara Shuey, knew my skills as a number cruncher and respected me.

I would keep teaching RCIA because it meant I didn’t have to deal with Father Bill directly. By the way, Father Paul used to teach all but about 8 weeks of the classes throughout the year. RCIA was a high priority for him. I would teach 4 or 5 lessons. A retired history professor from our parish would do two weeks on church history and Sister Timothy would do a lesson on prayer. Father Paul would do nearly 20 lessons to fill out the course. In contrast, we were lucky to get Father Bill to teach 4 or 5 lessons all year. It just wasn’t his priority. So I could continue to do nothing for the church but teach and avoid having to deal directly with him.

I would go to Mass on Sunday and sit through his lies from the pulpit and hate every minute of it. I seriously considered moving to a different parish. St. Christopher in Speedway and St. Michael’s on 30th St. are almost the same distance from my house in St. Gabriel. The problem was, that I attended Mass with my mother, and although she was aware of everything that was going on and disturbed by it, I don’t believe she would change parishes. As upset as she was about the situation, she was in the mode where I had been in that he hadn’t done anything to her personally.

Both my mother and I were devoted to the church and our parish. It wasn’t like we had to be good friends with the pastor as we had been with Father Paul. But there are limits to what we can tolerate.

I also had to consider what kind of message it would send to my students if I wasn’t attending Mass at Saint Gabriel. Here I am saying, “Come join this Church but I can’t stand being here so I’m going elsewhere.” I didn’t know was there would be a teaching opportunity for me at St. Christopher or St. Michael.

As I was dealing with all of this, we had an outside guest speaker come to RCIA. It was a nun from the Sisters of Providence St. Mary of the Woods. They are an order of religious sisters based out of Terre Haute Indiana about 70 miles west of Indianapolis. Their special ministry was as teachers. They had been providing teachers to Catholic schools around central Indiana for over a century. They founded and ran St. Mary of the Woods College. It was an all-girls institution again focused on training educators whether they were vowed religious sisters or not. I had attended a couple of weekend seminars there and it was a very nice facility.

This sister, I’m sorry I forgot her name, was giving a talk about the founder of their order Mother Théodore Guérin who had recently been beatified by Pope John Paul II. This is the final step before becoming canonized as an official Saint of the Catholic Church. The speaker was the nun who was in charge of the program to try to get their matriarch declared a saint.

Mother Guérin was born Anne-Thérèse Guérin in France in 1798. She entered the convent in 1823 and took the name Sister Saint Theodore. In 1840, at the request of the Bishop of Vincennes Indiana, a group of sisters from France led by Sister Theodore came to Vincennes to found a school and convent and to assist with the influx of Catholic immigrants to the area. In those days, Vincennes was the capital of Indiana. This was before the founding of Indianapolis and its establishment as the state capital.

They arrived in the small village known as St. Mary of the Woods and in a small log cabin founded a convent and school that later grew into the institution it is today. Sister Theodore was their Mother Superior.

Apparently, Mother Guérin was quite a character. She was known to hang out in town and engage in intellectual debates with the movers and shakers of the community discussing religion, politics, philosophy, or whatever topic and she could hold her own with the best of them.

Although she was there at the invitation of the Bishop, he tried to micromanage her and interfere in the way that she ran the convent and the school. When she returned to France briefly on a fundraising mission, he tried to hold an election in her absence to have her replaced as Mother Superior. She was unanimously elected to retain the post by her community.

At one point, she was so upset with the interference from the Bishop that she wrote a letter to the Bishop of Detroit and asked if he would sponsor their move to his area. He wrote back rejecting the request and told her to stay faithful and that God would provide. After that, the Bishop of Vincennes never interfered with her again. Probably the Detroit Bishop wrote him a nasty letter telling him to stay the hell out of her way and let her run her convent or he would end up losing them altogether.

Mother Théodore Guérin died in 1856 at age 57.

Under the rules of the Church, one cannot be considered for sainthood until 50 years after their death although there have been exceptions made. In 1907, a process was begun to have her considered for canonization as a saint. To be declared a saint, one has to have two miracles attributed to them. The first was in 1908. One of the sisters in her community had breast cancer and other medical issues including an abdominal tumor and a neurological problem that affected the use of her arms. One evening she prayed at the crypt of Mother Théodore Guérin not for herself but for another sister who was ill. The next day, she regained the use of her arms, her abdominal pain disappeared, the cancer never spread and she lived into her 80s. They never said what happened to the woman she was actually praying for. Let’s hope she recovered as well.

Once you have one miracle attributed to you, can be “beatified” which is a step along the way to becoming a saint. The sister who visited us talked about going to Rome for the beatification ceremony and how beautiful it was. After beatification, you earned the title “Blessed”.

I was greatly inspired by the story of this amazing woman who dedicated her life to God and to education. She also had clashes with clergy that nearly drove her away from her ministry as a teacher. I could identify with that situation. My primary ministry for the church was as a teacher and I was worried that my troublesome clergy was going to make it impossible for me to continue that ministry just as it had happened with Mother Guérin.

That night I went home and prayed to Blessed Mother Théodore Guérin. I told her, “You know what it’s like to try to teach the Word of God under the authority of a troublesome member of the clergy. Yet you persisted and succeeded. Mother Théodore… give me the strength to endure this challenge the way that you endured your challenges.”

The following week it was my turn to teach. Throughout the lesson, I kept thinking that this might be the last time I would teach for Saint Gabriel and perhaps the last time I would teach forever if I could not find a position in another parish.

When I returned home from class that night, my mom had a huge smile on her face. “I’ve got some juicy gossip for you.”

“What is it?”

“Father Paul heard that they are moving Father Bill to a new parish. He will be leaving in just a few months.”

Thank you Blessed Mother Théodore Guérin. All I asked for was the strength to endure. I would never have had the gall to pray that the man goes away. But that prayer was answered. He was leaving my life for good. I could continue to serve my parish as I had been doing for many years.

I don’t recall exactly how long Father Bill was assigned to our parish but I think it was under two years.

We would be getting a new pastor. With new challenges. Like all priests in my life, I had some serious disagreements. But things were much much better after that.

Overall, I taught RCIA classes for 31 straight years.

I wrote a letter to the sister from St. Mary of the Woods who had come to our parish to tell us about Blessed Mother Théodore Guérin. I told her how untenable things had become under my pastor. And how I had prayed to Mother Guérin not for a solution to my problem but for the strength to endure it. And I told her that my troublesome pastor was leaving. I said I didn’t know if it was the kind of thing that would count as the second miracle to get her matriarch canonized but I had no doubts whatsoever that I had my own personal miracle through the intercession of Blessed Mother Théodore Guérin.

The cause for canonization finally succeeded.

The second miracle occurred in January 2001 when a maintenance man who worked at the college wandered into the chapel attracted by sacred music. He was suffering from an eye condition that was going to require surgery. He prayed that the crypt of Mother Guérin and awoke the next day to find that his vision was much clearer. He no longer needed complicated eye surgery and doctors were at a loss to explain how his condition resolved itself.

She was canonized as Saint Theodora Guérin in 2006 and at the time was only the third American Saint.

Father Bill was assigned a new parish in southeastern Indiana just across the border from Cincinnati. I pray from time to time that he is doing well and is growing in experience as a priest and a pastor.

I could continue to talk about my work under our next pastor but I think it’s time to take a break from the religious topics. I know not all of my audience is that interested in this area of my stories. Next week, we go to college. I will talk about my nine semesters at IUPUI earning a BS degree in computer science and I will probably follow up with the two years I was employed as a computer programmer starting with my eighth semester in college.

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