A few weeks ago I wrote about the death of my brother Ray and how the first death among seven brothers and three sisters impacted all of us. Since my brother’s death I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my family and the faith we all share.
How did we get this far in our journey within the Church? The prime mover for my family and the most important factor in our faith and in our lives was our dad. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “Through the grace of the sacrament of marriage, parents receive the responsibility and privilege of evangelizing their children” (Catechism 2225 ). Now my father never read the Summa Theologica and he wouldn’t know Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine if it snuck up and bit him in a hard to reach place. My father was a working stiff from an era where being a grocer was a career for a lot of hard working stiffs. Our family, with our dad as securely placed at the head of it as any silver back gorilla could ever hope to be, lived in an economic climate that allowed a grocer to support his wife and send all ten of his children through 12 years of Catholic schooling.
My father’s picture and bio may never be found in a lexicon of great Catholic thinkers but he was the closest thing to the evangelizer to his own children that one is likely to meet. He did not accomplish all of this “God Work” through the vehicle of a life free from care, and void of worry. Quite the contrary. In some respects, our dad’s life was a lot like the Jimmy Stewart classic movie It’s A Wonderful Life, only without the guardian angel and the happy ending.
Life was hard and filled to the brim with its quota of bitter disappointment and personal failure for my father. He started a business and went broke. He battled the bottle and eventually beat it. His three pack a day cigarette habit finally ran him to ground and took him away. In short, he had that wonderful Irish gift for disaster. Still our dad had another side to him that made up for any and all defects — His faith. In an age where politicians proudly declare how their “personal” Catholic beliefs will not interfere with their public policy making, our dad showed us that private practice and public action went hand in glove. And he showed us the power of perseverance that can be obtained as long as one was anchored on the pillars of the Church.
I have now lived my life longer without my father than with him and time has a remarkable ability to help one focus on the important things. To an outsider, watching this chaotic mess we called our family, one might walk (or even run!) away with a sense of complete despair. To us, all the confusion and trouble were the ordinary flotsam and jetsam of daily life. What made it all easier to bear was the one tremendous constant in our existence. The Church.
Our mother was a convert because of our father. My brother is a priest because of our father. And the rest of us all reside joyfully — if imperfectly — in communion with the Church because of our father. How did he pull off this religious grand slam? What incredible Thomastic rationale was employed to convince us that God was one in three and that He incarnated Himself in order to make possible our salvation from original sin. What did our father do? Very little — except to show, by his example, an absolutely unwavering faith in the tenets of the Church.
My father never understood Vatican II. He didn’t like change and the mere mention of a “folk mass” was enough to send him into an apoplectic fit. Where our grand old rickety house once stood there should be a brass plate to commemorate the oratory concerning the pluses and minuses, mostly minuses, of the post councilor Church that was exercised across our old oak dining room table on any given Sunday. But in the end it really didn’t matter where one came down on Kumbaya or the sign of peace.
What my father understood and conveyed unerringly to the rest of us was that God existed; He loved His creation so much that He sent His only son to die for our sins and that before Jesus found His way to the Cross, He took the time to establish a Church here on Earth to represent Him until His return. There. My father did not learn that from twenty years of Jesuit education. He learned it by absorbing and believing and living a few simple and universal tenets.
Our dad was downright biblical in his contradictions. To the world that worships power and money he was an abject failure, yet he was the master of our house in the very best sense of the word. His authority came from a power none of his ten children were willing to contradict even if at times we thought we could get away with a challenge to that authority. But if we really stepped out of line, if one of us ten really got into a fix, our dad, the stern disciplinarian was always there — calm, compassionate, and totally selfless.
His faith was not worn as an outer garment for all the world to see and marvel at. He wore a medal under his work shirt and ashes on one Wednesday out of the year. His fidelity was unwavering, his devotion to the Blessed Mary equally strong. We ten, his children, knew this not because he told us but because he showed us. Our dad was a theologian and didn’t even know it. He understood you never missed Mass. We might miss Mass sometimes when one of us was too sick to attend, but somehow our father was never sick enough not to get up and get himself to church. Our dad also knew you needed to go to confession, give up something important to you for Lent, and celebrate the true meaning of Christmas and Easter.
And just like all of the gospel reversals from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John that have told us those who are first will be last and those who are last will be first, our father left us all those many years ago empty by the measure of the materialistic world but full with the deposit of faith he had accumulated in his wife and the ten children he so powerfully and profoundly influenced. All of my father’s children love their faith and to a man and woman, have tried to live conscientiously within the Church. That makes him 10 for 10 for Christ. Not bad for a theologian. But this theologian was a grocer.
Robert Brennan is a professional television writer based in Los Angeles. He and his wife, Melissa, are members of St. Cyril of Jerusalem parish in Encino, CA.
This article originally appeared in the National Catholic Register and is used by permission.
