SEPTEMBER 2020 “


Kind, gentle and self-effacing” are the ways most of my friends remember my late mother. But as I reflect on what have been the


greatest influences on my life as a Catholic pastoral musician, I am struck by how much her other attributes, passions and strength of will shaped my professional and personal life and convictions.


I grew up in the 1960’s in an observant German- Irish Catholic family in a small steel town in Western Pennsylvania. Our family belonged to the largest, predominantly Irish parish in the city whose prominence on the skyline matched its pride as the first among equals. Te German, Italian and Eastern European parishes had maintained some of their original culture and languages and therefore were considered to be “ethnic” parishes. I was born at the end of 1956, in the middle of the cold war, at a time when Sen. Joseph McCarthy had only recently been censured for his tendentious senate hearings in which he sought to root out suspected “communists” and to intimidate and ruin reputed homosexuals in government by any means necessary, in an eerily prescient precursor to the current ‘deep state’ conspiracies.


Formed by family


My parents were pious, practical Catholics. Mom’s diary is full of references to daily Mass attendance, often with a few kids in tow. I believe more than a few of us were born within hours of her most recent daily Mass. All five boys were altar servers who even took their turns serving the occasional 5:30am printer’s Mass. Two of the boys spent a total of 12 years in the seminary.


Nearly all of the children were also strongly encouraged to acquire a musical skill as my mother had done on the piano. My piano lessons began as a First Communion gift; by the time I was in sixth grade I had the confidence to accompany full school Masses in a packed gymnasium with a 2 ½ octave reed organ pumped by my own two feet. In the early 1970’s my parents successfully convinced our pastor to hire a recent music school graduate to become the parish’s first full-time director of music.


Just as memorable as my mother’s genuine piety in those early years was her inexhaustible empathy


for anyone she encountered in need. Often to the embarrassment of her children, she would without apparent hesitation approach a distressed or anxious family and offer assistance. Sometimes our embarrassment would border on frustration—it was not unusual to wake to the aroma of baked goods filling the house in the early morning, only to find that the sweet rolls had already left the house, sent to a family who just lost a grandmother or a child. Another hallmark of her hands-on faith was her watching out for the strangers in our midst. She was keenly aware of someone feeling isolated or abandoned. For Sundays and special occasions, our dining table of 8 regularly expanded to include an elderly, blind unmarried uncle, or a socially-awkward autistic-savant man from our parish, or even a visiting foreign missionary who came to preach at the parish.


My parents’ concern for the fate of others was not confined to people they knew personally. Having served as officers in World War II, they both knew well the horror of war and grew to oppose our efforts in Vietnam. During the height of the war, the family dinner table would often expand to include young friars from the local Capuchin seminary. Tese young men were protesting the war at the county courthouse by reading aloud the names of dead soldiers from a seemingly endless list, as a reminder of the tragedy and futility of the war.


My father had an equally muscular and incarnational expression of his faith. He and my mother were active in the local human relations commission which promoted racial harmony and fair housing. Probably at some financial risk to his own small life insurance business, Dad devoted countless hours to establishing transitional living homes for people released from state mental institutions, as well as a drop-in center for disaffected youth. Both of my parents were very active in the resettlement of Vietnamese war refugees and in fundraising efforts to support indigenous people of Chimbote, Peru.


I met a family with young children recently, in front of the White House during the Black Lives Matter protests. I recalled to them how my mother introduced me to the value of public demonstration during the boycotts of lettuce and grapes in support of the migrant farmworkers strikes in the late 1960’s. And for my parents, the


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