Day: August 15, 2010

Digging deep for a friend

Don Heyrman is obituaried in S-T today. He died a week ago today, a month short of his 91st birthday, having lived 50 years in Evanston. He plugged away all his life at civic and social concerns and what was known as “Catholic Action” in a bevy of organizations — National Association of Laymen, Chicago Conference of Laymen, Conference of the Laity, Christian Family Movement, Catholic Interracial Council, World Congress of the Lay Apostolate in Rome. A man generous with his time, while raising a family and working as a marketing manager for a major corporation.

Generous too with his cash, on a moment’s notice, as I discovered, calling him up one day long ago from the news room to tell him that Msgr. Jack Egan, then a Lawndale pastor, had worn out his credit with a card company and needed bailing out. I’d had a call from a Jesuit who was living with Egan (and many other activists) in the Lawndale parish. I called Heyrman, a friend of Egan’s, to see what he could do. “Well,” he said, with barely a pause, “my wife and I didn’t need that vacation anyway,” and he said he’d cover it.

How’s that for a measure of character?

Complain if you must, about this old gray church . . .

You hear Catholics complaining about, even being disillusioned with, the church because of its priests. I did yesterday, from a cradle RC whose memory goes back a generation in a parish where “you had to be Irish or Italian” to get any notice (he being neither: my guess is the Italians said you had to be Irish).

He was leading up to recounting a recent incident which gratified him greatly. So to be fair, he softened his critique. However, reading in recent years of Vatican chicanery and hostility to republicanism (in the 19th-century European sense), he finds himself increasingly critical and, as I say, disillusioned.

Good. It means he is developing into a grown-up Catholic, forced to ask himself why he still embraces the faith of his fathers and mothers. The short answer is that it’s the one, true church.

“To whom shall we go?” the apostles asked Jesus when they had found his preliminary Eucharist announcement hard to swallow and he had asked if they were about to leave him. “You have the words of eternal life.”

In other words, you are in for a dime? You’re in for a dollar. And not to quibble. Too much is at stake.