By 2000, our young family was growing again. Our son Ben had arrived at the end of 1995 and our daughter Maria arrived 15 days into 2000. We hardly imagined that, following that joyous event, we would lose both my mother and Fr. Tim Kernan within a year's time. By the time we brought Maria to St. Adalbert for baptism on April 29, she had already been through a lot. Maria was born with a cleft lip and palate, a fairly common and easily treatable abnormality, and by the time of her baptism she'd already undergone the first of several surgeries to repair her lip. She'd been the beneficiary of a lot of prayers in her young life and outside of Maria's immediate family, I have no doubt that Fr. Tim was the clubhouse leader.
Things were getting better at St. Adalbert by then. The school building had been sold and the new charter school would begin operation the next year. The church had recently completed work on a new parking lot. The previous year, for the first time in over a decade, the parish had not run a five-digit deficit. The Vietnamese parishioners were now well-established and several of the community elders were now on the parish council. The future looked brighter than it had been at any time in the previous decade. At this moment, Fr. Tim's health was beginning to fail. He had suffered a heart attack several years before and had a defibrillator implanted. That had helped for a time, but now he was ill more often than not. He would end up spending significant time in 2000 in the hospital, as his huge, fragile heart began to give way.
On Maria's baptism day, Fr. Tim was strong. It was a beautiful spring afternoon and he was in high spirits. Helping another child join the fold always brought Fr. Tim great joy, probably more than anything else. He gave me the needle that afternoon about making sure to keep enough money in the parish budget to pay for holy water; he knew that I would be back at the parish house two weeks later with my green eyeshade for the annual parish budget meeting.
Those budget meetings were often pretty contentious. Not once did we have an operating budget that was over $100,000. While you can run a household for less than $100,000, running a Catholic parish with an aging physical plant for that kind of money is not an easy proposition, even when the pastor has taken a vow of poverty. The key was to ensure that St. Adalbert did not retreat inward. St. Adalbert needed to be a place of hope in a tough neighborhood. That simply wasn't negotiable. And to the end, Fr. Tim insisted that the church budget included whatever was possible to ameliorate conditions in Frogtown. If repairing the boiler had to wait a year, or if the leaking roof was a problem on the east side of the church, we'd simply have to defer the maintenance. Taking care of the parishioners and the larger community could not wait.
As Fr. Tim's health continued to fade, the monthly finance meetings became sporadic. While the rest of the world was paying attention to hanging chads, we met again in the dining room of the rectory. It would be the last time. Fr. Tim had recently returned from a two month stint away from the parish, mostly spent in the hospital. My mother had died during the summer and I had the sense that I'd be attending another premature funeral all too soon. We took care of business pretty quickly that evening and then he began to talk to us about some of the things he'd learned from his time at St. Adalbert. I wish I'd taken notes, but I do remember much of what he told me that evening, as images of political operatives running around Florida flickered in the background on the muted television. I necessarily have to paraphrase a bit, but here are a few of the things he said:
- While people sometimes need sympathy, what they really need is dignity. Even if someone has been victimized, few people really enjoy the role of victim. People need something to believe in that is greater than themselves and if a priest forgets that, he cannot be effective.
- Social justice is paramount, but it is not possible without social cohesion. Frogtown had shown the ability to pull together in tough times and those were the times that things got better. He was concerned that it was getting tougher with each year. He had tried to do outreach with other parishes and churches in the neighborhood and had been successful to an extent. He hoped that it would continue, but he wasn't sure if it would.
- People can change reality; their own, at least. He had seen it in his own life; kids who were running the streets, people mired in drug abuse and despair, had turned it around. It's difficult but it can be done.
- You don't have time to wait. Tim Kernan was praying hard to get better, but I think he knew the curtain was coming down. He had more that he wanted to do. He would have to find another way to make an impact in Frogtown.
In January of 2001, Fr. Tim Kernan passed away, at the age of 60. He left the entirety of his modest estate to St. Adalbert. Others would have to carry on his work.
Next: what could Fr. Tim Kernan teach to Fr. Michael Pfleger?
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