Lent 2013, Day 33: Culturally Catholic

That my great-grandfather Patrick Rigney died on November 18, 1914, in the Missouri River village of Oacoma, South Dakota, and was Catholic, we can be sure. As for the rest, well…

• The date he gave for his birth back in Ireland, ahem, varied. Early sources show it as March 8, 1838. In the 1900 census, it was 1839. His fanciful obituary in the

  

  county newspaper put the year at 1835. He adopted St. Patrick’s Day as his birthday somewhere along the line; his tombstone shows March 17, 1838.

• His wife, Abigail Leane, thought they married on July 28, 1868, in Worcester, Mass. But twelve years and eight children later, they “remarried” in Dakota City, Nebraska. When questions arose about a widow’s pension for Abbie after Patrick died, she said she burned the original marriage certificate because she was so ashamed of having had a civil rather than a church wedding. (There’s no certificate of a civil marriage on file in Worcester; I’ve checked.) One family legend is that Patrick had convinced a friend to pretend he was a priest to “marry” them in Worcester.
• In a letter back to the family, he bragged about his involvement in the Utah War and wrote, “Say what you want about those Mormons but they are good fighters,” even though records indicate any violence was over before he could have reached the scene. We have no letters explaining why he went AWOL for more than two years during the Civil War.
• His obituary describes him as being a “sincere and devout member” of the Catholic Church. But beyond the wedding stories, we have none related to any evidence of a faith life.

Yet I’m grateful that despite all this humanness, he and my great-grandmother passed on enough of a sense of obligation or fear of hell or perhaps even actual faith to have their ten children, including my grandfather, baptized, who in turn had his five children, including my father, baptized. And I’m grateful that he and my mother, who came from a similar Polish background on her mother’s side, had me baptized. For while it’s tempting to be dismissive of ancestors who appear to have been Catholic in name only, they lit the spark of Christ’s presence in me. And so, on his adopted birthday today, I’ll pray the prayer of his Mass card.