By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
My mother often told us about her childhood visits in the early 1940s with her favorite uncle, a gregarious New England Catholic priest born in Limerick, Ireland. Mom adored him, but her stories also always fondly recalled his young assistant, a quiet Vermont Yankee priest who liked cowboy movies.
Thomas J. Leonard was my mother’s great uncle, born in Ireland in 1871. He and his parents immigrated to America from Limerick when he was a young boy. Thomas studied in Vermont and in Canada, where he was ordained a priest in 1902. He ministered to the flock for the next half century, including thirty-four years as pastor at the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary parish in Middlebury, a small Vermont town about thirty miles south of my mother’s hometown of Burlington.
Father Leonard performed my grandparents’ wedding ceremony and many other extended family religious rites, ranging from baptisms to burials. Perhaps as a result, he got to pick my mother’s middle name. He chose the very Irish “Mavourneen,” which translated from Gaelic means “My Darling.” He honored his beloved Irish roots in many other ways too.
He lectured about “Ireland—The Land of Scholars.” He went back to Limerick several times via steam ships. After one trip, he even brought home three paintings for the local Knights of Columbus headquarters. One showed a 1798 meeting of the Irish Parliament and another of an assembly of the Irish Volunteers in Dublin in 1799. The third painting was a portrait of the great Irish patriot Daniel O’Connell.
Father Leonard also solicited donations for the victims of the Irish War of Independence against Great Britain and of the Irish Civil War. In 1921, he placed newspaper advertisements in The Middlebury Register appealing for funds to aid the “Suffering Children and Women of Ireland.” The ads explained, “The women and children of Ireland are in dire distress. They are without clothing, without food—close, very close to the brink of starvation.” He raised almost $25,000 in today’s dollars, no small feat for a country priest in a rural county of a sparsely populated state.
Mom’s “Uncle Father Leonard” had a special affinity for her family. His sister (and my great grandmother) Kate Leonard Sullivan died in 1892 at age 25, right after giving birth to my grandmother Catherine Sullivan Gleason. In a sad example of history repeating itself, Catherine died young too in 1939, leaving behind six children including my then 8-year-old mother.
Afterwards, Mom would visit Uncle Father Leonard and his sister Mary Leonard in Middlebury in the 1940s. (You can read Mary Leonard’s fascinating story here: A 150-year-old Irish woman’s voice.) The Leonards loved her visits, but sometimes got busy and delegated the task of entertaining their preteen niece to one of the more-junior priests also at the parish. His name was Father Frederick R. Wilson.
Father Wilson was ordained in 1942 and assigned immediately to work as Father Leonard’s assistant in Middlebury. Father Wilson was born in Massachusetts in 1916. Both his parents, however, were Vermont natives with Green Mountain ancestry extending back before the days of the American Revolution. He grew up in Rutland, Vermont.
In addition to his studies in theology and philosophy, the bespectacled Father Wilson also was known as an expert on Vermont history. None of those topics held my mother’s attention for very long. Instead, entertaining Mom typically meant taking her to the Middlebury theatre to watch the Saturday afternoon cowboy movie matinees, with popcorn included.
Mom said that Father Wilson was a good sport about it, even though he probably had more pressing parish business to which he should have been attending. She said that he even seemed to enjoy the cowboy movies as much as her.
I have this mental image of Father Wilson, dressed in his black suit with his roman collar, patiently sitting there watching the likes of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans with my young mother. Or perhaps they bonded over a John Wayne picture or some other mid-twentieth century Western cinematic masterpiece.
Mom grew up, of course, fell in love, and prepared to get married. By the Fall of 1951 Father Leonard was too sick and too old to perform my mother’s wedding ceremony. Mom asked her old cinema buddy Father Wilson to preside instead. He readily agreed.
They enjoyed a lovely early autumn morning service in St. Patrick’s Chapel at Burlington’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. When the priest and wedding party stepped outside afterwards, they gazed across a deep blue Lake Champlain and saw fall colors starting to paint the slopes of the Adirondack Mountains. It could have been a scene from a good movie.
Unlike the Western flicks he watched with Mom, Father Wilson’s life did not have a classic happy ending. He did not get to take my mother’s children to any cowboy matinees. Instead of riding off into the warm glow of a sunset, Father Wilson was killed instantly in a horrific car accident on a snowy New England day in February 1953. He was only 36-years-old.
Mom missed her friend, which is why she told us about their cinematic adventures so often. Remembering and talking about people we have lost is a form of resurrection, perhaps the only form of life after death most of us will experience while we are alive.
I never met Father Wilson, but I think I miss him too. I would have enjoyed taking him out for popcorn and a movie.
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, will be published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.
