By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Human mortality decrees that we never meet the majority of our relatives in real time, in the flesh and blood. We must find other ways to know our forebears. This is difficult, but especially when one of the most interesting characters in your family’s Irish-Catholic two-hundred-year-old American saga had towering stone walls and lovely stained glass windows instead of skin and bones.
My parents descended from a long line of Catholics who left Ireland in the 1800s and settled in various parts of New England. The family tree includes recognizably Gaelic surnames such as O’Brien, Gleason, Sullivan, Leonard, McCarthy, Duffy, Doyle, Flaherty, Fitzgerald, Kennedy, Hogan, Lynch, Murphy, Killary, Halvey, Carroll, Barrett, Barron, and Cahill. Most of them lived and died in Burlington, Vermont.
Living there included baptism, confession, communion, confirmation, marriage, social activities, and Sunday Mass in Burlington’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. Known also as St. Mary’s, the cathedral stood at the corner of St. Paul Street and Cherry Street in Vermont’s largest city. Workers—and during the American Civil War volunteers—built the cathedral using mostly locally quarried redstone. Opened in 1867, and omnipresent at our major family events for a century, the old cathedral is the only building I’ve loved without ever stepping foot inside.
Like living, dying in Catholic Burlington also included a trip to the cathedral, followed by a final stop at its nearby cemetery. Just a short drive away, St. Joseph’s cemetery sits on a hill overlooking the city and Lake Champlain to its west. It is the oldest local Catholic boneyard, with interments dating to before the Civil War. Quaintly spooky, the graveyard’s narrow dirt roads cut crooked paths among ghostly stone gates, mossy obelisks, decaying headstones, and decrepit markers of various shapes and sizes, many taller than me. During one visit, our young children were terrified at first, but soon wandered around happily looking for family names on the tombstones. We found both my name and my son’s name there.
In the years between the world wars, my mother’s family lived on Peru Street in Burlington’s Old North End just a few blocks from St. Mary’s Cathedral. Early on Sunday mornings, long before anyone needed to leave the house to get to Mass on time, my grandmother Catherine Sullivan Gleason was impeccably cleaned and dressed, sitting in the family car, waiting, and tapping her foot impatiently. At regular intervals, she would loudly call out, “Time!” as the rest of the Gleason clan scrambled to get ready and out the door. Catherine was devoted to the cathedral, although she had ample reason not to be.
Catherine’s parents—Kate Leonard and Michael Sullivan—were married there in May 1891, an event the local newspaper described as “an enjoyable affair.” Just eighteen months later, however, the family was back at the cathedral, but this time for young Kate’s funeral. She died in November 1892 at age 25 while giving birth to Catherine. Perhaps having heard family stories about her mother’s nuptials, Catherine excitedly planned her own cathedral wedding for May of 1914. The much-anticipated event was subdued instead. Catherine’s father Michael had died a few weeks earlier at age 46, and his funeral also was at the cathedral.
Catherine died young too—in 1939 at age of forty-six—from coronary thrombosis and congestive heart failure. Of course, she also had a cathedral funeral. Catherine’s uncle (her mother Kate’s brother) Father Thomas Leonard presided over the solemn ceremony. He had preached his first homily as a new priest at the cathedral on Christmas Day in 1902, and thereafter delivered to cathedral parishioners entertaining lectures with titles like “Ireland: the Isle of Scholars.” Finding the right words to eulogize his beloved sister Kate’s only daughter probably was a much more difficult task for the eloquent priest born across the Atlantic pond in County Limerick.
My mother Kathleen Gleason listened to that eulogy. Kathleen was Catherine’s youngest daughter, just eight years old at the time of the funeral. She attended the sad event holding the hand of her father Henry Gleason. Twelve years later, Kathleen had her own cathedral wedding when she married my father, Kevin Peter O’Brien, in the intimate setting of the adjacent St. Patrick’s Chapel. It was the perfect venue. Both my parents were recent graduates of Cathedral High School, and Kevin’s family had its own poignant history with St. Mary’s. Kevin’s father (and my grandfather) Donald O’Brien attended services there as a boy, the same church where his mother (Annie McCarthy) and father (Edward W. O’Brien) had wed in February 1890.
In the late 1880s, while still in his early twenties, Ed O’Brien—born in nearby Swanton just south of the Canadian border—got a job in the dress goods section of a store called Leo & McLaren. The downtown Burlington retailer, called the Boston Store, offered various clothing and household items. Ed sold fabrics. As a boy, he had helped his father in the family grocery and was a natural salesman. While working at Leo & McLaren, Ed met Annie McCarthy, the head of the notions department. Annie, whose younger sister Mary Elizabeth (“Mame”) was a tailor, was in charge of the store’s large stock of hairpins and sewing supplies, including buttons, pins, and hooks. Naturally, the fabrics salesman and notions clerk had to work together.
Soon, the tall and trim Ed and the diminutive Annie—short and just over 100 lbs.—were an item. Annie’s other younger sister Nellie McCarthy, close friends with Ed’s little sister Agnes O’Brien, tracked the budding relationship in her diary, first noting in August 1889 that: “Ed came home with Annie and me.” By February 1890, Ed and Annie were married at the cathedral. They had a fun reception with many friends, and Nellie’s diary indicated, “Presents kept coming all day.” The festivities continued after the couple’s wedding trip to New York City. Nellie noted: “Ed and Annie came home. We raised Cain in the evening.” Their fellow store clerks gave Ed and Annie a handsome French clock, perhaps hoping to give them the gift of time together.
It was not meant to be. The tone of Nellie’s diary turned dark just a few months after the wedding when she wrote, “Went after the doctor for Ed.” Ed had tuberculosis. Although Ed’s and Annie’s son Donald O’Brien was born in January 1891, the tuberculosis claimed Ed just eight months later. Annie never remarried, and raised Don with the help of her sister, Mame, and her parents, Jerry and Alice McCarthy—both Irish immigrants during the Potato Famine. Annie and Mame ran several local businesses, no easy task for single women in the early 1900s. They built a house together at 185 Maple Street, within walking distance of the cathedral they attended for the rest of their lives. Annie passed away at age 84 and was buried from the cathedral in January 1951, the same year my parents got married there.
There seemed to be a lot of love in my parents’ relationship when it started. My older cousin Michael Winslow was the ring bearer and recalls watching them engage in one of the most romantic kisses and passionate embraces he ever saw. Their early morning cathedral wedding, however, almost did not happen. The father of the groom—journalist Don O’Brien—always worked late nights to help get out the next day’s morning edition of the Burlington Free Press. My father and his family overslept on the big day and did not get to the church on time. My mother’s sister Mary Winslow urgently called the O’Brien home, woke them up, and asked if they were coming. Her phone call set off a firestorm of panic and activity as the groom’s family rushed around to get ready.
Luckily, the O’Briens lived on Maple Street, only a few blocks from the cathedral. Mom was red-faced and furious when they arrived, and almost called off the whole event. Eventually, she calmed down and went through with the service. By all accounts, the September 21, 1951 wedding was as lovely as the setting. Afterwards, the bridal party stepped out of the chapel, looked over the shores of Lake Champlain, and enjoyed the first signs of autumn colors emerging on the Adirondack Mountains across the water.
Two decades after my parents’ wedding, a few days before St. Patrick’s Day, and as early spring snow still lingered on the ground, a late-night fire broke out at the cathedral. Feeding ravenously on heavily varnished wooden pews, the March 13, 1972 inferno quickly engulfed both the lovely St. Patrick’s Chapel and the beautiful cathedral. It was a fiery and terribly destructive act of arson unleashed by a former altar boy. When morning arrived, the sacred place where my parents had exchanged their vows, and the site of numerous other family baptisms, First Communions, marriages, and funerals, was in irreparable ruins.
Ironically, at about the time fire destroyed that lovely old church, my parents’ marriage also erupted into flames. They divorced in the early 1970s. I often have wondered if this was mere coincidence or if the two terrible events shared some sort of cruel cosmic connection. At the time of the cathedral fire 50 years ago, I lived with my mother in Ogden, Utah. I never stepped foot into the grand old edifice, but I never will forget my mother’s sad reaction upon hearing news of the fire. Burlington Free Press newspaper clippings reporting details of the conflagration, mailed to us by Vermont relatives also distressed by the calamity, arrived a few days later. Mom pored over them as if a member of the family had died. I think that is exactly what happened.
How does an inanimate object like a building become a friend or family member? Although we inherit many of our friends and family members, they are with us during both significant and mundane moments. Friends and family members may sustain us, or we may support them financially. They can be comforting or inscrutable, welcoming or cold, life-giving or suffocating. Friends and family make us happy and sad. They provide us with a sense of stability and support, or trigger doubt and uncertainty in our lives. We seek out family and friends in times of need. Sometimes they help us but sometimes they do not. We take them for granted and yet, we miss them when they are gone. Instead of flesh and blood, Burlington’s old Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception had stone wall skin and stained glass bones, but nonetheless it checked many, if not all, of these friend-and-family boxes for my extended Irish-Catholic American clan.
After the turn of the millennium, I finally visited the Burlington cathedral site, but I only got there twice. The first time was in 2007, when we buried my mother Kathleen at St. Joseph’s cemetery. She had died while staying with my sister in Texas, and we wanted to bring her home afterwards. We attended Mass in the modern cathedral, consecrated in 1977 to replace the one my family knew so well. After Mass we laid Kathleen to rest in the Leonard family plot, where her brother said my grandmother Catherine also was buried. The beautiful site is just steps away from the final resting place of Catherine’s own mother Kate. We left mom with chocolate chip cookies and red roses, and in the care of her beloved family members. A priest from the cathedral presided at the graveside service.
Almost a decade later, I visited St. Mary’s once more. It would be the last time, because the replacement cathedral itself would be closed in December 2018. My wife and I walked over from our downtown Burlington hotel. For a few moments, I imagined that I lived in the neighborhood and was out for a stroll with the countless grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins whom I never met but who had walked along the same paths. Once at the cathedral, I retraced the first post-nuptial steps my parents took together, from the former site of the St. Patrick’s side chapel where they were married, and around the corner to Cherry Street, where the façade of the old cathedral had stood. As did my parents, I looked west, out over the lake, at yet another autumn quilt of leaves emerging on the distant mountainsides.
Suddenly, I heard the loud clanging of a bell. I was startled and charmed. Somehow, until that moment, I had forgotten a basic detail of my cathedral research—about how after the fire the huge hundred-year-old bell from the burnt-out church had been preserved and reinstalled in a new steel bell tower erected on the same corner where the old brick and stone belfry once had risen. When the bell rang, I was standing right under it.
The bell was mournful but uplifting, half chime half toll, at once both a requiem for and an ode to my ancestral spirits imprinted on those hallowed cathedral grounds. I sang along quietly with the bell, the only dialogue I ever had with my cathedral cousin. When the bell went silent, at first I wanted to grieve for the ephemeral and now extinct structure defined by stone walls and stained glass windows. Instead, I rejoiced for an invisible but everlasting edifice, built with love and memory, and anchored on the foundation of my heart.
The feeling lingers today. My family cathedral is gone. My family cathedral lives on.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) 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—and about his family’s roots in Burlington, Vermont—was published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021. He is working on a book about discovering his Irish heritage.
