Our Joe

I have always been a low-key person in almost every respect. Friends are greeted with a nickname, and are welcomed with a minimum of fuss in the sartorial department. And quite honestly, our best friends are the ones who make almost nothing of their accomplishments.

Years ago, a brilliant, youngish Dominican friar taught my husband how to use the breviary. We were Protestant at the time, but the prayers of the Catholic Church were very appealing.



We visited Joe from time to time in Washington D.C.. One year he welcomed us into his home, the House of Studies, for a few days just prior to Christmas. The three of us went out to see a Muppet movie, eat some afgan. food and enjoy the snowflakes that were falling in Northwest D.C.

A few years later, we went back again, this time with our newly adopted daughter and Joe took us to the zoo.



On each visit, our familiarity with the Catholic Church increased, and so too our comfort level with what seemed at the time to be strange practices... praying the rosary, kneeling during worship...things that no good protestant from my background had ever encountered.

When we made the decision to come into the Catholic Curch, it was Joe I contacted.

It did cross my mind that I might have to start calling him Father Joe, but no, he was still Joe as he gently and joyfully told us how to proceed.

The fact that he was calling from Rome did not seem overly important to me at the time. I was, after all, used to international calls.

After we entered the church and began to learn some nuts and bolts of how things are done, I realized that Joe had a religious name, Augustine. Some of his protestant friends called him Joe Gus, in deference to his "other" name.

I still called him Joe.

At some point I learned about the dicasteries in Rome, among them the Congregation for the Doctrine for the Faith, and realized that Joe worked there as a, what was it, an undersecretary? Someone named Ratzinger had been his boss before he became Pope.





Joe? Our Joe? This was the guy whom I had called in Rome and he had returned my call? Joe Gus?

You just never know. Humility hides greatness, if you are looking for certain kinds of greatness...position, fame, stature. But humility reveals another kind of greatness if you have the eyes to see. Patience, kindness, good humor, a love for the Muppets.

Our Joe has taught me a lot about the church.

Here he is in his latest role.

Oh, and now my daughter calls him "Archbishop Joe."



Dominican Province of St. Joseph Easter in Rome Blog op-stjoseph.org