Glenmary
Home Missioners
P.O. Box 465618
Cincinnati, OH 45246
513-874-8900
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Glenmary Challenge
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This article originally appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of Glenmary Challenge
Living Out the Lord's Passion
His prayer list was clear evidence of the faithfulness that characterized his life.
By Father Bob Poandl
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| Father Joe Gartner: The Eucharist was the center of his life. |
Tell your sister I am praying for her.” Those were Father Joseph Gartner’s last words to me. Two days before his death, knowing that our 91-year-old Glenmarian would not live long, I visited him at Mercy Franciscan Terrace, the assisted care facility where he had spent the last six years.
Father Joe had his eyes closed, apparently sleeping. Brother Dennis Craig, one of Glenmary’s ministers to our senior members, joined me in the prayers for the dying. As I prepared to leave, I spoke a bit more forcefully to overcome Father Joe’s deafness. He opened his eyes as I said goodbye, and that is when he promised the prayers for my sister Carol. Knowing she has been battling cancer for several years, Father Joe regularly kept her on his prayer list, always asking about her. It was clear evidence of the faithfulness that characterized his life.
Father Joe’s first 10 years as a priest were spent working in his home diocese of Brooklyn. Realizing there were many priests serving the Church in New York, he had a desire to go to a more missionary area. In 1950, with his bishop’s permission, he entered Glenmary. He later described that as the best decision he ever made.
Glenmary’s founder, Father William Howard Bishop, recognizing Father Joe’s keen intellect and outstanding memory, made the young priest Glenmary’s assistant novice master the very next year. From there he sent Father Joe for two years of study at The Catholic University of America to become a canon lawyer for Glenmary.
After such a meteoric beginning, one could expect Father Joe’s Glenmary years to be filled with positions of leadership and great responsibility. He did use his new degree to teach moral theology and canon law at Glenmary’s fledgling Our Lady of the Fields Seminary—but only for one year.
His list of assignments over the next 30 years, until senior membership, shows 50 different assignments. Behind those many very brief stays was the struggle with mental illness, not diagnosed until much later. That struggle made so much of his life the living out of the passion of the Lord both for himself and for those around him.
How well I remember one 2 a.m. visit in the early 1990s to a local hospital emergency room. Brother Dennis, the same man who would accompany Father Joe through his days of dying, was with us. The rage and the pain within Father Joe made him ban us from being within his eyesight. Praying quietly, we watched from our out-of-view spot until he could be admitted for the treatment he needed.
Fidelity through that loneliness was the hallmark of all those years. Even after reaching senior membership, Father Joe spent 11 years using his canon law training to help in the tribunal of the Diocese of Covington (Ky.).
Only in his last six years at Mercy Franciscan Terrace, where the routine allowed for very careful monitoring of medications, did Father Joe finally bloom, spending some of the happiest days of his life.
During these final years, he daily concelebrated the Eucharist, the center of his whole life. His death on Nov. 5 followed by just a few days the conclusion of the Synod of Bishops in Rome, the official close of the Year of the Eucharist. It is as if we could hear from the eternal liturgy of heaven Father Joe’s words, not only to Glenmary but to all those who shared his passion for the home missions: “Tell them I’ll be praying for them.” |
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