In the inviting suburban kitchen, Gerald Meyer, former Des Plaines alderman and dentist, is pouring sodas. The microwave is humming. Ollie the dog is running around underfoot. Meyer’s son Tom, also a dentist, is home for lunch from the family practice Meyer founded 38 years ago.
As Tom plops his potato on a plate, dousing it with ketchup, the two engage in typical father-son patter. “What’s up for this afternoon?” Meyer asks. Tom describes briefly his afternoon schedule and then adds, “Mike won’t be home until late.”
It’s a typical domestic scene. Yet, scattered here and there in the Des Plaines family home are some unexpected religious icons. A well-thumbed prayer book and Bible lie on the enormously long family table, where Meyer’s 10 children once could all sit comfortably. Above the sink, where a jar of dried pasta might be found in another home, is a glass container of holy wafers.
These unlikely objects are talismans of Meyer’s new life. Two years after his much-beloved wife, Catherine Ann, died of a brain tumor, Meyer made the decision to give up his thriving dental practice, successful political career and the prospect of a relaxed retirement for a much more arduous path–studying for the Roman Catholic priesthood.
This May 25, he realized that dream. After studying four years at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary just outside of Philadelphia, Meyer was ordained, at age 63, by the diocese of Peoria, where he will now be the associate pastor at St. Columba Catholic Church in Ottawa.
The day after his ordination, he returned to St. Emily’s Catholic Church in Mt. Prospect to celebrate his first mass in his former parish. It was a joyous occasion, despite those who were missing: Meyer’s wife and four of their children who had died of cystic fibrosis, to whom the mass was dedicated.
However solemn the proceedings might have been, Meyer’s six remaining children still maintain a healthy mock-irreverence about their father’s new undertaking. “He was a little nervous, we could tell,” Tom says with a chuckle. “It was the first time he soloed.”
Nearly everyone who knows Jerry Meyer–fellow priests and seminarians, family members, neighbors and friends–remarks about his deep, unshakable faith in God and the Roman Catholic Church. It’s a faith that has served him well through the years. Asked if he was ever angry at God, Meyer simply can’t fathom the question, ” Never,” he responds adamantly.
Had he responded affirmatively, he would perhaps have had the right.
“My faith was never shaken,” he says. “My wife’s wasn’t either. We knew God gives you the help you need.”
A soft-spoken, unassuming man with salt-and-pepper hair, Meyer comes across as both devout and down-to-earth. He is a deeply conservative Catholic, vehemently anti-abortion and, despite his history, against a liberal Catholic push for the Vatican to change its status on a priest’s right to marry. Yet he manages to convey his deeply held beliefs without sounding pious, judgmental or holier-than-thou.
“His faith has always been strong,” says his youngest son, Michael, a recent graduate of the Chicago College of Osteopathic Medicine. “I can remember as a kid, during our conversations at dinner, he always managed to bring the conversation around to the Catholic Church. We tease him now, saying he’s been giving sermons his whole life.”
Cystic fibrosis was not a well-known disease when Meyer’s children were diagnosed at Children’s Memorial Hospital in 1973. In patients with cystic fibrosis, glands secrete an abnormally thick mucus that leads to the obstruction of the pancreas and some other organs and chronic infections of the lungs. It is often fatal.
If both parents carry the cystic fibrosis gene, they have a 1 in 4 chance of having an affected child, doctors now know. All 10 Meyer children were born before knowledge of the disease and its effects were widely known.
At first, the couple believed the four were suffering from allergies. By the time the children were diagnosed, however, Meyer and his wife, whom he had met in 1955 while he was in dental school at Loyola and she was studying to become a registered nurse, had done enough reading up on the disease that they were not surprised.
“We were saddened, but we didn’t cry about it,” he recalls. “We always tried to do our best to see that our children’s lives carried on as normally as possible.
“They absolutely never complained,” Meyer says of his four children who had the disease.
The family went on regular Sunday family outings and frequently vacationed by car, then, as the family grew, by van. With so many children, there was always a family party–what with all the First Communions, graduations and birthdays.
In 1972, Catherine Meyer’s parents moved in for a time as well; her mother suffered from multiple sclerosis, and her father from a diseased kidney. For a time, Catherine Meyer also treated her father-in-law with a dialysis machine in the basement.
“It was crazy,” remembers Liz Winkler, one of Meyer’s daughters, now an Atlanta homemaker. “We went through all our losses, which seemed to happen so often. It was constant change, waiting for the next thing to happen.” As a result, she says, she and her remaining four brothers and sister “have depended on each other. The losses we went through nobody else understood except (our) fellow siblings.”
Patty–the one who was “just a tiger, feisty,” as her father says–was the first to die, in 1975. She was 12. Then came Cindy in 1979; she was the generous one who as a little girl used her allowance to buy presents for everyone and later became a crafts woman who exhibited her ceramics at local craft shows. She was 21.
Then there was Marianne, tenacious Marianne, who worked hard to overcome a learning disability and worked as a clerk at a local Kmart. She died in 1984 at age 25.
Jerry Jr. was the last, at 29, in 1990. He had earned an MBA from DePaul University and a master’s degree in industrial engineering from the University of Michigan before finishing a doctorate in systems analysis from the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Catherine Meyer was stricken, quite suddenly, with cancer in 1988. By the time it was discovered, her brain tumor has spread, tendrillike, throughout her brain. She lived only seven months after her diagnosis. She died at home, surrounded by her family, on the day after Christmas in 1988. Tragically, her death came at a time when the couple, with most of the children raised, were rediscovering each other, taking private time to go out to dinner, renewing their marriage.
He still cannot speak of his wife without choking up with emotion. “Our life together was God’s precious gift to me,” Meyer says. In remarks after his first mass, he told the assembled worshipers that his ordination was “the most joyous day since June 23, 1956,” the day he married Catherine.
The death of Catherine, coupled with the death of Jerry Jr. two years later, shook the family to its roots, Tom Meyer says. After those two mainstays of the family were lost, the remaining brothers and sisters began working to strengthen the family bonds.
Eight months ago, they had a kids-only bull session where each talked about their reactions to their siblings’ deaths, losing their mother and their father’s decision to enter the priesthood.
This month, all six and their spouses and children vacationed together at a Georgia lake. (Besides Tom, 27; Liz, 30; and Michael, 26, the family also includes Arlington Heights resident Susan Nelson, 39, who works for the dental practice as office manager; Jim, 32, a dentist in the family practice and Oak Park resident, and Paul, 30, a doctor. Paul and his wife, Missy, and their two children, Abigail and Jack, live with Tom and Michael in the family home in Des Plaines.
After his wife’s death, Meyer did not want to remarry, but instead saw his interest in theology and spirituality grow. He and his wife had been loyal attendees at theology classes at the Dominican Priory in River Forest. Then, in 1991, he and his son Jim attended a retreat at the Bellarmine Retreat House in Barrington, run by the Jesuits. It was a spiritual weekend for silent reflection; none of the participants could talk. It was there, kneeling in a small chapel, when Meyer made the decision he would study for the priesthood.
“Prior to that, the thought (of entering the priesthood) was in my mind,” he says. “I wondered if I should continue working; I was only 58. But this thought kept occurring to me. I thought, `Should I really leave everything and go into uncharted waters?’ “
The answer, ultimately, was yes: “It was a slow, gradual `call, ‘ ” he says.
Soon he was traveling down to Peoria for meetings and interviews, and was eventually accepted there as a seminarian. He had chosen the Peoria diocese for sponsorship, he says, because he yearned for relative anonymity away from Chicago, where he was so well known and because he admired the writings of the bishop there, Bishop John J. Myers. He decided not to leave for a full year, however, to give time for his son Jim to take over his dental practice. Son Tom has since joined Jim there.
When he told his children, they were supportive, although not universally thrilled. Michael, who was then still in medical school, was the most reluctant.
“We’d been golfing, and we were coming home in the car when he sprung it on me,” Michael remembers. “I almost died.” After losing his mother, he was concerned he might lose his father too. In the years since, Michael has grown considerably more philosophical about his father’s decision: “He’s so great, why shouldn’t we share him with other people?” he says.
Meyer’s decision was also big news around Des Plaines, where he was an alderman for eight years and served on the zoning board, as well as at St. Emily’s, where he and his wife had been active. The couple had spearheaded the church’s pro-life committee, enlisted their children to stuff church bulletins with its newsletter, and volunteered to serve at fundraising pancake breakfasts.
“There was mixed reaction,” says Jim Sanford, a deacon at the church and a neighbor. “At first it was like, `Whoa! Wait a minute. This man was a successful dentist and had 10 children, and now he’s going to become a celibate priest?’ I, for one, was elated.”
Meyer left for Philadelphia in the fall of 1992, and he kept the congregation in touch with frequent letters about his studies, published in the church bulletin. Some of the letters revealed the human side of the seminary, detailing the struggles he had adjusting to the rigors of a student’s life, designed for the much younger.
“Living with younger people was a big challenge,” explains Father John D. Silcox Jr., a fellow seminarian. A former lawyer, he decided to enter the priesthood at age 54. At St. Charles Borromeo, he says, older seminarians were a rarity among the some 240 residents, most of whom were in their late 20s.
“When you live with younger people, you’re the oddball,” he says. “You really have to enter into that whole milieu of living as a younger person, keeping their late hours, hoping to enjoy their music.”
Meyer often sneaked off for a round of golf at a nearby public golf course, golf being his one and only “vice.” Along with his demanding academic studies, Meyer served in a variety of Pennsylvania churches and other ministries as an intern. It was in those assignments–at an inner city church and a children’s hospital–he said he began learning how to strike the delicate balance between his new role as a priest and his old role as father, dentist and caregiver to the sick.
He remembers once counseling a 21-year-old girl with cystic fibrosis who had been hospitalized and “hated God,” he explains. Her sister, to whom she was very close, had recently died of the disease, and she was mourning that loss and was fearful, too, about her own condition. He counseled her about keeping her faith without ever telling her about his own family’s struggles with the disease, because he said he didn’t want to tell her the children had all died.
Other times, in homilies, he does refer to his past. He spoke at a funeral in Earlville, Ill., while spending last summer at St. Theresa’s Catholic Church there, and priests in Earlville still remark over how poignant it was, the way he discussed his own losses so movingly.
“I know it sounds corny, but it seems like he’s got that holiness about him,” explains Sanford, the deacon at St. Emily’s. At that first mass in Mt. Prospect, seeing Meyer on the altar was a little awkward, he admits. “After having my dentist fill my teeth and then to be up on the altar with him, that was very strange to me,” he says. “But I looked at him and got the sense this was where he belonged. He’s got that radiant glow.”
His children agree. They were all there–along with their spouses and Meyer’s five grandchildren–to see him celebrate his first mass. It was a family affair: Jim, Tom, Paul and Michael were altar servers, and his three granddaughters accompanied Meyer to present flowers to a statue of the Virgin Mary. Most of his kids described feeling inordinately proud of their father during the ordination and the first mass.
“I’ve never seen my father so happy,” Tom Meyer says.
Meyer began his new assignment this month at St. Columba in Ottawa. The Peoria diocese is primarily rural, so it will be a slower pace from his former lifestyle in the busy northwest suburbs. But he’s looking forward to it.
“I think God has directed my life,” he says. “God has prepared me for this. I don’t know why he did it, but he just did. I only hope I can help bring the people (in the new parish) closer to him.”
