The Catholic Church has been taking a lot of lumps lately, a lot of them deserved. But it’d be a shame if the church’s troubles kept us from recognizing the work of the men and women who have dedicated their lives to the people. Today, one priest will get his due.
Down at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Le Center, Minn., with Mass at 10:30 this morning and a 1:30 p.m. reception, they will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the ordination of the best-known Lebanese guy in St. Paul, with the possible exception of former Mayor George Latimer.
I have known Father Ray Monsour for almost all of his 40 years in the priesthood. He buried my dad out of the Cathedral in 1981, but I was just a kid when I first met him. I was 13, an altar boy at St. James in St. Paul’s West End. Ray was a newly minted priest, 25 years old, and from a different world: from the West Side, across the river, probably two miles from my neighborhood, which practically made him an alien.
Plus, he was Lebanese. That made him a rarity on West Seventh in those days, and I would rather not tell you the private nickname we good Irish and German altar boys gave our new Lebanese priest. But we should have admitted it to him in the confession booth.
It was at St. James that Father Ray started to get an education about how the powerful can walk over the weak when hundreds of his parishioners and their homes were callously tossed aside to build Interstate 35E. After that, Ray went up on the hill, to St. Luke’s. And from there, in 1969, he was assigned to Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Mexican parish on the West Side, back in his old neighborhood.
“But I don’t speak Spanish,” he protested when he got the news. “You don’t need to,” he was told. “No, I need to know Spanish,” he repeated. “Nope,” they said.
So he went to Guadalupe. And got a nun to teach him Spanish. After a year, he went to South America, beginning a ministry of Minnesota priests who preach the good news to impoverished ironworkers in Venezuela. When he came back, five years later, he not only spoke fluent Spanish, he also was prepared to work among the poor of the Twin Cities.
The church sent him back to Our Lady of Guadalupe, for seven years this time. It was the 1970s, and it was a rough time on the West Side, where young Latino activists were chafing at the lack of jobs and opportunities and weren’t content to wait for change.
“Some of what they did in those days wasn’t right, and I think they’d admit that now,” he says. “It wasn’t unusual when I was there to get called at 2 or 3 in the morning because someone was shot. But what they were asking for back then is what everyone is supposed to get in this country — rights and respect. There was some trouble, but then things started to get better. Maybe they caused society to look at them a little more, huh?”
Father Ray still ends a lot of sentences in an Old World manner, with a “huh” and a question mark, a way of making sure the listener is following along. I remember it from when I was an altar boy and he would pop up out of nowhere on the playground, catching me in some heathenish act and asking if that’s the way I was supposed to be acting, huh?
No, Father. Sorry, Father.
He grew up in an Arabic-speaking home, the fourth of six children born to Joseph and Sadie Monsour, who came from Lebanon in 1927. He grew up in Holy Family, the Maronite Catholic Church on Robie Street. But when he told his parents he wanted to be a priest, they told him to switch to the Roman Catholic Church because the only Maronite seminary at that time was in Lebanon, and they were afraid if he left America they’d never see him again.
He switched and, after six years of studies at the St. Paul Seminary, was ordained on Feb. 2, 1963. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis didn’t know it but it had just obtained the services of a man who would become a leading advocate of outreach to the poor, the newcomer and the non-English speaker. St. Paul’s native-born, Lebanese-American, Spanish-speaking priest was on his way. Forty years later, at 65, he’s one of just seven men — out of an ordination class of 19 — still in the priesthood.
“Let’s put it this way,” he says. “We changed so much in my 40 years I never expected it, huh? We’ve got a few people who’ve got in trouble and it hurts. Let’s be honest, sometimes you’re almost afraid to let people know you’re a clergyman.”
If they were all like Father Ray, there’d be no need to hide the Roman collar.
When Father Ray was the pastor at Guadalupe, it was the only Spanish-speaking parish in the archdiocese. Now 17 churches have Spanish-language services. Wherever he has been assigned, from the West Side to North Minneapolis and from Venezuela to Le Center (where his congregation includes migrant farm workers), Father Ray has been ahead of the curve.
“We’re the fourth- or fifth-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world,” says Father Ray. “But we don’t admit it. Americans are frightened and they try to hide that by saying (about the immigrants), ‘Why don’t they speak English?’ instead of saying, ‘Why don’t we see what they’re talking about, why don’t we take the trouble of listening?’ They’re here to take the jobs no one else wants, but we’re afraid to admit they’re a blessing to us. They’re like everyone else. The hardest thing is changing the Anglo mentality.”
Frank Rodriguez, 82, a former legislator and union leader from the West Side, has been a member of Our Lady of Guadalupe since the parish opened its doors and has known Ray since Ray was a boy. Frank hadn’t seen young Ray for a few years when, one day, he spotted him behind the church, cleaning up some piles of brush.
“He came out the weeds and he told me he was a seminarian now and I thought, Well, I’ll be a son of a gun,” Rodriguez says. “The Lebanese always go against the grain. Now, here I am, going to his 40th anniversary as a priest. He was as good a priest as I’ve ever known, and I’ve known every priest who’s been at Our Lady of Guadalupe. Father Ray takes a back seat to no one. He was a surprise, I’ll grant you that. But what a beautiful and what a gratifying result we had.”
A beautiful and gratifying result. Today, I think we can all agree with that, huh?
