Catholic priest, nun, made big impacts on the community
Not all immigrants to Healdsburg came here driven by economic necessity, living the classic American story of working brutally hard just to secure benefits for their immediate family.
What follows is a story of two foreigners, two Irish who came to our area in the somewhat recent past, the past of living memory. Both Father Tom Gowing and Sister Fintan McAuliffe came here for job-related reasons.
They were not your typical immigrants. Their jobs involved a religious calling, a vocation. Each did a lot of disruptive, status quo-disturbing good, that spilled outside and may have rattled the walls of their church.
Sister Fintan for 35 years tended to the elderly in Healdsburg and started the tradition of the Senior Appreciation Dinner that has become part of Healdsburg’s character.
Tom Gowing helped get a new church building built in Windsor and ministered to the Latinos and other poor and dispossessed in a direct and loving way, speaking their language and lending them money. He sometimes ignored church procedures as well as U.S. law, getting himself in trouble. Both led selfless lives of devotion. Their stories are happy in that they fulfilled themselves. Each did for a time what they loved, and they achieved lasting substantive contributions. Their stories are sad because their lives ended without the comfortable old age such selfless service deserves.
Retired Episcopal Priest Marvin Bowers remembered seeing Sister Fintan on her rounds at the Healdsburg General Hospital. “It must have been sometime in the 1970s,” recalled Bowers.
He was at the hospital visiting a sick member of St. Paul’s and he heard the distinctive rapid and heavy footfalls of Sister Fintan. She had Monsignor John “Jack” O’Hare in tow. “She was practically dragging him around by his pyx,” Bowers said. (The pyx is a special round metal container worn round the neck by a priest when delivering communion to those in a hospital or nursing home.)
Sister Fintan took her mission seriously, wearing out priests and others who tried to keep up with her. She did not drive, and often prevailed upon Father O’Hare to drive and accompany her. That day he looked frayed around the edges. Father Bowers recalled, “He pulled me aside as she was dragging him around. ‘This woman is killing me,’ Jack said, ‘I need a drink.’ And later we had a consoling drink together.”
The same time that Sister Fintan was wearing out Monsignor O’Hare at Healdsburg General Hospital, a young Latina girl was getting to know a new Irish priest in Santa Rosa. Laura Gonzalez, one of Tom Gowing’s longtime friends met him when she was a girl and he was a priest at St. Rose in Santa Rosa. He made a big impression on the girl in Santa Rosa in 1974.
Laura now serves as a school board member in Santa Rosa, but in the summer of ’74, both she and her great grandmother were invalids together. Her great grandmother had fallen and broken her hip, beginning “her arduous and protracted journey to death,” as Laura eloquently writes in her blog (www.socolaura.org). Laura was a girl who had broken her leg and was stuck in the same house with her frail ailing relative.
Gowing was an Irish priest at St. Rose, a few years in the U.S. He brought communion and stayed and talked to Laura’s great grandmother. Tom was just learning Spanish. His efforts expressing himself through his thick Irish brogue made indelible memories for young Laura. It was both funny to hear him try to get his Irish tongue around the Spanish and poignant in the care and comfort he bestowed. Months passed, Laura’s grandmother died and Tom left for Bolivia to learn Spanish.
Years passed, Laura grew up and in 1991 she started dating Ruben, who would become her husband, a man who had immigrated from the Yucatan. Ruben kept raving about a priest, Padre Tomás in the Yucatan who was really helping the people there work their way out of poverty. Then she heard that Padre Tomás was in Sonoma County. It turned out to be the same Father Tom that Laura met as a child. Laura renewed their acquaintance and started a friendship that would last until his death, decades later.
Sister Fintan was born Margaret M. McAuliffe in 1920, in Lixnaw, a village of 200 in County Kerry, Ireland. In 1941 she entered as a postulant in the Infant Jesus Sisters. In 1949 she took her final vows, and in 1950 she came part of a delegation of five Infant Jesus sisters to Healdsburg to start the Catholic School at St John the Baptist Catholic Church.
Sister Fintan, freshly avowed, arrived with her four other sisters here in Healdsburg in 1950. They were housed at the convent at Ursuline while their quarters were established in town. Then they lived for a time in the Passalacqua home on Haydon, now the Haydon Street Inn. In time Sister Fintan and the other sisters moved to the convent right across Tucker Street from St. John’s School.
The posting to Healdsburg was the first venture into the Americas for the Infant Jesus Sisters. St. John’s School opened with 96 students in grades one to six on September 18, 1950. While the Sisters had been brought to teach and run the school, Sister Fintan’s particular mission evolved into visiting the ill, the elderly and the lonely.
“Fintan did all the house work, you know, all the kitchen work, and she had that front view window, right facing the school. So she knew everything that was going on in the school yard. Plus she could read the newspaper when she was peeling the potatoes,” said Sister Monica Dunne, a retired Irish Infant Jesus Sister, still living in Healdsburg.
Fintan did the cooking for the other sisters who did the teaching. She religiously visited the old and ailing. Those she could not get to during the day she went to in the evenings. For those she could not get to any time, she started a telephone ministry. She gave piano lessons after school for generations of Healdsburg children.
In 1983, She combined her cooking ministry and her ministry to the aging and her considerable will and ability to get things done to help start the tradition of the Senior Appreciation Dinner. She challenged the city council to do something to honor our “elderly citizens” and to do it now, not later. The first dinner was funded by the City Council, and council members and city staff volunteered to prep, cook, set up, serve and clean up. To Healdsburg’s and to Sister Fintan’s credit, her spirit has endured in this annual meal, now supported by businesses and staffed by a wide swath of volunteers.
In 1985, St John’s School was shedding some of its sister teachers and Sister Fintan was sent home to Ireland with some of the other Irish sisters. She was devastated. She felt Healdsburg was her home, and she was being sent away. Nonetheless she went joyously and continued her good works. She regularly sent a Christmas letter to the Healdsburg Tribune with succinct good wishes, still visiting the old and ailing, “until illness gave her another mission – that of prayer and suffering,” as her memorial service observed. She died in 2004.
Tom Gowing was born one of 12 children in Ireland in 1943. He went to St. Patrick’s College in Carlow, Ireland, and to St Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park. He was ordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood in 1969 in the Diocese of Santa Rosa. He encountered Laura Gonzalez and her grandmother in 1974, went to Bolivia to learn Spanish, then to the Yucatan to minister under the auspices of the Maryknolls, a Catholic missionary order.
Gowing returned to the Santa Rosa Diocese and worked for a time in the early 1980s under Father Michael Culligan in Healdsburg at St. John’s.
It was at this point Sister Fintan and Father Tom both worked in Healdsburg. All his life Tom Gowing cared deeply about others, and took no care of himself, eating when he could and not paying any attention to his health.
He developed diabetes, but it went undiagnosed. It was at this time while in Healdsburg that he first started experiencing symptoms of dizziness, near fainting, lethargy and lack of balance. Fintan observed his behavior during this time, and she assumed he was fulfilling the Irish drinking stereotype and reported him as being drunk.
It is almost novelistic how Fintan’s resolute and rule-bound goodness clashed with Tom’s empathetic and rule-bending goodness. Probably because of Fintan’s complaining about his supposed drunkenness, he was diagnosed and escaped serious censure. He continued to be slipshod about his health, eating erratically and badly, forgetting his insulin and not pacing himself.
After his assignment in Healdsburg, Gowing served for 10 years at Our Lady of Guadalupe in Windsor, helping get a new church building built. He reached out to the wealthy parishioners. One of those he reached out to was Fred Furth, a successful, flamboyant attorney, not lacking self confidence. Furth attributes his self confidence to his mother, Mary Agatha Furth.
He made millions from class action suits and bought vineyard land and Chalk Hill Winery, starting in 1974. Furth spent time away from his San Francisco office with his mother on his winery estate.
Mother and son would attend mass in the overcrowded Our Lady of Guadalupe. Furth’s mother died in 1980. Sometime later Gowing approached Furth, bringing a set of plans with him.
Furth recalls a meeting with Gowing that would alter Windsor: “Father Gowing, who is a wonderfully spontaneous man … rolls out his plans, and says, ‘Your mother wants you to build this church.’ Well, you know, I didn’t doubt that my mother had communicated with him.” It was a gutsy fund-raising strategy for Gowing to invoke Furth’s departed mother, but it worked. Furth went on to help Gowing build the church, putting a lot of his own money into it and reaching out to others in the parish with means.
In addition to the new Our Lady of Guadalupe church, Furth eventually also helped build the Mary Agatha Furth Center, completed in 2000, a conference and dining facility seating 450 for dinner, that is part of the church and used for both church and community events.
While Father Tom was raising funds and reaching out to the wealthy, he still demonstrated his abiding love and ministry for those he considered the least among us, the Latinos. He helped them out in many ways, “Beyond the usual baptisms, marriages and quinceañeras,” wrote Laura Gonzalez.
“When people needed a job, they came to him. When they had legal problems, they came to him, and he would often ask a friend, a local rich high profile lawyer, to help them out. He loaned money to people unable to pay the rent, who needed to go back to Mexico to see a dying relative, who were low on groceries at the end of the month, who had to see a doctor, etc. He let homeless guys stay at the rectory, or the building on the property, until they got on their feet or dried out.”
Gowing was convinced he was doing God’s work, and he needed only to honor and obey God’s laws. He actively helped people immigrate, legally or not so legally. Though he helped get the new church building built, his work with immigrants did not curry favor with some in the church.
After Father Gowing got the new church building completed in 1993, he got a new assignment to Garberville at Our Lady of the Redwoods and neighboring parishes. His heart, according to Gonzalez, was with the Latinos in Windsor. Exiling him to a remote place in Humboldt County was, in her eyes, a punishment for his rule-flaunting ministry to Latinos. Yet he was a soldier of the church. He followed orders. He made the best of his far flung responsibilities, but he continued to care more about his flock than himself. His diabetes got worse, and he died of complications about 10 years after he left Windsor in 2004, at the age of 61.
Both Fintan and Tom made the highest and best use made of their special skills and were taken for the last decade of their lives to works and places they would not have chosen. Both Fintan and Tom rolled with the changes, being self effacing religious people, knowing they were not in control of their lives. Both Fintan and Tom died the same year and both are were buried in Ireland. Fintan died there, and Tom was carried home. They left lasting good in their wakes.
Like ripples widening our, their goodness endures. Fintan’s ministry still carries on in Healdsburg daily at the Senior Center, and by the Agency on Aging three days a week at St. Paul’s, in the Senior Appreciation Dinner now put on by an ever-growing group of citizens. Our local reverence and care for the aging and ailing has been helped by the fierce dedication of Sister Fintan. Father Gowing’s outreach to Latinos has lasted in a number of institutions.
One started when Monsignor John “Jack “O’Hare with Marvin Bowers of St. Paul’s and Bill Hayes of the Federated Church started Healdsburg Shared Ministries that now manages the Food Pantry. There’s the Sunday free meal put on by seven different churches in St. Paul’s, and the Friday free lunch put on by St. Vincent de Paul at St. John’s.
Bowers also started a Spanish Episcopal mass at St Paul’s, a shower ministry at St. Paul’s that continues to this day, a co-op house-cleaning service, and NCCS, a tiny homeless shelter.
NCCS, now known as NSCS, currently manages transitional housing and seeks to re-establish its overnight emergency shelter. One can follow that chain of goodness forward to the Alliance Medical Center that serves a rural poor population, largely Latino, and now enjoys a robust community presence.
It was near collapse when Max Dunn, in the late 1980s, a newly retired executive, started helping it, prompted by his Pastor, Marvin Bowers. Max Dunn also facilitated the labor center that helps insure day laborers get a fair shake. Bowers, Dunn and many others have drawn spiritual sustenance from the same well as Father Tom in his outreach to Latinos.
The selfless caring that Sister Fintan and Father Tom brought to their personal ministries have inspired others and should inspire us continuously. They are at the center of the heart of Healdsburg. It is refreshing that their good endures and it falls on us to move it forward.
Their own institution, the Catholic Church, took them from their beloved ministries before they wanted to leave. Yet the church respected and blessed them. Although both are buried in their native Ireland, both Fintan and Tom had well attended memorial services here; Fintan at St John’s, and Tom at Our Lady of Guadalupe. Yet the community has grown and their memory fades. So keep a space in your heart for Fintan and Tom. May their examples lead us on.
