How a young priest, on his lunch hour, changed a life

    Growing up in the hill country of Texas in the 1930s, Marjorie Hill was so poor and so isolated from civilization that she had no earthly idea of what she might be missing.
    Marjorie’s mother was kind and loving, but her father drifted in and out of her life whenever the wind blew. The family home – bursting with nine children – had no electricity, no running water and no windows.
    Formal religion came every month or two in the form of an itinerant preacher, who would set up a tent and thump the Bible.
    “All I knew was that the devil was bad,” Marjorie said. “When the traveling preacher came once a month, that was a very big experience for children who don’t see people for days and days. I was never exposed to books or any of the educational things in life. The day I went to school was the first day I saw crayons or pencils or books.”
    When Marjorie was 9, the family moved to a tenement house near Fort Worth, where her mom found work at a newly opened airplane factory.
    “It was like we had moved into a mansion,” Marjorie recalled. “We had running water and a bathroom inside. We had a little four-burner stove instead of the wood stove we used to cook on.”
    It was there that Marjorie met “Skeets,” a 21-year-old woman from Philadelphia who was expecting her first child while her husband was out of town on military duty. Skeets wanted to attend Mass every day, but her husband feared for her safety having to take two buses to get to church before dawn.
    So, Skeets asked Marjorie if she would get up at 5 a.m. and accompany her to church. And, she paid her a quarter for every Mass.
    “I can still remember taking that bus in the early morning dew on those hot Texas mornings, when the lights of the city were awakening,” Marjorie said. “When we got there, I saw this cathedral, and it was something I had never seen before. I went inside and I didn’t know what to think. It was like heaven. The candles were afire, and it seemed as though the Blessed Mother was smiling at me.”
    Her daily visits to church went on for two months until it was time for Skeets to deliver. But then, something went dreadfully wrong. Skeets went into labor at home and began bleeding uncontrollably before she was rushed to the hospital.
    Somehow, Marjorie got to the hospital in time to snuggle up to the woman who seemed to have drifted into her life like an angel.
    “I went up on her bed and leaned over to her and she said, ‘I don’t want you to be sad. I’m going to heaven to be with the Blessed Mother, and I’ll be waiting for you and we’ll be together,’” Marjorie said.
    Eventually, Marjorie’s family moved to New Orleans and lived in Gentilly Woods. Because she had to help support the family, Marjorie worked at Walgreens on Gentilly Boulevard in the afternoon after she finished her classes at John McDonogh.
    It was in Catholic New Orleans that Marjorie felt drawn back to the church that she had seen, smelled and touched as a 9-year-old in Texas, but she didn’t know where to start. So, one day, she  simply knocked on the door at the St. Raphael Church rectory, and a newly ordained priest, Father Ray Hebert, answered the door.
    “He was young, and I think he had been out playing basketball,” Marjorie said. “I think my request kind of startled him.”
    Over the next several weeks, on his lunch hour, Father Hebert gave Marjorie instructions in the “Baltimore Catechism.” Within a few months, Marjorie was baptized and confirmed. And then, on March 5, 1953, Father Hebert witnessed Marjorie’s marriage to Merlin Barth, whom Marjorie had met while working at Walgreens.
    In their nearly 60 years of marriage – most of it spent in California, where Merlin moved to pursue his architecture career after graduating from LSU – the Barths had six children, 11 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. All of the children were raised in and still practice their Catholic faith.
    In 1982, Marjorie and Merlin made a pilgrimage to Rome with members of their St. Justin Martyr Parish in Anaheim and met Pope John Paul II. “I have a picture of him, holding my hand,” Marjorie said. “Just think, he is Blessed John Paul now. I touched his hand.”
    Marjorie wrote down her memories of her journey to the Catholic Church and mailed them last year in a letter to Msgr. Hebert, now 84, who was stunned to hear how the teenager to whom he once taught catechism was selected Catholic Woman of the Year by her church parish.
    “When I celebrated my 59th anniversary as a priest, which was three or four weeks after I got her letter, I told everyone, ‘I’m not going to preach a homily at all – I’m going to have that letter read,’” Msgr. Hebert said, smiling. “I didn’t know whether I had done all those wonderful things.”
    “I knew it was hard for him to fit me in, but he took a poor, uneducated girl and helped me learn about Jesus,” Marjorie said. “I want to thank him for what he did for me as a young priest. He opened up the Lord to me and made it possible for me to become a Christian.”
    Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected].