Going home

Father Robert Hoban, our pastor for the past ten years, died this week. Two weeks ago, the associate pastor, Fr. Vrana, informed us all that Fr. Hoban had decided to forego any further treatment for his esophageal cancer. He had had enough of doctors, drugs, patchwork surgery and the relentless pain. He was 54.

He always looked a lot younger than his years. He just had that kind of face. He was a big guy at six four, with something of a paunch. It didn’t help that all the little old ladies in the parish were always bringing him baked goodies to eat.

Standing at the door of the church after Mass, he would keep his mitts in his vestment sleeves, not too keen on shaking hands with people as they left. Someone asked him about that mannerism one day and he said there was no sense in making friends here since he was only going to be rotated to another parish in a few years. It was one way to look at it, but I wondered if that made for a lonely life. The alternative would be to have friends in every parish in which he’d served—people all over the county he could call on for help or whatever he needed.

So, he had a streak of cynicism.

Still, he would always remember if you had been sick, or something had happened in your family and he’d ask how things were going. Even if he seemed distracted while you were telling him something, he was still able to recall the details the next week as you were leaving church.

He was kind of a one man band in the parish for a couple of years, doing everything himself. There just aren’t enough priests to go around, and even though we are a big parish with about three thousand families on the books, for a long time I guess the bishop didn’t think we warranted a second priest to help out.

One thing he could do very well was compose and deliver some pretty darn good homilies. (They’re not “sermons” now, they’re “homilies”.) That skepticism of his did not affect his ability to talk straight to you about the lessons in the gospel. He was usually able to leave you with something to think about, a principle to apply, a tweak in your attitude. That’s what I’ll miss.

He was an excellent steward of the parish’s finances, running several successful fund raising campaigns over the years, and cleverly using investment interest to pay our diocesan assessments. (You may know that the diocese takes a cut of our weekly collections, and we have been seriously in arrears in the past.)

Fr. Vrana remarked the other day that Fr. Hoban would roll over in his grave if he knew how much we were spending on his funeral. I understand that 125 priests are expected to attend. We have a vespers service on Sunday at 3pm and Fr. Vrana asked me to read there. The funeral is Monday at 11a.m., and while he also asked me to read there, I believe they have family members who will handle that.

The associate pastor, Fr. John Vrana, is 66. He was one of Fr. Hoban’s professors in the seminary. I don’t think this is what he signed on for. He has been administering the parish for the past year and will likely become the next pastor. The bishop has options, of course, since he has been closing and consolidating parishes throughout the diocese. With our falling attendance and weak financial status, we are not sure what will happen.

Fr. Hoban was first diagnosed back in July of 2007. We all knew something was going on, since he lost a lot of weight very quickly. He was not very forthcoming about his condition until it was impossible to conceal. His doctor delayed testing and treatments that might have helped control the cancer early, but who knows if it made any difference in the end.