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Happening ... in the Local Church
 Father
Thomas Fox at Sacred Heart Church, Remington (Photo by Kevin Cullen)You’re invited To mark the 50th anniversary of Father Tom Fox’s ordination, a public reception will be held from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, June 13, in the parish hall at Sacred Heart Church, 124 N. New York St., Remington. Refreshments will be served. The priests of the diocese are invited to a Mass at the church at 4 p.m. June 15. A reception and cookout will follow. |
By Kevin Cullen
The
Catholic Moment
REMINGTON — In 1948, Tom Fox was a farm boy attending Holy Family School in Monterey. He loved the Church, he loved to serve Mass, and he was the top student in his eighth-grade class.
His teacher, Sister Mary Ernestine, was convinced that he should be a priest, and the pastor, Father Joe Adler, agreed.
But Frederick and Elizabeth Fox had 14 children. Young Tom, one of 12 sons, knew his parents couldn’t afford to send him to the seminary.
Then, one morning, Father Adler said, “Get in the car, Tom. We’re going to Lafayette to see Bishop Bennett.”
By noon, the awestruck lad was eating lunch with Bishop John G. Bennett. The bishop, a former farm boy himself, told him that seminary expenses would be paid as long as he behaved himself and continued to get good grades.
“He said, ‘If you don’t say anything about it, I won’t, and nobody else will,’” Father Fox recalled with a chuckle. “Can you see a bishop doing that today? I went back and talked to my parents … They were kind of on the side of the nuns and priests, so I decided I’d better go and try it.”
The rest is history. Father Fox, pastor of Sacred Heart Church in Remington since 1995, was to mark the 50th anniversary of his ordination on May 28. A golden jubilee celebration, with family, friends, and parishioners old and new, will be held June 13.
“He’s wonderful, that’s all. We don’t ever want to let him retire,” said parish office administrator Millie Mathew. “I’ve been his secretary for six years, and we haven’t fought yet. Time sure flies when you’re having fun.”
When Father Fox was pastor of St. Ann Church in Lafayette, Vincent FitzSimons came to know and love him. FitzSimons is a lifelong parishioner there and helped remodel the parish hall.
Father Fox is a kind and caring man, with a way of making others “feel instantly comfortable with him,” he said.
“I have all the respect in the world for him,” FitzSimons said. “He is what I would call a true shepherd. He really took care of all of us … he was a wonderful pastor and we all loved him.”
Father Dennis Faker was a member of Sacred Heart Parish before he was ordained to the priesthood in 2008. Now he is associate pastor at the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception and at St. Lawrence Church, both in Lafayette.
He said that Father Fox encouraged him during his discernment for the priesthood. He was with Father Faker’s father when he died, and officiated at his funeral.
Father Fox, he said, has a personality marked by kindness and compassion.
“One time, I suggested that he try to coax a young girl to be an altar server,” Father Faker said, “but she was very afraid, terrified. The first time she came into the sacristy to serve Mass, Father Fox hugged her. It was a warm moment.”
Father Fox, now 75, treasures the chalice presented to him by his family on May 28, 1960, when he was among five priests ordained in Lafayette’s Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception by Bishop (later Cardinal) John J. Carberry, successor to Bishop Bennett.
“Of course, my first Mass was at St. Anne’s in Monterey (his home parish),” he said. “There were a lot of relatives around there and in Plymouth … the church was pretty much full.”
He had spent four years of high school and two years of college at Our Lady of the Lake Seminary on Lake Wawasee in Syracuse, Ind. It once had been a casino/hotel, but Bishop Noll, of the Diocese of Fort Wayne, thought it was too luxurious and had the carpets and upholstered furniture taken out.
“You had a couple of straight-backed wooden chairs and a couple of little wooden desks. It was bare bones when we got there,” Father Fox said.
The following six years were spent studying at Saint Meinrad School of Theology in southern Indiana.
He served as assistant pastor from 1960-64 at St. Vincent de Paul Church in Logansport. Pay was $50 a month, plus stipends. The pastor, Msgr. John P. Schall, had been pastor in Monterey when Father Fox was born, and had baptized him.
In 1963, Father Fox attended a Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) convention in Washington, D.C., where he met and spoke with President John F. Kennedy.
Father Fox worked at Central Catholic High School, Lafayette, from 1964-76.
Bishop Carberry expected his seminarians to obtain state teaching licenses. “I thought, and hoped, that I would never use it,” Father Fox said. “Golly, that was a challenge.”
He taught history and religion for six years, and often had classes of 35 students each. He also served as junior class moderator and student council moderator.
“You had to be there at 7:30 a.m., and stay in school until about 4 o’clock,” he said. “You had to prepare for classes, and do the testing and grading.”
On Friday nights, he chaperoned school dances after basketball games.
In 1970, Father Fox was named assistant principal and business administrator. That year, he also served as administrator of St. Ann Church, Kewanna. From 1970-76 he doubled as administrator at St. Elizabeth Church, Lucerne.
He called his Central Catholic years “some of the worst and best of my life. I look back on it and say, ‘How did I do it?’ I couldn’t do it now.”
But almost every time he visits Lafayette, he sees one or more of his former students. It’s always fun to be remembered, to reminisce, and to catch up on the lives of those long-ago teenagers, he said.
Father Ted Rothrock, now pastor at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Parish, Carmel, was a student in Father Fox’s U.S. history class in 1968.
“I found him to be very understanding about high school kids. He had good rapport with our class, anyway, and he was always very fatherly and very funny,” he said.
Father Rothrock said that he was especially patient with students who struggled in his class.
“He’s been a very good priest,” Father Rothrock said, “very faithful, good to his people and popular with his people, too. He’s always been kind, which I think is one of the hallmarks of a good priest. You can be knowledgeable and a good theologian, but if you are not kind, what good are you?”
In 1976, Bishop Raymond Gallagher asked Father Fox to oversee the construction of a new St. Cecilia Church in DeMotte. He was pastor there for eight years.
Also in 1976, Father Fox was named treasurer of the Lafayette Clergy Relief Association, a benefit fund designed to provide income to retired diocesan priests. For the next 26 years, he wrote checks and made investments.
During his tenure, a church, rectory, education center and parish hall were built in DeMotte, and a cemetery was established.
“Every priest should have the opportunity to build a new church,” Father Fox said. “You have to go through all the liturgical hoops, work with the contractor, the builders, the liturgical commission, the whole ball of wax.
“We got all that done, and I was about at the point of enjoying it when Bishop Higi said, ‘I want you to come back to Lafayette,’” Father Fox said. “I said, ‘I don’t want to come back to Lafayette.’ So I went back, to St. Ann’s in Lafayette.”
During his tenure there, 1984-95, the parish hall was remodeled and the Matthew 25 Share and Care Soup Kitchen ministry grew.
“Whenever you leave a place, you think, this is going to be hard,” Father Fox said. “Then you get to a new place, and you think, ‘If I hadn’t come here, I would never have met these nice people.’”
Remington has been a good fit, he said. He enjoys living in a small farm town, and still being close to Lafayette, with easy access to Interstate 65. Changing demographics and mega-farms, however, have brought a decline in the number of parishioners.
“Years ago, when you had a family farm it was 200, 300 acres,” he said. “Now, it almost has to be 2,000, 3,000, 5,000 acres.”
He doesn’t plan to retire, as long as his health holds.
“A couple of the guys who have retired say, ‘Don’t do it if you don’t have to. It gets pretty boring,’” he said. “Others keep pretty busy, the ones who are tied in with some of the bigger parishes every weekend. I figure if you’re going to do that, you may as well stay where you are.”
He enjoys spending time at his cabin-turned-house on Big Monon Bay, off of Lake Shafer.
Perhaps the most dramatic change in the Church in 50 years, he said, came with the Second Vatican Council and the shift from Latin to English at Mass.
“I had 12 years of Latin,” he said. “During the last two years of seminary, our books were in Latin, and we offered Mass in Latin for two or three years after I was ordained. Then they moved the altar out to face the people, and Latin went out the window.”
He liked that change, he said, but “I got to thinking about all the poor guys who flunked out of seminary because they couldn’t get the Latin, how they struggled with it, then, all of a sudden, that’s gone.”
He said he has noticed a loss of the “sense of the sacred.”
Years ago, there was a “different and, I suppose, a better appreciation of the Blessed Sacrament as the Body and Blood of Christ,” Father Fox said. “There was a much higher level of respect and understanding, a greater appreciation of what we were doing. Today, everything is so nonchalant.”
But some things never change. After 50 years, the highlight of each day remains “meeting Jesus Christ in the Mass. The Eucharist is still the highlight.
“We begin by placing ourselves and our responsibilities in the hands of God,” Father Fox said. “The remainder of the day is filled with taking care of the needs of the people.”