Remembering A Good Man

Father Robert Gannon was my senior guidance counselor and later the pastor at the catholic church for the parish where I grew up and where my parents live.  He was tall and thin and clean cut.  His haircut was always very 1962, which was out of date for the end of the hippie era when I was a senior in 1980.  But the look came back later which was good.  He was a guy who was too clever, too shrewd and funny to look behind the times.

Fr. Gannon was a great person, a terrific teacher, and a very good priest.  I stopped believing in God when I was about 15, which I told him.  He never pressured me to "be a good Catholic" or guilted me in any way.  My father on the other hand flipped out when I stopped attending church, tried to force me to go, and angrily told me that the only reason I didn't want to go was so I could sleep late on Sundays.  Fr. Gannon would ask me why I felt the way I did and we engaged in many civilized debates about the issues.  He even once said to me, "You know, Jimmy, I usually don't like to go against what a parent says to their kids, but I think maybe your Dad is actually doing more to push you away than bring you back to the church."  He was right.  I had said as much to my Dad.  Gannon knew that you need to respect people's basic dignity and that included their beliefs, even if they were different from yours.

He was a big influence on me in high school and afterward when he was pastor at Our Lady Queen of Peace (even though I wasn't in the parish or a churchgoer/believer anymore).  Even before I was a senior (which was the year he was guidance counselor for) I used to hang out in his office and talk to him when I had time between classes.  He was smart, caring, and had a great, upbeat sense of humor.  He was someone who I looked up to because he was really intelligent but also just a good human being.  He really gave a damn about the right things. 

There are a lot of high school teachers who treat you without any respect just because you're younger, but Gannon never did that.  I never thought of it till now but for a long time I felt that he was a good friend.  The real evidence of my trust in him was when someone I knew confessed a serious crime to me.  I knew I wanted to go to the police but was afraid that the guy might find out if I did it officially and come after me.  He was a dangerous, erratic  character who liked me well enough but I had no illusions he wouldn't turn on me if he thought I had betrayed him.  I didn't know what to do and then I realized -- I should talk to Gannon and ask for his help. He gave the information to a cop he knew and took care of it for me.  I would never have done that unless I trusted him completely, which I did.  That's a pretty high compliment in my book.