7: Special Permission to Get Married

Episode 7: An episode from the other side of the world.

Yvonne shares how she became a Catholic and eventually found  communities to belong to.

She also talks about her work supporting people who have a dementia and how her faith motivates her to do that.

Check out Growing Old Gracefully  from the Diocese of Leeds -  a source of sound information about dementia and faith.

A new episode, a different conversation, every Wednesday!
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Find the transcript: https://kindsofcatholic.buzzsprout.com

Music: Greenleaves from Audionautix.com

Transcript

You're listening to All Kinds of Catholic with me, Theresa Alessandro. My conversations with different Catholics will give you glimpses into some of the ways we are living our faith today. Pope Francis has used the image of a caravan. A diverse group of people travelling together, on a sometimes chaotic journey together. That's an image that has helped shape this podcast. I hope you'll feel encouraged and affirmed and maybe challenged at times. I am too in these conversations.

So, thank you ever so much for joining me today, Yvonne. You're welcome. And for listeners, Yvonne is joining us from the other side of the world today. Yvonne is in New Zealand, so we're hearing from someone a long way away due to the wonders of technology. And the other thing that might be good for listeners to know is that, unlike other guests so far, Yvonne is someone who hasn't been a Catholic from the very beginning of her life, and so we're gonna start by exploring what happened there. So here we are then, Yvonne. So you're a young person, and then, let me see. You becoming a Catholic, was that something to do with meeting your future husband?

Well, yes. Before I met him, my flatmate and I, who neither of us were Catholics, went to the Catholic church in the big city that we lived in, Dunedin. And we went to a Mass and we were horrified when they passed the plate around twice and we thought we're never going back, they're very greedy, these Catholics. And then, we kinda left that. To get married, we had to get special permission from, the bishop.
And, so we planned the wedding and, that was a bit tricky too. Because my father was a Freemason, he wouldn't allow us to get married in the Catholic church. So we had it in a Presbyterian church, and the Presbyterian minister and the Catholic priest from the town next door, because we lived in the country, did the ceremony with the Catholic priest doing the actual marriage, but which my family didn't really realise that we were married by the Catholic priest. And the Catholic priest of the town that we were married in was very old and didn't really approve. So that was why it was from the neighbouring town in the day when we had priests in every little town.

So slightly controversial start then.

Yes. Slightly controversial start.

But it sounds like there was something drawing you to the church even before getting married.

Yes. Fred had I don't know what it was, but it was something that he had that I wanted. Well, maybe it was his faith, that he was committed to going to Mass each week. He was committed to his family. Not that I wasn't committed to family, but, you know, my original family. I don't know. There was just something about him that obviously appealed to me because I married him, that drew me to the Catholic church. Yeah. I had to go and have instruction, I guess you'd call it, before we got married from the bishop's assistant or something in Dunedin and I was, I think I was baptised after we got married. And we didn't know that we were allowed to get married with the Catholic priest until about 2, 3 weeks before the wedding. So we'd planned it all with the Catholic priest, but we didn't know that it was really gonna happen like that.

Somebody made a good decision to let everything go ahead because, of course, you've been a Catholic then all these years and contributed such a lot to the church. What was important to you about your faith then in those early days? What did you appreciate about becoming a Catholic?

I think part of it was, being the same as Fred, who's my husband. And I despite the double plate, I actually enjoyed Mass. We didn't particularly make friends at the church there. We were very young, of course. I think oh, I can't really remember, but I think the congregation were all at a different stage of life. Like, we were just newly married and then after, as I said, we'd been married for 10 months, we were transferred to Melbourne. So we didn't really make any friends there. So it was just he and I, Fred and I, in this big Catholic world. Oh, the priest, we knew Father Gantly. He was very welcoming.

And were you in Australia for a long time?

We were just in Melbourne for 2 years, and our eldest son was born there and baptised there. And our second son was conceived there, but born in New Zealand. So we joined a parish in Melbourne. Initially, we went to the Columban fathers. That was kind of early in the morning when people didn't hang around and so we didn't really make friends there. And then we found the church rather like we did in Leicester, actually, just by being out walking, we found a church and we started to go to that church, and that was where our son was baptised. But the priest there, when we tried to make ourselves known to the priest, he said, I'm just new here, so I don't know anybody either. So it didn't really work either. I was surprised I stayed with not here all this.

Yeah. That's what I was thinking. It was a bit of a slow start then, finding a kind of community you belong to. Did that happen in the end? Has the parish community been important to you?

Oh, absolutely. When we came back to New Zealand, we joined kind of a parish community group, and we used to meet weekly, I think, and we would do faith growth things. We would have weekends away. We had shared meals. You know, we were really very much part of the parish. And I think, yes, since then, we've really blossomed in the parishes we've been in.

Did it help having children, you know, that there was a kind of family to connect with other families?

I think probably. We came back to Christchurch where Fred's mum lived and dad, but dad wasn't a Catholic, but we just kinda had more support. Yeah. The parish was a young parish, lots of young families.
I would call it a fairly dynamic parish in that, you know, lots of these community groups and stuff going on for young families.

I think it'd be interesting to hear a bit, Yvonne, from you about, you know, bringing up children in the church and seeing where their faith journey takes them, possibly not in the direction we as parents might hope. I know we've got some resonance here. So tell me what your experience has been.

We have 3 boys, and as they were growing up, we were very much involved in the parish. We led the 1st communion program. We were part of parish weekends away. We were part of Christian life groups. So, that was an adult thing. We met once a week, but we had family gatherings at weekends. And so we mixed with Catholic families. I remember going on a renewal weekend and, one of the questions or things to think about was, are your friends Catholic? And, you know, to help support you in your own faith. And, I thought about that and I thought, actually, I don't have any friends who aren't Catholics. So we were very much part of the Catholic community. And then boys grew up and decided that the Catholic faith wasn't for them. In fact, no faith was for them. And so, 3 boys. Although we still see some of the Catholic values in their lives, they wouldn't profess to be Catholics at all. So it was a shame.  I mean, we would put a rug down on the floor at night and we would pray and sing songs of praise. And, you know, before they would go to bed, we would say grace at meal times and encourage them to pray and encourage them not to pray just for a new bike or a skateboard or whatever it was they wanted. We had a prayer basket. When we hear of or are asked to pray for people or situations, we write them on a bit of paper and put them in the prayer basket. So at mealtimes, we always took out a prayer petition and each person around the table prayed for that, you know, said a prayer for that person, prayed a prayer. So they had quite a bit of formation, I guess you'd call it, growing up.

Yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? Because you sound almost as if, I mean, you're painting a beautiful picture there of Catholic family life when the children are younger, but also it can sound a bit like trying to justify, you know, we did all we did all the things. We did all the things and and and still

We lived two doors away from the state school, so they just went to a state school. And then, when they went to what's called college now, they went to a Catholic school then and all their friends were presumably Catholics or had some reason to be at a Catholic school, which was, a very multicultural school in New Zealand. It was on the edge of a city where there was a big Pacific population. So they had, you know, really, lots of friends from other cultures, but to no avail.

We sow our seeds, don't we? And then we have to leave it to God.

Yeah. Absolutely. But Fred and I are still involved in church, of course. Okay. So what supports your faith more recently than those happy times with the children being young?

Well, currently, we're part of what used to be called Teams of Our Lady, which is spiritual growth for couples. It's now just called Teams. With being a traditional Catholic, I guess, I don't approve of. I think it should still be called Teams of Our Lady. However, we meet, monthly, and we study the scriptures, and we have a usually, some form of spiritual input. We've just finished Alpha in our little group. And, other times we've read a book by some spiritual writer, and we'd read a chapter a month and discuss it. You know, think how it applies to our lives. And we have, within that, we also have things that we endeavour to do each month. So we endeavour to engage in personal prayer daily, couple prayer daily, a yearly retreat, daily reading of the scriptures. There's 5 endeavours. Oh, and a rule of life. So a rule of life which brings you to be a better Christian Catholic.

So it gives you a kind of structure?

Yeah. And of course, again, that's a little community. And, of course, at the moment, because we're both retired, we go to daily Mass when we're at home. I'm a reader at Mass. And the daily Mass is a kind of a community of its own as well. It's about, I don't know, 30, 40 people go.

So just for listeners then who might want to picture what the church is looking like in New Zealand now, you did mention that there isn't necessarily a priest in every place these days. So how do things look? Because actually, when you mentioned there are 30 or 40 people coming to daily Mass, that sounds like quite a healthy congregation, actually. So what does what does the church look like on the ground?

We have a diminishing number of priests, and so parishes have been joined together. So, one priest might cover 2 or 3 parishes. Sometimes in the country there's 1 priest covering several towns. So, you know, in the more remote areas like the West Coast, some of those towns will only have a Sunday mass once a month, and they'll have liturgies. Here, because we live in Wellington in the city, our parish is being joined with parish next door. So we have 1 priest who covers the 2 parishes. A lot of our priests come from the Philippines. We do have some New Zealand priests, but they're getting old.

Okay. So sounds like a similar picture to here, actually. The parish that you're in now, is that also quite multicultural?

Oh, yes. Our parish, because we have a Filipino priest, we have a big Filipino community, as well as Pacifica. We like to go to the 5:30 Mass in the parish next door because it's based in a Pacifica housing area. And the singing is to die for. It's just incredible. Once those men start singing, the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. It's just incredible and wonderful. And our Father Ron, we were at his Jubilee Mass as well. I just love that witness. You know, that witness of years, years of just faithful service. And those guys, those priests, they just give everything. It's just incredible.

And it's amazing when you when you hear how many years it is and you kind of look back and think, gosh. So they were ordained when they were, I don't know, 25 or 26 or something and all that time.

Well, you know, I think about Father Ron at 75, just retired last year. I think I couldn't wait for 65. I walked out at 65. I wasn't hanging around any longer. I wasn't going to hang around for another 10 years.

I think witness is a good word. It's just a huge witness, isn't it, to their commitment to living the gospel, serving the community?

Absolutely.

Okay. And I see this YODAT next to your name on the screen, Yvonne. What is YODAT?

 YODAT is Young Onset Dementia Aotearoa Trust. Aotearoa is the Maori word for New Zealand, land of the long white cloud. Fred and I, because Fred has young onset dementia, he was 63 when he got his diagnosis, and it had been coming probably when we left England in 2011. Probably that was the beginning. He was beginning with his dementia then because he never got work when we came to New Zealand. So I think that was because his dementia was starting, and he couldn't get himself together. And I was busy working anyway. And in 2015, we were asked to be part of, to help, setting up this young onset dementia trust, YODAT, which is a not for profit Trust, and we have services and support for people 65 and under who have dementia. 6 years ago, because we've just had our 6th birthday, because I was an occupational therapist, which helped, 6 years ago, we set up a day service. So twice a week, people who are 65 and under with a dementia come to a spot. And because I'm an occupational therapist, we set up a program of activities and cognitive stimulation therapy, which comes out of England. Very good program. And now, yeah, it was very much Fred and my baby with one other person. Over the years we've developed and now it's much more organised and I oversee a peer support group for people just new to younger onset dementia. So we meet in a cafe in town and have a chat, then go and do some exploring and don't really talk about dementia. I mean, that, you know, it's a pretty frightening kind of thing to be going through. And if they want to, they can talk about it. I'm just the facilitator of the group. Just all sorts. Just do things that are a bit lighthearted, but with people who understand what's going on. And then the day service is for people when they're a bit more on in the journey of dementia. It's a very positive place to be. People like being there. And I think that's probably also come out of, although we don't talk about faith, well, we do if it comes up, but we don't carry a banner. People know that I'm Catholic and that I'm a practicing Catholic and that Fred's Catholic and practicing Catholic. But I think that our respect and kind of inclusiveness and all of that just comes out of our Catholic faith, I think.

Yeah. I think there are values there, aren't there, about the dignity of each person.

And the value of each person. You know, they're even though they've got a dementia and they're struggling with some things, they're still people and they've got their individual personalities and

Yeah. Still precious.

Absolutely. Because I support people who, their person is going to go to care home, and that's a big, big wrench in people's lives. So I often spend hours on the phone. I suppose it's counselling people hanging over from my work where I could, you know, done a bit of counselling training. So sometimes it can be quite heavy.

Yeah. There's a lot of emotions, aren't there, around all of those decisions?

Yes.

For listeners, I went on to speak with Yvonne about how Fred is doing more specifically, and I haven't captured that part of our conversation here. I hope for any listeners whose lives are touched by dementia, in one way or another, there's been something in Yvonne's story that's been helpful for you and supported you in your faith. I've also put some relevant links in the episode notes, so do have a look at those if you think they might be useful to you.

I've really enjoyed talking to you today, Yvonne. Thanks ever so much for being here and sharing your experiences of living your faith, partly in Leicester and partly on the other side of the world.

You're welcome. I've enjoyed it too.

Thanks so much for joining me on All Kinds of Catholic this time. I hope today's conversation has resonated with you. A new episode is released each Wednesday.
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