Let's write about where my husband and I were married!

How nice to read about my home town parish St. Rita's in Dundalk Maryland, reported in the Catholic Review, by Priscila González de Doran:  Saint Rita's was established June 2, 1922, beginning as a mission church of St. Luke in Edgemere, Maryland.

My husband and I were married in St. Rita's Church. How time flies!

St. Rita reaches centennial anniversary.

When Peggy Shaffer took her 6-year-old son to Sunday school at St. Rita in Dundalk almost three decades ago, she wanted to help the parish while waiting for her son to complete religious education.

Saint Rita's Tabernacle at the church in Dundalk, Maryland

Shaffer approached Deacon George Evans, one of the first permanent deacons in the country who served St. Rita for 33 years, and said, “I’m going to be here for an hour, is there anything I can help you with?”

“He had this crazy look in his eyes and the next thing I know I’m teaching third-grade Sunday school,” she noted.

Shaffer has been a parishioner of St. Rita for 32 years and has volunteered at multiple ministries. As the Baltimore County parish celebrates its 100th anniversary, she is an example of the kind of hardworking people who have helped keep the faith community strong over the decades.

Front entrance at the Saint Rita's Roman Catholic Church in Dundalk, Maryland

St. Rita has been able to accomplish a century of parish life due to the love instilled from multiple generations and the commitment to leadership from parishioners, said Shaffer, who helped plan a series of festivities for the centennial celebration.

In its most recent years, the parish has struggled through a shortage of clergy and frequent changes in leadership.

Charlotte Locklear, who has been a parishioner for 47 years, recalls when a lay leadership core group of parishioners was formed in the early 2000s to keep the parish together and running smoothly at a time when the parish lacked a pastor for two years.

“Without this group of parishioners, we would not have been able to survive,” Locklear said.

When a local business closed in 1980, many people stopped at the parish office and asked the receptionist at the front desk for food. Parishioners gathered to discuss ways to help those hungry people and came up with a food pantry idea, which later evolved into a soup kitchen.

St. Rita Supper Table, a soup kitchen ministry instituted in 1980, has served 200 to 300 people weekly.

Mary Catherine Haines, who has been a parishioner for 75 years, and her parents were some of the early supporters and longtime leaders of the ministry.

“It never ceased to amaze me when we needed something and someone would come in the door to help,” Haines said. “There were many miracles along the way.”

Haines’ parents cooked and she was an active member of the ministry. When her parents died, she took the cooking role until she physically could not continue with it.

A teen who opened the door of the rectory to hungry people back in 1980 took over the ministry. Stacey Nagel was touched by the people asking for food at the rectory and decided to volunteer at St. Rita’s Supper Table.

“I think that’s where the love for the poor became a thing in my heart and in my mind,” she said.

David Nagel, her husband, volunteered at St. Rita’s Supper Table since he was a child, attended St. Rita School and was an altar boy at the parish.

The Nagels have been loyal parishioners of St. Rita for generations. David Nagel’s family has been in the parish three generations before him.

The parish downsized in 2018. The hall, home of St. Rita’s Supper Table, along with the school and convent buildings were emptied for potential sales.

St. Rita Supper Table became Soup for the Soul, an independent soup kitchen run by Stacey and David Nagel. Its location moved to Dundalk United Methodist Church and eventually to its current location on Willow Spring Road.

Saint Rita's Church campus in Dundalk Maryland, this Marian statue stood outside of the school and convent.

St. Rita Parish, made up of 626 registered families, continues with outreach ministries such as St. Rita’s St. Vincent De Paul Society, which has been active for the last 16 years in the parish and has eight core members. Debbie Bullington, president of St. Rita St. Vincent de Paul Society and parishioner for 20 years, said the ministry is “spiritual first.” She noted that volunteers pray before serving the people and before packing the bags. They also pray with the clients for their problems and needs in private, upon request.

“Sometimes people come to get the food and they are full of things to say,” Bullington said. “Praying and paying attention to those clients individually is what makes us unique."

The food pantry ministry continued operating constantly throughout the pandemic, serving approximately 70 people twice a month with options for pick up at the parish and home delivery.

St. Rita was established June 2, 1922, beginning as a mission church of St. Luke in Edgemere. Steady jobs at the Bethlehem Steel plant in Sparrows Point helped birth St. Rita’s parish. The first generation of parishioners cleaned the grounds and helped build the first wooden structure church in 1922.

By 1947, the parish had a second church built to accommodate the growing parish, which is the building still in use today.

St. Rita School served the community from 1926 to 2006. The parish became part of a pastorate with Sacred Heart of Mary in Graceland Park and Our Lady of Fatima in Baltimore in 2017 under one pastor.

St. Rita has been served by 12 pastors and three pastoral life directors. (When I grew up in the Saint Rita's parish, the pastor was Monsignor Weindham (? sp), but the priest in charge was Father Muth.)

The faith community celebrated its 100th anniversary throughout the year starting June 2, 2021. The parish held two healing Masses, movie nights and a Christmas concert. A basket was placed near a St. Rita statue inside the church, where parishioners could leave Mass petitions related to the anniversary and for revitalization of the parish. Parishioners prayed a novena to St. Rita May 13-22, accompanied by several activities including a St. Rita festival, dedication of a tree in memory of departed clergy, talks about St. Rita and a living rosary. Eucharistic adoration and confessions were offered to the community May 13-21. The culmination of the anniversary was a Mass and dinner May 22.

“St. Rita will always be our home,” Stacey Nagel said. “We hold our faith very dear and near, and we hope to pass it on to future generations.”

Email Priscila González de Doran at pdoran@CatholicReview.org

Let's write about syphilis and racism

Echo report published by National Public Radio:

Syphilis study at Tuskegee: 117-year-old Milbank Foundation publicly apologizes for its role in the racist study about syphilis and launches a partnership with Voices for Our Fathers Legacy Foundation.

“Voices for Our Fathers Legacy Foundation is transforming the legacy of our fathers, and grandfathers from one of shame, and trauma to honor and triumph,” said Lillie Tyson Head, president of VFOFLF. 

For almost 40 years starting in the 1930s, as government researchers purposely let hundreds of Black men die of syphilis in Alabama so they could study the disease, a foundation in New York covered funeral expenses for the deceased. The payments were vital to survivors of the victims in a time and place ravaged by poverty and racism.

Altruistic as they might sound, the checks — $100 at most — were no simple act of charity: They were part of an almost unimaginable scheme. To get the money, widows or other loved ones had to consent to letting doctors slice open the bodies of the dead men for autopsies that would detail the ravages of a disease the victims were told was "bad blood."

Milbank Memorial Fund : Echo apology for its role in the Tuskegee Syphilis study.

Fifty years after the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study was revealed to the public and halted, the organization that made those funeral payments, the Milbank Memorial Fund, publicly apologized Saturday to descendants of the study's victims. The move is rooted in America's racial reckoning after George Floyd's murder by police in 2020.

"It was wrong. We are ashamed of our role. We are deeply sorry," said the president of the fund, Christopher F. Koller.

The apology and an accompanying monetary donation to a descendants' group, the Voices for Our Fathers Legacy Foundation, were presented during a ceremony in Tuskegee at a gathering of children and other relatives of men who were part of the study.

The Milbank fund declines to try to justify what it did in the 1930s: Endowed in 1905 by Elizabeth Milbank Anderson, part of a wealthy and well-connected New York family, the fund was one of the nation's first private foundations. The nonprofit philanthropy had some $90 million in assets in 2019, according to tax records, and an office on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. With an early focus on child welfare and public health, today it concentrates on health policy at the state level.

Koller said there's no easy way to explain how its leaders in the 1930s decided to make the payments, or to justify what happened. Generations later, some Black people in the United States still fear government health care because of what's called the "Tuskegee effect."

"The upshot of this was real harm," Koller told The Associated Press in an interview before the apology ceremony. "It was one more example of ways that men in the study were deceived. And we are dealing as individuals, as a region, as a country, with the impact of that deceit."

Not all of the victims or their descendants knew of the fund's role:  Lillie Tyson Head's late father, Freddie Lee Tyson, was part of the study. She's now president of the Voices group. She called the apology "a wonderful gesture and a wonderful thing" even if it comes 25 years after the U.S. government apologized for the study to its final survivors, who have all since died.

"It's really something that could be used as an example of how apologies can be powerful in making reparations and restorative justice be real," said Head.

Despite her leadership of the descendants group, Head said she didn't even know about Milbank's role in the study until Koller called her one day last fall. The payments have been discussed in academic studies and a couple books, but the descendants were unaware, she said.

"It really was something that caught me off guard," she said. Head's father left the study after becoming suspicious about the research, years before it ended, and didn't receive any of the Milbank money, she said, but hundreds of others did.

Other prominent organizations, universities including Harvard, and Georgetown, and the state of California have acknowledged their ties to racism and slavery. 

Historian Susan M. Reverby, who wrote a book about the study, researched the Milbank Fund's participation at the fund's request. She said its apology could be an example for other groups with ties to systemic racism.

'"It's really important because at a time when the nation is so divided, how we come to terms with our racism is so complicated," she said. "Confronting it is difficult, and they didn't have to do this. I think it's a really good example of history as restorative justice."
Hundreds of Black men were targeted in the study

Starting in 1932, government medical workers in rural Alabama withheld treatment from unsuspecting Black men infected with syphilis so doctors could track the disease and dissect their bodies afterward. About 620 men were studied, and roughly 430 of them had syphilis. Reverby's study said Milbank recorded giving a total of $20,150 for about 234 autopsies.

Revealed by The Associated Press in 1972, the study ended and the men sued, resulting in a $9 million settlement from which descendants are still seeking the remaining funds, described in court records as "relatively small."

The Milbank Memorial Fund got involved in 1935 after the U.S. surgeon general at the time, Hugh Cumming, sought the money, which was crucial in persuading families to agree to the autopsies, Reverby found. The decision to approve the funding was made by a group of white men with close ties to federal health officials but little understanding of conditions in Alabama or the cultural norms of Black Southerners, to whom dignified burials were very important, Koller said.

"One of the lessons for us is you get bad decisions if ... your perspectives are not particularly diverse and you don't pay attention to conflicts of interest," Koller said.

The payments became less important as the Depression ended and more Black families could afford burial insurance, Reverby said. Initially named as a defendant, Milbank was dismissed as a target of the men's lawsuit and the organization put the episode behind it.
George Floyd's murder changed things

Years later, books including Reverby's "Examining Tuskegee, The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy*," published in 2009, detailed the fund's involvement. But it wasn't until after Floyd's death at the hands of Minneapolis police that discussions among the Milbank staff — which is now much more diverse — prompted the fund's leaders to reexamine its role, Koller said.

"Both staff and board felt like we had to face up to this in a way that we had not before," he said.

Besides delivering a public apology to a gathering of descendants, the fund decided to donate an undisclosed amount to the Voices for Our Fathers Legacy Foundation, Koller said.

The money will make scholarships available to the descendants, Head said. The group also plans a memorial at Tuskegee University, which served as a conduit for the payments and was the location of a hospital where medical workers saw the men.

While times have changed since the burial payments were first approved nearly 100 years ago, Reverby also said there's no way to justify what happened.

"The records say very clearly, untreated syphilis," she said. "You don't need a Ph.D. to figure that out, and they just kept doing it year after year."

* Since 1972, "Tuskegee" has become a word that stands for an infamous research study: a forty year endeavor on the part of the United States Public Health Service (PHS) to not treat African American men with late stage and presumably non-infectious syphilis, while promising them the aspirins, tonics and diagnostic spinal taps were treatment. The Study turned into a long effort (1932-72) to track nearly 400 men (the subjects) assumed to have the disease and nearly 200 men (the controls) assumed to be disease free in the countryside surrounding the city of Tuskegee in Macon County, Alabama. Despite the publication of a dozen research studies about the Study in medical journals over the years, there was major outrage when a newspaper reporter exposed it to the wider public in July 1972.