By Rita McInerney

On the 10^th anniversary of his ordination to the episcopacy, the Josephite Harvest, the magazine of the order, recalled the years of service by then Bishop Eugene A. Marino.

On the duties of a priest they quoted from St. Paul: “For it is not ourselves that we are preaching, but Christ Jesus as the Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake,” 2 Cor.

On the duty of a bishop they quoted Jesuit Father John Bligh, writing in 1955: “It is the duty of the bishop to sustain the perservance of his people on their long and tedious journey, to remind them of their destiny, and to check them from drifting away into the bondage from which they have been rescued. In this task the bishop has the priests to help him: they too must support the people’s morale by their word and by leading exemplary lives.”

In his years as priest and for the past decade as bishop, his brother priest has lived in accord with this apostolic ideal, the unidentified Josephite author commented.

The author went on to say: “In every aspect of his life, Bishop Marino has been consistent, both in his fidelity and dedication to the will of God, and in his exhortations to listeners that they too must seek and fulfill the will of the heavenly Father. If he spoke about peace, he also spoke about justice, for without the latter, there is no true peace. His audience on occasion could be members of a congressional panel, or of a political party. His hearers at times were largely from the black community or from the white…”

The numerous talks given by the bishop, the article said, all pointed in one direction: “Always be mindful of the mind of God, of the will of God, in doing what you are obligated to do.”

“My work is to be primarily a pastoral presence," the bishop said in January during a visit to his future archdiocese to celebrate the Mass in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His presence was then to about 400,000 Catholics in a region which included most of the District of Columbia and two-thirds of Prince Georges County of Maryland.

The bishop, who said at that time that he spent most of his time going about to the 50 parishes in his region for formal visitations, for Confirmations, conferences, anniversaries and other functions and special events, didn’t mention the many other demands on his time.

He was responsible for at least 20 Catholic schools in the district and in the county; was secretary of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and the U.S. Catholic Conference, was chairman of various bishops’ committees, was highly involved in ecumenical and interreligious efforts.

In all these extensions of his pastoral role he was a spokesman. He spoke to congressional committees on full employment, on homelessness. He spoke out and wrote about the need for Catholics to abhor and deplore the Ku Klux Klan; about the black family and the American Church; the permanent diaconate; Mary as the link between liturgy and doctrine; the connection between Abraham Lincoln and Dr. King; the pressing need for Catholics to be involved in local legislative affairs.

He would travel wherever people, priests or bishops were gathered and wanted to hear him, to Los Angeles, Providence, R.I., Philadelphia, New Orleans, New York City. Airports, meeting halls, banquet fare were as frequent to his stewardship as parish celebrations and school board sessions.

Despite the tremendous demands on his time and energy, his friends and associates say he is available, he listens. Dan Curtin, secretary for Catholic education in the archdiocese of Washington, D.C., was just one of several friends who emphasized these qualities in speaking with the Georgia Bulletin.

“I found him to be extremely supportive of Catholic education. He was always interested in helping out if there was a problem in a school or an area…always willing to sit down with anyone involved and very carefully listen to everything that was said. He will hear everybody, going around the table to each one."

Curtin recalled a “particularly difficult situation: involving parents, pastor and principal. “We though we had all sides covered at the first hearing,” he said, then another faction surfaced that sided with the pastor.

“They should be heard,” the bishop decided. “We cleared the calendar and made a date to meet with them.” Eventually, Curtin said, the situation was resolved with the parents vindicated.

The archbishop-designate, the educator said, is well known in the Washington archdiocese for his “collaborative efforts. He listens very carefully and asks good questions for clarification.”

“You will have a shepherd who really believes in people,” he said. “He believes in collaboration, in involving people in completing or solving a problem…I can tell you the priests in this archdiocese have great warmth and special love for him…He’s always available.”

Three years before being appointed auxiliary bishop in the archdiocese of Washington, in 1971, Father Marino, at the age of 37, became the first black vicar general in the history of the Josephite order. As vicar general he was responsible for spiritual and educational formation for the seminarians, priests and brothers. One of his accomplishments was to revise the religion – theology program at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Washington.

In 1971, after Pope Paul VI issued his apostolic letter establishing Church laws by which the permanent diaconate would be established and guided, the Josephite superior general at that time, Father George O’Dea, appealed to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops to promote restoration of this diaconate and the inclusion of black deacons.

As a result of his plea, the U.S. bishops voted to recommend a Josephite program for diaconal candidates in inner city areas. Four pilot programs were approved, including one in Washington, D.C. Father Marino was appointed as first spiritual director of the permanent diaconate program for the archdiocese. In this role he was a contributor to the formation guidelines adopted by the U.S. bishops’ committee on the permanent diaconate, writing the section on “The Diaconate In The Black Community.”

Jacqueline E. Wilson, executive director of the Office of Black Catholics in the archdiocese of Washington, first met the new archbishop in 1973. It was an assembly of about 500 black Catholics called to discuss the setting up of the office. Archbishop William W. Baum had suggested the meeting be held and Father Marino gave the keynote talk.

The assembly agreed on the need for creating such an office and Archbishop Baum, accepted the decision on Dec. 15, 1973.

Seven months later, “during the time we were having elections,” Archbishop Baum informed Father Marino that he had been selected as an auxiliary bishop. “Right from the beginning he was our favorite son. We all grew together,” Mrs. Wilson said.

Mrs. Wilson is a member of St. Gabriel’s, the Washington parish where the new auxiliary bishop was named pastor. She was president of the council of the parish, a mid-sized one which has been black for “quite a while,” and from which a number of black leaders have come.

Back in the mid-70s, there was a need within the fledgling group, she went on to say. “A lot of folks learned a great deal about governance, leadership. He gave us affirmation in order to go forward, a gentle prodder in situations of great change for people...He makes his wishes known, doesn’t allow people to rush him…welcomes everyone to speak with him. He’ll listen and then ask pertinent questions. He may not answer right on the spot but you’ll see an answer.

“He is the kind of person who encourages others to do things. He doesn’t need to get the credit and is laid back and happy to see that the team did something.” Her impressions were fast and fluent during a telephone interview with the Georgia Bulletin.

Last summer was a busy time for the bishop and the black Catholics in the archdiocese. Following the Sixth National Black Catholic Congress held in May at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, “We worked all summer developing a Washington version of the pastoral plan” approved at the national congress, Mrs. Wilson said.

They took the major topics treated in the congress document; identity, evangelization, leadership, families, social concerns and social justice issues, and hammered out “a much stronger presentation,” she declared.

Throughout, “he was always part of the whole process; keynote speaker for the Reflection Day…went everywhere speaking to groups both in and out of the archdiocese, and sometimes just as a participant. He always responded to calls for help. If he couldn’t help personally, he would suggest ways to make it easier,” Mrs. Wilson said.

He will be a spokesman any time for social justice, for “issues that some persons didn’t want to touch – the homeless, a cross burning in Prince Georges County, murders of the children in Atlanta,” she emphasized.

“Humility is one of his strengths. I think he is a gift to the Church. The Lord has worked miracles,” she concluded.

Black Catholics were the focus of the March 29, 1980 issue of America, the national magazine published by the Jesuits. Bishop Marino was among the contributors, discussing the challenges present in the economic and social dilemmas of the times.

He recalled the religious faith of black Americans, the Gospel values that took root in the experience of slavery. Such institutionalized cruelty, he wrote, did not engender among blacks a cynicism but the conviction that the Lord Jesus alone understood the depth of suffering and would at length deliver His chosen people from their bondage.

In this present time, “From the unsettling perspective of possible nuclear holocaust and certain international tension, we ought to be able to discern as a people the simple truth that the obsession with race, which has poisoned the bloodstream of a great nation, must yield at some point to a coherent search for standards of fairness and justice warranted by both our religious and civil traditions.”

In the lengthy article he touched upon the black bishops’ pastoral letter, Brothers and Sisters To us, and the progress and setbacks since the 1954 landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education, crime, unemployment among blacks, the family and evangelization.

In his conclusion he said “our loyalty to the communion of Christ’s body impels us to face squarely those forces of sin that weigh down the members of the human family. The Church in history has been a clear and faithful teacher of equality and active concern for the poor, even when the lives of its members did not bear witness to this truth. By restating clearly the mandate of Christ for those dispossessed because of race, the pastoral of the American bishops offers a splendid foundation upon which to build an agenda for the 1980s.”

Father William P. McKenna was one of the three member class of 1962 ordained Josephites. The others were Father Eugene Marino and Father John G. Harfmann, now assigned to the Josephite Pastoral Center in Washington, D.C.

“We’re all different, but close,” Father McKenna said. He is pastor of St. Veronica’s in Cherry Hill, Baltimore, a parish built mainly by black GIs and their families after World War II when they moved into a new housing development in the last area in the city to be developed.

Fathers McKenna and Harfmann will be among the concelebrants at the Installation Mass for the archbishop-designate.

“When we see each other, it’s quality time,” Father McKenna said. “On our 25^th anniversary, I took him to Ireland and he took me to Rome.” Father McKenna’s parents were born in Ireland and his mother, he said, had manned a machine gun in a Dublin hotel where she worked during the 1916 uprising.

His relatives opened their homes to the traveling Josephites in Lismore, Waterford and Limerick. “He loved Ireland,” Father McKenna said.

Just as the McKenna kin extended a warm welcome to the bishop in Ireland, so did their brother in the priesthood, Pope John Paul II, at the Vatican. “Gene had previously seen him just a few months before when he traveled to Rome with other bishops to plan the U.S. trip” of the pontiff.

Father McKenna remembers a “prophecy” that came to him rather unexpectedly when they met in 1973 to celebrate their anniversary.

“You’re going to receive the red,” he told his close friend. The next year Father Marino was named auxiliary bishop of Washington.

They have traveled the distance as friends, even though they might not meet as often as they would like. They were friends from that first year at Epiphany Apostolic Seminary in Newburgh, N.Y. Gene Marino spent his first Christmas away from home with the McKennas in Medford, Mass. It was lively, like his own home, with five boys and two girls.

Later, when the three moved to St. Joseph’s Seminary in Washington, they enjoyed putting on plays for other seminarians. “We put a lot of effort into this, memorized our lines like crazy,” the Baltimore pastor recalled.

He remembers his friend Gene being sidelined for three or four months during the last year at seminary by a double detached retina. “He jumped back from that with patience and stick-to-it-tive-ness and did his canonicals, (testing before ordination) despite the setback.”

When Father Marino was assigned to teach at Epiphany Apostolic Seminary after his ordination, one of the faculty members was Father John Filippelli, now pastor of St. Francis Xavier parish in Baltimore, the oldest black parish in the United States.

“I taught him Spanish, informally,” Father Filippelli said. “He was a fast learner, a good pronunciator. He was interested because of his father. His father’s brother, Antonio, lived in Spanish Harlem. We would go into the city on Wednesday afternoons. I used to drop him off at his uncle’s. I was born a few blocks away.”

The Marino children living in the northeast would keep in touch, the priest said, with the young priest visiting his sister Katherine and brother Joaquin, both of whom were working in New Jersey at the time.

“Gene was very popular in Newburgh,” Father Filippelli said. “He was a great source of solace to one Hispanic family…people take to him immediately, he’s kind and compassionate.”

Father Filippelli, a former superior general of the Josephites, was area director for the Washington-Baltimore area when Father Marino was vicar general.

Although this will be the first time the bishop will be serving at a distance from other members of his order, “All the Josephites rejoice” at his appointment as archbishop, his friend said. “We feel he’s more than capable, if anyone is worthy, he certainly is.”

The Josephite priest so important in the life of the archbishop-designate, Father Joseph L. Maurer died on Easter Sunday of this year at St. Joseph’s Manor in Baltimore after an illness of many years. He had been a priest for nearly 49 years and would have marked his 83^rd birthday on April 30.

The young Gene Marino admired this priest, wanted to be like him. “I cherished the idea of someday being a parish priest…like my own experience,” he said many years later after being appointed auxiliary bishop of Washington, D.C.

A few weeks after his death, Father Maurer’s papers were sent over to Father Peter Hogan, archivist at the Josephite headquarters in Baltimore. He had carefully saved photos of the school band, all lined up on the church grounds, a group of altar boys posed on the wooden steps of the church, a nostalgic picture of the crowd outside Our Mother of Sorrows Church on the day of its dedication on a sunny day in 1914.

In the folder, also, were graduation programs, receipted bills for graduation pins and prizes, notations about awards for mothers – Mrs. Marino was among this small group-and brief notes about “going down to the jail” to get someone freed.

The program for the class of 1948 from the elementary school revealed that Gene Marino could surely be called the outstanding member of the class. He had the highest average, perfect attendance, most loyal altar boy. He had attended daily Mass during May. He also won a scholarship to the parish high school.

It was this foundation, the Christian doctrine of the Josephite pastor and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in school, the strong faith in the home of the parents, Lottie Irene and Jesus Maria, that prepared the Marino children for the future.

Another influence was Sister Francine of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, Gene Marino’s teacher in seventh and eighth grades. She remembers that “He usually had the highest marks in the class.” Although he was “very studious” he could be somewhat of a tease, especially about his singing voice, which wasn’t up to her standards for the school choir. He did however, play in the school band, not one but two instruments – the baritone horn and the trombone.

He was one of the boys she could depend on to clean the classroom at the end of the school day. “We had no money for janitors.”

Sisters Francine went back to Biloxi last June at Bishop Marino’s invitation for the 25^th anniversary of his ordination. She had her picture taken with him on the steps of the church. Back in 1948 he had told her he wanted to be a priest.

“In the south, blacks’ whole life revolves around the church, social and religious,” according to Sister Eileen Marino, a member of the Oblate Sisters of Providence. Her order celebrated its 150^th anniversary in 1978 and is the oldest congregation of black sisters in the U.S.

Sister Eileen, five years older than her brother, shared memories of growing up in Biloxi with the Georgia Bulletin during a visit to the large and hospitable motherhouse of the Oblates on a hillside outside Baltimore.

When they were young, she remembers, there were parish lawn parties, suppers, meetings of the Knights of Peter Claver and its auxiliary, and parish-to-parish tournaments with Catholic youth from Bay St. Louis, Gulfport, Pass Christian and Pascagoula, other cities along the Gulf of Mexico. Brother Gene managed the girls’ basketball team in high school. “I was always a cheerleader.”

The neighborhood where the Marinos lived, and where their Bradford grandparents had lived before them, on Fayard Street, included blacks and whites. Downtown, in the stores there were always two soda fountains, even in City Hall. Blacks had to sit in the balcony of the movie theater until the latter part of the decade when a theater was built for them along the segregated section of Main Street. After that they could no longer attend downtown movies.

There was no library for blacks, Sister Eileen, a teacher for 30 years, said, only the one at Our Mother of Sorrows school.

Walking was one way to ease some of the pain of the all-pervasive racial discrimination that was the town environment. “We walked everywhere. We wouldn’t ride the segregated buses,” she said.

Their property included a large lot next to the home built by their grandfather, Eugene Bradford, a master carpenter, and inherited by their mother. Here their father installed swings and play equipment. Here they played baseball, basketball and croquet.

The front porch, with its two swings hung from the ceiling, was a gathering spot. “We danced a lot, played parchesi…and the neighbors would come over to listen to the radio.”

The lot where they played was big enough for a large garden which put a variety of fresh vegetables on the table all summer long. There were pigs, chickens, ducks and a pet rabbit, Sister Eileen said.

“Mother was a down home cook, and daddy the gourmet cook.” He had received high school diplomas in Puerto Rico for academic studies, cabinetmaking and as a chef. These framed certificates, in Spanish, hung on the walls of the Fayard Street house.

Jesus Maria Marino came to the United States from Puerto Rico not long after U.S. citizenship was granted Puerto Ricans in 1917. With his brother, Antonio, they planned to work their passage on boats stopping at U.S. ports. Somehow they were separated at the dock in San Juan and Antonio sailed away on a ship which took him to New York.

Later, his brother’s ship took him to several foreign ports before docking at New Orleans. From there he came to Biloxi. Sister Eileen remembers that he worked nights as a baker, from 8 p.m. until 1 or 2 a.m. He was never out of work. During World War II he worked at a shipyard in Pascagoula. Sometimes, she said, he would be the cook on shakedown cruises for new ships.

Their mother was the disciplinarian and the one the children turned their earnings over to. When Gene would work with his father at the bakery on Saturdays his pay went right to his mother. She added it to the common till where it was saved for higher education. Several of the sisters graduated from Xavier University in New Orleans.

The brothers and sisters are close, Sister Eileen said, and try to get together as often as possible. They had an extraordinary reunion in June in Biloxi when their bishop brother celebrated his 25^th anniversary as a Josephite priest. A reunion photograph captured 72 smiling relatives spanning three generations.

Wherever they gather, the Oblate sister said, the bishop celebrates Mass. He marries nephews and nieces and later baptized their babies.

“Last summer three couples in the family renewed their marriage vows with Uncle Gene.” Two years ago, at Christmas with sister Lillia and her family in Kinston, N.C., two couples renewed their vows and Dwayne Patterson, Lillia’s son, was married.

“My sisters, with one exception, married non-Catholics,” Sister Eileen mentioned. “They later converted. It’s not that we discuss religion. We just are.” Both parents were Catholic “from way back” and the practice of family Rosary, daily Mass, regular confession is deeply ingrained.

“My niece, Sister Sharon (daughter of Juanita, the oldest Marino offspring) says her Uncle Gene was her inspiration as a child. When he visited the Howells in Minneapolis he would say Mass every day. Sharon was always present.” In late March Sister Sharon made final profession of vows as a Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet.