By Georgia Bulletin Staff

ATLANTA--Regina Cline O’Connor, the mother of Catholic author Flannery O’Connor, died May 8 in Milledgeville. She was 99.

Funeral services were held May 12 at Sacred Heart Church in Milledgeville with burial at Memory Hill Cemetery. Father Chet Artysiewicz, pastor of Christ Our King Mission, Greensboro, was the principal celebrant at the funeral Mass.

Born Jan. 27, 1896, Mrs. O’Connor is the last surviving child of a family of 15 brothers and sisters.

In 1922 she married Edward Francis O’Connor, Jr. and lived in Savannah, in 1925. In 1938 Edward O’Connor was diagnosed with lupus and died two years later. Flannery was later diagnosed with the same disease and died in 1964.

Father Hugh Marren, a concelebrant at Mrs. O’Connor’s funeral Mass and her pastor in Milledgeville during the 1980s, described Mrs. O’Connor as “a great lady” with personal gifts of “great dignity, presence and courtesy.”

“Regina was a person you’d only read about in a book,” said Father Marren, now pastor of St. Anthony’s Church in Atlanta. “I never expected to meet anyone like that.”

During his tenure at Sacred Heart, Father Marren brought communion to Mrs. O’Connor in her home every two weeks or so.

“She met you with the greatest hospitality. Everything had to be just right,” he remembered. “It was a lot of work a big sacrifice,” because of her age and crippling arthritis she bore without complaint.

Father Marren said he was surprised at the number of visitors Mrs. O’Connor regularly received, longtime friends and family, people who wanted to discuss Flannery’s work.

“She was never a recluse, but very open to meeting people,” he said. “Her last years were very painful, but she was always very jolly, very hopeful.”

Mrs. O’Connor was willing to talk about her daughter, but only to those who wished to know Flannery for their own edification, not for her value as a newspaper item. She usually declined reporters’ request for interviews because her remarks were sometimes misquoted and taken out of context.

“Regina was able to distinguish between those interested in her daughter and those just collecting stories,” he said. She liked people to know her daughter in terms of reading her daughter.”

Father Marren arrived in Milledgeville in 1985 and because acquainted with Mrs. O’Connor “in her winter years.” She was a person of “very strong faith,” he said, a devout Catholic who was “tremendously generous” to the little parish where she had worshipped for so long.

During the first year he visited her stately family home in downtown Milledgeville, neither Father Marren nor Mrs. O’Connor made mention of her famous daughter. The priest got to know Mrs. O’Connor as “a woman in her own right, independent of whether Flannery was a genius or not.”

He related a later conversation when Mrs. O’Connor wondered if he had read any of Flannery’s work. Father Marren admitted he hadn’t.

“Well, you should,” she admonished.

“What’s the point?” he asked. “I’ve had the privilege of speaking to the master who taught the master’s hand.”

With charismatic grace and wit, he said, Mrs. O’Connor dismissed the compliment. “That blarney is going to get you nowhere,” she told him.

“I just cracked up laughing and she joined in the laughter as well,” Father Marren recalled.

When he did begin reading Flannery O’Connor, he found a positive, hopeful spirit. The author’s personal battle with illness and pain produced no bitterness or anger in her work.

“That’s not given. She learned that on her mother’s lap,” said Father Marren. “Regina inspired Flannery with her own great faith, hope and love. She was in major part responsible for sowing the seeds of faith that would later sprout in the life and writings of Flannery.”

Reviews by Flannery O’Connor frequently appeared on the book page in The Bulletin (of the Catholic Laymen’s Association), the forerunner to The Georgia Bulletin.

Leo Zuber, a member of St. Thomas More Parish, Decatur, until his death in November, 19890, edited the biweekly page from the mid-1950s until the early 1960s.

Blanche Zuber, his widow, recalls that Regina O’Connor was “a Southern matron with a strong personality” who always put her daughter first especially after her illness was diagnosed.

“When Flannery was sick her mother would make sure that visitors would not overstay their welcome because Flannery needed her rest,” Mrs. Zuber said. “She was a good mother who really cared for and loved her daughter.”

Mrs. Zuber said Mrs. O’Connor was proud of most of her daughter’s accomplishments.

The first book Flannery ever wrote was about her family,” Mrs. Zuber said. “Regina was so proud of Flannery, who was just 13 at the time, that she had the book published and distributed it to everyone in the family.

However, Mrs. O’Connor had not read the contents of the book. “Flannery had told some family secrets,” Mrs. Zuber said. “Once Regina found out what was in the book she took all the books back.”

Regina Cline O’Connor was a benefactor of the Village of St. Joseph, contributing to its support from the time when it was an orphanage in Washington, GA., to its present work as a residential treatment center for children in Atlanta.

A simple brick parish hall at Sacred Heart in Milledgeville adjacent to the 1874 church was named the Flannery O’Connor Hall in 1985, a tribute which Regina Cline O’Connor said at the time was “very near and dear to her heart because it was her own church which dedicated this hall to her daughter.”

Mrs. O’Connor was unable to attend the blessing of the hall by Archbishop Thomas Donnellan Nov. 17, 1985, but sent a message to the gathering through family members and provided a photograph of Flannery which is framed in the hall alongside a dedication plaque.

One of Mrs. O’Connor’s greatest joys was visiting Andalusia, the family farm on the outskirts of Milledgeville. It was a place of happy family memories, where she and Flannery had lived among the farm animals and peacocks.

“There was a lot of suffering in Regina’s own life and in Flannery’s,” but she accepted it graciously, Father Marren said. “She felt it went with the territory.”