| Greetings!
Special vocations and the family
By FR. PHILIP KENNEDY, PRESIDENT
The world we live in has a dire need of examples of commitment and perseverance in faith.
Many families have persons in their past generations who were noted for some achievements or other and have remained in the family memory, with anecdotes or exemplary stories. I grew up hearing often about one such relative, Charles Hughes Gauthier, who became Archbishop of Kingston and later of Ottawa, in the early part of the 20th century. His mother was Mary McKinnon, and my mother was Dorothy McKinnon, both of Alexandria in eastern Ontario. So "the bishop," as my aunts and uncles referred to him, was my mother's great-uncle, and was used to speaking to the family in Gaelic, the family's native tongue. But he worked masterfully in English and French, so much so that the Anglophones of Ontario thought of him as French and the Francophones considered him "anglais."
Archbishop Gauthier was held up for us as a prominent vocational example, who gave himself completely to the Church, and was ordained in 1867, just as Canada was becoming a nation. He was head of the Kingston diocese when Archbishop Fergus McEvay, his close associate, was establishing the Catholic Church Extension Society, and he supported the cause of missions in Canada until his death in 1922.
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