The Arleen Hynes Page

Arleen died peacefully at 12:12 p.m. 5 September 2006 at St. Scholastica's, St. Cloud, Minnesota





A memorial and burial service were held at St. Benedict's Monastery on Friday, September 8, 2006<


A second memorial service was held in Arlington at the Lady Queen of Peace Church on 21 October 2006.
You can read the text of Delores Leckey's appreciation (a pdf file)
The memorial booklet of the service is included here.
Note that after printing the pdf file the pages can be center-folded (1-12, 2-11, etc) to form the booklet

The sound-recordings made at the Lady Queen of Peace Memorial Mass can be found at their Choir website http://www.paxchristinova.org/olqp/
There are 5 separate recordings in MP3 format which you can download or play directly:
3 songs: "Turn, Turn, Turn", "I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say", and "You Are Mine"
The other 2 recordings are Sister Nancy's homily, and Patrick Hynes' "Remembrances"

 DePaul Willette
has arranged for a tree to be planted
in Yellowstone Park in the name of Arleen 		 


A brief obituary from daughter Mary, Blogs of Denis and Mary, August-September 2006

The Washington Post obituary, 15 September 2006

Memories, commentaries and pictures of Arleen

Two poems written in Arleen's honor;
one from daughter Mary, the other from nephew Greg Ackerman
- others are included in "the Memories" page just above
   
   
 
 Arleen's descendants and their significant others...
  Clik on pic to see a larger pic!
      (from Brigid)

You might also enjoy looking at Nico's recent pics of Arleen and Simone (his daughter, her great-grand-daughter, aged 1) together in late August 2006 on one of her last "good days".


Two genealogical files: (in pdf format, more complete original listings can be obtained on request)
(1) Arleen's ancestors
(2) Arleen and Emerson's progeny




90th birthday memorial, May 2006: the HYNES family rejoice at Kilfenora, Collegeville

Arleen's brief chronology of her life

   
A Memoir of Josie Dunn McCarty (Mama)
by Arleen McCarty Hynes
 
      [with editing and illustrations by Jamie Yeager,
      (and slightly revised formating to pdf form by Gordon)]

Circles Linking /Intersecting:
Some of Arleen's Heritage and Subsequences
by Gordon Berry April 2, 2006

As we have learned through the internet, almost everyone is within six degrees of separation with anyone else (especially with actor Kevin Bacon), but within Arleen’s extended family there have been a remarkable group of repetitious incidents, places, contacts, and related events. Although one can now “measure the diameter of the internet”, we have not come up with a formula to measure the frequency of accidental (or deliberate) repetition; till then these following examples will have to suffice...

We have noticed eleven of these "wheels within wheels" which connect especially to Arleen's family history and to our own family and they are briefly described below. You may know of other interconnecting circles.

Circle 1
About 1781, Susannah Donahue, the Irish Catholic married Abel Morgan, the fundamentalist puritan (Baptist?) on a revolutionary battlefield. This is the story that describes the earliest known forbears of Arleen’s family: the family history put together by twin sister Eileen McCarty Yeager and niece Rosemary McCarty Nimtz describes how this incident was used to justify inclusion of those proud southern Indiana families as “Daughters of the American Republic” - had Abel almost single-handedly just defeated the British (that hated King George the Third) on that Pennsylvania battlefield? Susannah had run away from Ireland, and now she left her catholic faith to raise a brood of puritans. Someday the true story may be found of how this was a cover for his running away to hide in the woods of Kentucky, and how she kept her missel to continue her secret Catholic prayers.

Circle 2
About 1810, after living in Hardin County Kentucky, Abel’s widow and sons (Jesse, Thomas and others) cross the river at Edgeland Avenue near Louisville, Kentucky. They were part of a group of Baptists on the move to fresh pastures across the Ohio river. Amongst them was the Thomas Lincoln family, which eventually included their famous son Abraham: once they reached the promised land of the rolling wooded valleys of Southern Indiana, they stopped to build their church at Little Pigeon River. The church is now a tourist site and the Morgan names can be found on the role of the families living there. There were not enough promises kept in that promised land, and so, within a few years, the Lincoln family went off to Illinois, and the Morgan family moved north to Montgomery still in Indiana, for the next promised land.

Circle 3
In Montgomery Indiana in1835, catholic Eliza Quigley (also of an Irish family) marries Jesse’s son (Abel’s grandson) James Studeville Morgan - in a ceremony most probably performed by Father Edward Sorin. Father Sorin wished to establish a Catholic college in or near Montgomery, but the Bishop believed that one local Catholic college, that of Vincennes is enough. So, in 1842 he gave him leave to travel north where northern Indiana was still a frontier being settled. He found an appropriate place next to two small marshy lakes just two miles north of South Bend. There he and a few monks established in the spring of 1843 what was to become the University of Notre Dame, the world famous center for football, physics and avant-garde liberal Catholic doctrine. But perhaps Eliza became a fallen-away catholic - the pressures were strong from the fundamentalist Baptist families who dominated life in the small communities around Montgomery. The catholic church on the top of the hill probably represented to them quite the antithesis of their religious beliefs. In short, we are not sure how the family balanced their religious backgrounds.

Circle 4
In 1861, on one of the first days of the American Civil War, James Studeville’s daughter Elizabeth Morgan married the Irish catholic immigrant Patrick Henry McCart(h)y at St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Montgomery. Patrick Henry had sailed from a British dominated Ireland a few years before, landed in America at New Orleans, and worked his way by flat-boat up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers to the land of opportunity in Southern Indiana. Starting work in the coal mines of Davies County, he gradually became one of the most respected members of the Montgomery community (Not that coal-miners aren’t respected!). He served them for a few years as a representative in the Indiana State Legislature in Indianapolis (1868-1870). Only when he wished to enter the race for Mayor did he discover that further political enhancement for Catholics was greatly limited by the regulations and the society of Indiana. So up the family got and took their wagons and belongings west to western Iowa and the small town of Sheldon. There they found paradise - or so we have been told! Did Elizabeth ever forgive Patrick Henry for the uprooting? She certainly insisted on being buried on the opposite side of the Sheldon cemetery from him.

Circle 5
In 1939, Minnesotan Emerson Hynes, (of Irish Catholic ancestry among others), studying for a Master’s Degree at Notre Dame, meets Patrick Henry’s grand-daughter, the Iowan twin Arleen McCarty (of Irish Catholic ancestry among others): one tradition suggests that they were praying at Notre Dame’s half-scale version of the Lourdes grotto, but more likely they met at the end-of -term dance, dancing and talking the night away; part of this latter story has Emerson being passed along by Eileen, or was it that he was snatched away by Arleen. Choose the story you like best - as future events have shown, there might be some truth in all three....
      You might think this dull sameness of religion and national ancestry, might not lead to much exciting. But, of course, we know different(ly): they followed their joint ideals of living lives according to their jointly held beliefs, being as self-sufficient as possible on a 10 acre plot and their home-built home in a rural catholic community of Collegeville, Minnesota: Emerson teaching philosophy and social sciences at the Benedictine St. John’s University; Arleen never doubting for a minute that a woman’s work is not just in the home, but also in being a full part of the world of ideas, and the idea that all women should be a part of a full society; all this and ten children too.

Circle 6
In 1968, in Arlington, Virginia, Arleen and Emerson’s daughter, catholic Mary Hynes marries Church of England Britisher Gordon Berry. Two generations of Irish (and some French-Canadian) Catholics might find it hard to accept a return to a compatriot of the Irish-cow stealers, and at the same time not even of the same “old religion”. Acceptance was easier than it would have been for a true “mixed marriage”. This latter had been understood in the families, for at least a hundred years, to occur if someone of the opposite political party was part of the marriage. I (Gordon, that is) had verified the correct color of my stripes by campaigning for many months of 1967 for the Eugene McCarthy for President Campaign - together Mary and I had visited small towns (and Gary) in Indiana, raised funds with a dance-party in Madison,Wisconsin, and been tear-gassed in the anti-war demonstrations. I suppose we were really working for Arleen, since she was managing the “McCarthy for President Volunteers” that year. Besides, I was also a twin!

Circle 7
In 1981, Arleen returns to St. Benedict’s convent. The heavy work load for Emerson at McCarthy’s Senate office in Washington during the campaigns for President broke his health, and he died in 1971, leaving Arleen a widow, with 3 children still at home. She returned to her library science degree and started work as patients’ librarian at the top Federal mental hsopital, St. Elizabeth’s just across the river in Washington D.C. Thus, the field of Bibliotherapy was born, and her text, co-authored with daughter Mary is the bible of the field, and Arleen its Messiah. Which is a perfect lead-in to her 1981 return to Minnesota, and to start her vows at St. Ben’s. Her entrance to the Convent (now Monastery) was a shock to all her children, for some of them pleasant, others not-so-much: 25 years later it seems the most natural progress of her life; at the same time that she was able to return to her spiritual life which had been so much a part of her early years both in Sheldon, and in her marriage with Emerson, she was able to continue her development of the propagation of the bibliotherapy process across the nation. Arleen became the first president of what developed into the National Federation for Biblio/Poetry Therapy, now the NAPT, National Association for Poetry Therapy.

Circle 8
In 1995, Gordon accepts a professorship in Physics at the University of Notre Dame. Perhaps I got the job of Professor in the physics department because the provost learned that my mother-in-law was a Benedictine nun, and my father-in-law was a graduate of Notre Dame. It was only later that we learned that Father Sorin (that founder of Notre Dame) had come from Montgomery, but that surely would have clinched it too. On campus, on my way to that mecca, the Notre Dame Physics Department, I often pass the Lourdes grotto, a favorite of visiting alumnae, and think of the meeting there of Emerson and Arleen - what an amazing set of coincidences linking the Iowan, the Minnesotan and the Englander.

Circle 9
Back to Southern Indiana: in 1998, catholic Sebastien marries methodist Mia Maudlin in Salem, Indiana. The Maudlin family came to southern Indiana about the same time as the Morgans, in the very early 1800s. A short story indicates her this circle is much wider (or has a larger radius!) than might first seem: Mia’s mother Chong Cha Yang came from Korea, and hence the “Daughters of the American Republic” were quite surprised in their typically haughty ways when young Mia presented herself for membership. However, once they learned that the Maudlins are descended from Myles Standish (“Kilometers Deboutish”) they changed their attitude, giving Mia the chance to then reject them. So again, not a “mixed marriage”.
     Then in 2000, Mia and Sebastien linked to another of our circles and moved to Edgeland Avenue in Louisville Kentucky. So now we have Kentuckyans in the family once again - two bundles of energy called Ava and Tyra have been born there.

Circle 10
Arleen’s eldest son Denis with his wife Katrine and children Johanna and Paul returned to the circle of St. John’s in 1981. High power lawyershipping in Washington DC had been only a temporary attraction. They and the children Johanna and Paul enjoyed finding the more friendly, sincerely intellectual and more spiritually rewarding life that they found within the extended Benedictine Community. Their incredible change to the new “foreign country”, at least to the children, was the reverse of the change that had been experienced by Arleen and Emerson’s children in their trip to the “foreign country” of Arlington and Washington DC in 1959. It was so sad that Katrine did not live long enough to thoroughly enjoy it, succumbing to multiple sclerosis in 1997.
      The circle was completed as Denis and his second wife Susanna Humphrey moved into Kilfenora in the late 1990s. The original house of Emerson and Arleen has been transformed into a country residence hardly imagined as possible in those war -torn 1940s of Arleen’s early family times. It is noteworthy that Susanna is of course the daughter of Don and Mary Humphrey, the lifelong friends of Emerson and Arleen and the band of friends who were so active in the early days of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement.
      Just a personal note (as if the above circle stories were not personal!!): in South Bend we (Gordon) have “fought the good fight” to help a Catholic worker House to maintain residences for sustenance for local homeless people in their disagreement with self-righteous neighbors. Although the battle was lost, we feel the “war” (what an ugly word) was won. Our ideas of the word “neighbor” have been drastically revised, but at this present time we can say “help is on the way”.

Circle 11
As a crowning circle of three generations, in 1998, Arleen and Emerson’s son TMore , his wife Mary and their children returned to the Hynes house in Winnebago. They sold their picture frame and stretcher business in Washington DC, and came back to Minnesota. They came to the house that Emerson’s parents Merton and Mary Perrizo had built back in 1898 when they got married. Emerson was born there, and it was there that Arleen met all the rambunctious Hynes family members and learned they, the intellectual corn, soy-bean and cattle farmers of Minnesota (all democrats) were not much different from the intellectual pig farmers of Iowa (mostly democrats). Before TMore and Mary moved in, Emerson’s oldest brother Stanley and wife Charlotte (Aunt Char to everyone), had lived there for many years, although for several years after Stanley’s death (in 1985) Char had moved into the big city of Winnebago (population around 1000) and rented out the house.
      Their living again at the house makes it so wonderfully easy for all of us to come back and see the community of our roots. Just one of those many great experiences was the weekend family project of renovating and painting the old place - in exactly the colors conceived of by Mary Carroll Hynes (she is of Irish-catholic extraction, of course).

So, that is the eleven (count ‘em) circles. Just a few pieces, written to honor the old matriarch.

If you want to add more circles to the list, please feel free to send examples and I can add them to the website as part of our remembrance of a great lady.

A letter with a poem written by Emerson about a year before he met Arleen,
published in THE COMMONWEAL, February 10, 1939.(a pdf file)

Besides the drawing below, a few other pictures of Arleen in the twenty-first Century



(updated December 1, 2006 - send any errors/changes to hgordonb@comcast.net )

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