The celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Diocese of Charlotte is particularly meaningful to me. I’m a product of it and the labors of all those who have gone before us spreading the Gospel in North Carolina. Especially the Sisters of Mercy.
When this diocese was born, I was 5 years old and I wasn’t Catholic. I was born in Charlotte and raised in Mount Holly as a United Methodist. No one in my family was Catholic. My introduction to the Church came in 1975 when my parents enrolled my brother Tommy and me in Sacred Heart Grade School in Belmont, a ministry of the Sisters of Mercy. I was in the fourth grade, and Tommy was in the first. My teacher was a lay teacher, and Tommy’s class had Mercy Sister Mary Kathleen McNamara.
Now, Tommy and I had never seen sisters before. So when Tommy walked into his classroom and saw Sister Kathleen standing in the front of the class dressed in black from head to foot, he like to have died. The only woman he knew who dressed in a black outfit was the Wicked Witch of the West, and he was deathly afraid of her! Poor Tommy went out of his mind. He made himself sick, ran a fever and everything that goes with it. During the first couple of weeks, by the time Mom got him to Sister Kathleen’s room, both of them were crying.
Then Sister Kathleen worked her magic – magic only an Irish sister can perform – and ultimately Tommy fell in love with her.
As for me, I loved it all. I was amazed at the Mass. We went every Friday. I was fixated on the Blessed Sacrament, which everyone except a few of us received, and I wondered why I couldn’t be part of it. And I was also in awe of the sisters. Their faith. Their devotion to Christ. Their sacrifice. Everything about them.
I attended Sacred Heart through the eighth grade, the highest grade the school offered. Then I went back to public school and later graduated from Belmont Abbey College. My last two years in college, I was a licensed United Methodist pastor serving two small churches in Union County. After college I began a career as a police officer, and shortly thereafter I married a girl from northwest Pennsylvania who’d moved here while we were in high school. We had become friends and both graduated from the Abbey, and we married in December 1990.
A couple of years later, I felt moved by the Holy Spirit to leave Methodism. The Spirit pointed me in the direction of the Roman Catholic Church. I attended RCIA at Queen of the Apostles Church in Belmont for two years, during which time I regularly returned to Sacred Heart Convent to seek the counsel of my friends, the Sisters of Mercy. Sister Kathleen spent many hours with me and my wife Laurie, and she would even become our daughter Kathleen’s godmother.
When I joined the Church during the Easter Vigil Mass in 1994, my mother flatly refused to attend. She said the worst thing she ever did was send me to Sacred Heart because that’s where all this nonsense came from. Laurie joined the Catholic Church several years later, and we raised our family in the faith.
But a funny thing happened one evening about four years back while I was visiting Mom, who by then was in her 80s. During our visit, she looked at me and said, “Bill, I want to talk to you about joining the Catholic Church.” And she did, four months later! The seeds of faith planted by the Sisters of Mercy in my life had grown to include an entire family. Which is the point.
The Sisters of Mercy began planting these same seeds of faith throughout North Carolina long before there was a diocese in this state at all. From Wilmington to Asheville, they founded schools and hospitals. They accepted the invitation of Benedictine Abbot Leo Haid to come to Belmont to assist the Benedictines with their work spreading the Gospel in what was then mission country.
During their time here in the diocese, the Sisters of Mercy have also founded world class ministries such as Holy Angels, Catherine’s House and the House of Mercy, while also staffing schools and hospitals at the same time. And though they are few in number now, their legacy is that of the Parable of the Sower. The seeds they’ve sown from Murphy to Manteo continue to produce fruit in our state and this wonderful Diocese of Charlotte. All for the cause of Christ. Which gives us all a reason to celebrate!
Deacon W.S. “Bill” Melton Jr. serves at St. Michael the Archangel Church in Gastonia.