Wayne Residents Had Visited Famed Relative Last Friday
(This article appeared in The Beacon of the Diocese of Paterson Dec. 13, 1979)
WAYNE – The news of Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s death brought a feeling of loss rather than shock to his cousin Tom Holliger’s family here Sunday night, even though three of them had seen him only last Friday and made plans for him to give First Communion to seven-year-old Michael Fulton Sheen Holliger next week.
“We feel a great void. So much of our life has always revolved around the archbishop,” said Mrs. Yolanda Holliger, whose 1960 marriage had been personally promoted by her husband’s famous relative. “He was 84 years old and had been in poor health, so it wasn’t something we were totally unprepared for.”
Mrs. Holliger said she and her husband and 16-year-old daughter Michele, a De Paul High School junior, had been greeted at the door by the archbishop when they visited him in his New York apartment last Friday.
“HE WAS energetic and very warm, and sat up with us for a while. He reminisced a good bit about old elementary school classmates he had visited, and talked about the homily he would be giving at Midnight Mass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral,” Mrs. Holliger said, her voice occasionally tearful.
“He gave us copies of a letter from Pope John Paul Il on his 60th anniversary as a priest, and the one he had written back to the pope. He also gave us a copy of that famous picture, my favorite, of the pope embracing him during his New York visit.
“He had inscribed it for us, ‘With love and a blessing from the rock and the pebble’,” she said.
“We were planning to bring all the children in next week, on whatever day he would decide for Michael’s First Communion in his private chapel,” Mrs. Holliger said. “His doctors were watching him very carefully, so he had to limit his activities.
THE ARCHBISHOP’S plans for young Michael were in line with a long-standing Sheen tradition of involvement with the Holligers. He baptized all six of the children, and confirmed both Michele and Rosemarie, now a freshman at the College of St. Elizabeth, Convent Station.
He was fulfilling a promise made when he married Tom and Yolanda in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, after playing Cupid all throughout their courtship.
He had become friends with young Yolanda Tomaiuoli, then a student at St. Elizabeth’s, when she traveled into New York to give him private organ lessons.
“He introduced my parents at one of his television programs,” Rosemarie had recalled in a report written at De Paul last year, “He would invite my mother to dinner and ask for an organ lesson and invite my father the same evening.” She also reported on other guests at the dinners — “Clare Booth Luce, and duchesses” — and how the archbishop loved music and would always ask Mrs. Holliger to play for him.
LAST FRIDAY, Archbishop Sheen offered to help second daughter Michele find a gown for the De Paul junior prom, coming up Saturday night.
“We told him we had been shopping in the city for one that day, but hadn’t found anything, ” Mrs. Holliger said. “He wanted to call some friends of his, who could see she had something, and not be disappointed. We assured him we would take care of it ourselves.”
“He was very interested in who was taking Michele to the prom. He wanted to know if we had made sure he was worthy of her,” Mrs. Holliger recalled. “We told him it was John Costello, son of The Beacon editor, and he joked that we should tell John the archbishop would be getting a report.”
The Sheen blood ties to the Holligers came through the archbishop’s first cousin, Tom’s mother, Mrs. Reeda Ibeck Holliger, whose 50th wedding anniversary he attended a few years ago in Florida.
HIS TIES to the Holliger children were warm and obviously very precious to him. Rosemarie’s report recalled how he would read bedtime stories in Latin, “crawl around the floor… share his favorite candies … and take my mother and us shopping, telling us to pick out whatever we wanted.” Rosemarie had just returned to St. Elizabeth’s Sunday night, after her father’s birthday celebration, when she heard the news of the archbishop’s death, and came back home immediately.
“I think only his nurse Kathy was with him when he died,” Mrs. Holliger said. “Kathy called us, but none of us was really able to talk, so we didn’t get any of the particulars. You know, he granted an interview a while ago on A.M. America, only because Kathy was a friend of the woman who was the interviewer.
“We will miss him,” said Mrs. Holliger. “A lot.”
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