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Fr. Charles Raphael Hess, O.P.
"The evil men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones..."   Fr. Charles Hess would readily recall here the rest of that famous funeral oration spoken in a play set in pagan times.  It’s the pagan in all of us speaking: forget the good, remember and proclaim the evil.  Happily, at Christian funerals it’s the other way round: forget the evil, remember the good.  With Charles this is easy to do.  There was so little in his life that any of us might consider wicked, and so much quiet goodness.  That word "quiet" keeps surfacing as I think of Charles.  Nothing sensational about his day to day living, scarcely a single notable deed or accomplishment.  Only in summary does his extraordinary worth begin to sound.

Through seventy-six years of life, and over fifty years as priest and Dominican, we find Charles’s love for and pride in his family: his mother and father, three siblings and a multitude of other relatives.  When Charles vowed himself to religious life he unreservedly fulfilled the Lord’s demand to "leave father, mother, brothers, sisters...," but only in the sense that now his love reached deeper into and beyond them.  It was a joy for him to return to his family periodically for a marriage or baptism or some other ministry.  And with 32 nephews and nieces together with their offspring, family ministry was something of a vocation itself.

In the broader reaches of his Dominican vocation he was teacher as well as preacher, both here and in England; and whatever other ministry he exercised, simultaneously with it, he would have a student or two for Latin, Greek, theology, history.  He was also scholar, with some publications, and, by the appointment of the Master General, served with the prestigious Leonine Commission, critically editing the works of St. Thomas.   He served as Secretary to the Provincial in days when the Secretary was the Provincial’s right-hand man.  He was also province procurator, and once both secretary and procurator at the same time.  He was a devoted and respected Master of cooperator brothers, and wherever he was stationed he served as chaplain to the Dominican laity, helping, as he might, those in the world hungering for holiness in the spirit of St. Dominic.  He ministered in several of our parishes as Associate Pastor and at St. Dominic’s in San Francisco as both Pastor and Prior.  He was Province Archivist and Historian, and as such kept the brethren informed about key moments, persons, and events of our past in order that, as he believed, we might have a still better future.   But whatever his official assignment, he was not defined by it.  Wherever there was need, whether within or outside the scope of his current job, his priestly spirit reached out to it.

For Charles even more important than his active ministries was that of his religious life as such.  A religious life was something to grow up into.  My recollections of Charles are of him in choir during community Mass and office, quietly walking the corridors or leisurely (prayerfully?) working in library or archives, at meals and recreation or on a picnic with the rest of the community talking and laughing sometimes, but mainly quiet, serious but often smiling, always gentle; and almost always in his religious habit, a sign to all, himself included, that he, like St. Dominic, was the Lord’s man.  And I see him praying the rosary, by himself in his room or chapel or, preferably he would say, in common with one or two others.  A true, childlike Dominican, he clung to Mary as his own mother as well as mother of Order and Church.

But all of this was only the beginning.  Charles’s ministry climaxed in his last years, when it would seem to many to have ended.  As demonstrated emphatically by Christ, the best of ministry is not so much action as passion.  It’s in and through the cross — when Christ could do nothing — that we’re made whole.   Thus in Christianity the supreme worth of vicarious suffering.  And the greatest suffering isn’t so much physical as mental, spiritual - being emptied, as was Christ, even of God.  "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"   Charles was one with Christ in this, having suffered for such a long time from depression, which in these last years became chronically debilitating.

A final, necessary word about this quiet, gentle man.  Try as I might, I can’t recall his having bad-mouthed anyone.  Even when there was something obviously wrong in someone’s person or action he would, often to others’ annoyance, stubbornly refuse to admit it, and if he did he’d be quick to excuse it.   This wasn’t because he was blind to evil.  He read the newspapers, had heard thousands of confessions, was practiced in examining his own conscience, suffered his share of injustice.  But while so many of the rest of us, prompted by the pagan vestiges in our hearts, go to the extreme of focusing on "the evil men do," perhaps Charles figured he’d help right the balance by going to the opposite extreme.

Yes, so much good in Charles’ living and dying.  We’re grateful for that.  And grateful for his quietly having found and encouraged so much of the same in the rest of us.

- Fabian Parmisano, O.P.

XII:277