Faith, family the backbone of Bishop-elect Williams’ childhood years

From the beginning of their marriage, Bishop-elect Joseph Williams’ parents, Dr. Gary and Mary Williams, knew the kind of family life they wanted. And they were resolute about it being rooted in their Catholic faith.

Gary, 72, was a farm boy from Chaska whose childhood home is now part of the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. Mary, 71, grew up in south Minneapolis. She was 4 when her mother began taking her to daily Mass, a habit she maintained until she herself had little children.

“We both grew up in happy family life, and we saw our parents model what we wanted to have in our marriage,” Mary said. “My mother was big on traditions, and I carried on a lot of her traditions. We created a lot of our own traditions. … I think traditions are big on keeping families together.”

In the Williams family, those traditions were rooted in the Church’s liturgical year — celebrating St. Nicholas Day Dec. 6 and telling special stories on Advent evenings, home-sewn matching Christmas outfits, sacrifices and Operation Rice Bowl every Lent, sweetened cereal for breakfast on patron saints’ feast days.

Gary took the older kids to daily Mass nearly every day, and he and Mary also kept a weekly date night. The whole family took an annual fall walk in William O’Brien State Park near Scandia.

“They were so on the same page on how they wanted to raise their children and their family. … They were just so intentional,” said their oldest daughter, Maria O’Malley, 41, sitting with her parents and siblings Anne Droske, 40, and John, 48, in the Williams’ living room Jan. 3.

She turned to her parents. “You just didn’t miss anything,” she told them, “like going to daily Mass. It was every day — we didn’t miss it. My dad never missed praying at night or my dad reading Bible stories to us — it was every night.”

Pope Francis named Bishop-elect Williams an auxiliary bishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis Dec. 10. His ordination is scheduled for Jan. 25, the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, in the Cathedral of St. Paul in St. Paul.

Gary and Mary met in 1970 at a dance at the University of Minnesota, where Gary was a student. Mary was there with friends. Gary caught her eye, and she moved through the crowd to stand next to him. The first question he asked her was, “Are you Catholic?”

“Yes,” she answered. He said he was, too.

“Do you come from a large family?” he asked.

Yes, she did, she said: She was the third of 11. He told her he was the youngest of eight.

His third question: “Would you like to dance?”

“The interview was short,” he told The Catholic Spirit with a laugh. They danced together the rest of that evening, and the next day he called to ask her on a date. They were engaged about nine months later, on Aug. 8, the feast of the Assumption, and married at Visitation in Minneapolis the following May 1, the feast of St. Joseph the Worker. (Because of these feasts, their daughters have a version of Mary in their names, and their sons all have Joseph in their names.)

The cherished story of the couple’s meeting has been retold over and over in the Williams family — their grandchildren included it in a skit they performed for the couple’s 50th wedding anniversary celebration last year.

Mary said that while they were dating, she and Gary “talked about everything they could think of” about their vision and values for their lives, and that laid a foundation for a strong family culture as they began to raise children.

The Williams’ first son, Matthew, was born before their first wedding anniversary, and three other boys — John, Joseph and Peter — soon followed. (Joseph was born the day after their third wedding anniversary.) The family lived in a two-bedroom apartment in south Minneapolis as Gary attended medical school and completed his residency. In 1978, they moved to Stillwater, where Gary practiced as a family physician.

The couple had five more children — Mark, Maria, Anne, Paul and Katherine. Today, the nine siblings are ages 36 to 49, and six of them have children of their own, for a total of 30 grandchildren. Of them, 28 live within a few miles of the Williams’ home (the others are nearby in St. Paul). The oldest is 26; the youngest two were born last year.

Babies were always a pivotal part of the Williams family, even when they weren’t their own. Gary delivered about a thousand, he said, and his kids were accustomed to family plans changing last minute when the phone rang with news of a laboring mother.

“A lot of times you pack up the van, go hunting for a Christmas tree or be on your way to Valleyfair and I’d get the phone call and everybody heads back,” he recalled.

Those calls taught the Williams children flexibility, but there was little uncertainty in their family life, Maria recalled. Their parents’ love and affection made them feel safe and secure, she said.

“We knew how much our parents loved each other,” she said.

Bishop-elect Williams was a contented baby and easygoing child, his parents recalled. As a boy, he “always cared about the person in his class that didn’t have a friend,” Mary said. “I just saw goodness in his heart.”

In high school, he was a talented student and athlete, albeit competitive. “The only time I actually ever saw him get angry would be on the tennis court,” Maria said. “He did break a few rackets.”

With Mass a part of most weekdays, the boys were altar servers, something, John said, that helped them feel “plugged into” parish life as participants, not just observers.

Mary blessed their children with holy water each day — something she began when she was a young mother each time she laid one of her babies in a crib. The family also learned about saints, regularly prayed the rosary, gave God thanks before meals — even in public — and knelt together bedside for night prayers. “It was a nice prayer that always began ‘Dear Jesus,’ so there was this affection,” Anne said.

The Williams were intentional not only about what was part of their family culture, but also about what wasn’t — and that included all-access to the television. Gary built a TV cabinet with a door that locked over the screen.

“To dispel any idea of our sanctity, as little people, we’d climb up on top, and if there was one board loose, we’d try to turn the TV so you could catch a sliver of the TV we could see,” John said, laughing.

Gary and Mary saved discussions about family issues or disagreements for their date nights, and most disagreements dissipated on their own.

“We gave (Bishop-elect Williams) a home (where he felt) welcomed and loved, and gave him good siblings that surrounded him and passed on our faith in example and in word and Catholic schools and getting him prepared for sacraments,” Gary said. “We do joke a lot.”

In a press conference Dec. 10, the day of his episcopal announcement, Bishop-elect Williams described his family as “a school of charity.”

That “school” included caring well for their brother Mark, 43, who has cerebral palsy and intellectual disabilities.

“He’s brought a lot of joy to our family,” Mary said, noting that he’s also beloved around Stillwater.

When Anne heard her older brother describe their family as a “school of charity,” she said the phrase struck her because “we’re not a perfect family, so with that comes struggling, fighting for … reconciliation and restoring the love and grace when things are off.”

“It’s a school: That’s where you learn things. You learn how to forgive. How to share. How to encourage,” she continued. “We’re always talking with our kids about, ‘Your words can give life. What you say matters.’ … We learned that at home. We learned how to work through things and forgive, and to ask for forgiveness, too.”

As adults, the Williams children who are now parents are working to instill the same values in their own homes. Time with Gary and Mary is treasured by their grandchildren, including eight who are adopted. Maria and her husband adopted six from Ethiopia (and have five biological children), and John and his wife have two children: a daughter adopted from India and a son from Korea.

As both Bishop-elect Williams and their brother Father Peter Williams attended the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio, then The St. Paul Seminary and were later ordained, their love of God refreshed the faith of the whole family, Anne said.

“It was exciting,” she said. “We had all of these traditions and daily Mass, so we were rooted, but there really was a springtime of faith in our family through Father Joseph and Father Peter, just inviting us to new things, in sharing with us the things they were pondering and learning.”

Bishop-elect Williams “has always been so good at inviting and proposing, never imposing,” she said. She remembers taking an apologetics class he taught at St. Michael while she was in high school.

“I still have my worksheets from that because I learned with a new lens some of these things” of the faith, she said. “I think their vocations — both Father Joseph and Father Peter — were a real gift to me, I think to our whole family. … They’ve really become like spiritual fathers to me on my own journey.”

Bishop-elect Williams “is one of these guys who can work with little children — they love him — he’s good with the elderly. He’s good with people with special needs, people who are disadvantaged,” Mary said. “He has a heart, and I don’t see that in everybody, that … you can work so well with such a range of people.”

On Dec. 19, Gary and Mary gathered at an Olive Garden with their children and their spouses to eat together and take time to honor Bishop-elect Williams for his episcopal appointment. All but Father Peter, who was on a retreat, were there. They took turns speaking about what they admire in Bishop-elect Williams and how he has impacted their lives, to “pour our love on him,” Mary said.

“It was a beautiful evening,” she said, and it’s reflective of a new tradition in the family of intentionally honoring each other in word, writing or song on birthdays.

“We each have a deep love of our Catholic Church, for our faith,” Mary said. “We try to live and pass that love for the faith on to our kids and our grandkids. I never miss an opportunity to encourage them in different things. We both try to encourage our kids, just … trying to affirm each kid and their qualities of life I see in them, their different abilities. We’re all working toward heaven as our end goal.”