This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
When it comes to saints, we Scandinavian Lutherans around Rock Island have a poor track record. We have only one—Saint Olaf—born in 995 A.D. For the last thousand years, it's been slim pickings—not a one. Your Lutheran saint is an endangered species.
That was before Father Al Bischoff arrived in Rock Island in 1987 as campus pastor to the Catholic kids at Augustana College. He moved into an old house in our neighborhood, a block from campus, a Lutheran neighborhood, with one Catholic family, three Baptists, and two houses we were never sure of.
Father Al was a Jesuit, those people the Popes were constantly threatening to disband because of what my pocket encyclopedia calls "crafty intrigues."
Father Al must have accidentally taken the wrong set of vows. If there was intrigue and craft there, it was disguised inside a shiny bald head rising above a fringe of hair, and a constant smile from red cheek to red cheek, the whole assembly poking up out of a bulky turtleneck sweater. Wherever he walked, down our street to work, across campus, or in the park, everyone became a saint.
"Hiya, Saint," was Father Al's greeting to all alike, children, neighbors, students, football players, faculty. "Hiya, Saint."
We nearly saint-less Lutherans were especially suspicious. His eyesight must be going. We had looked forward to Heaven as a more discriminating place. Here was Father Al, adding fifteen or twenty new saints every day. We asked the hardest question a Lutheran could think of: Would Father Al have called Hitler a saint?
But we could not escape, and gradually we changed. Wherever he walked in the neighborhood, spirits brightened, burdens lifted. Normally proper Lutherans began to cross the street to visit with each other on front lawns.
Father Al went on making saints for three years until he was transferred. Only then did we realize what a strange event we had witnessed. Normally, it is miracles that lead to sainthood, but in our neighborhood, sainthood led to miracles.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
