Tower Topics ~ Summer 2002

Back to Table of Contents

Grandfather starts anew as a diocesan priest

Ron and Mary Elliott were partners.

They held each other’s hands through five miscarriages and the births of two daughters. Together, they dedicated themselves to parish ministry and Catholic education. Side by side they completed the formation program for the permanent diaconate. And on July 22, 1999, a heartbroken Ron was at Mary’s side when she lost her 10-year battle with breast cancer.

Even now, as Ron, 61, embarks on a new life as a priest, he knows his Mary is with him.

Father Elliott knew from the age of 12 that he wanted to be a priest. The summer after graduation from high school he enrolled in Conception Seminary, where he would work for nearly six years toward the only dream he ever had. But with graduation from theology school in sight, he “got to thinking about this girl.”

Ron and Mary had been classmates since grade school but had pretty much ignored each other, because he was set on the priesthood. But Ron would never get Mary out of his head.

Ron and Mary Elliott on their wedding day.

Just months after his withdrawal from the seminary the two were married. “She was the prettiest and sweetest girl there was,” he recalled. “And I would judge our marriage to be one of the best ever.”

Drafted in the Vietnam War, Ron took his new bride to Germany where he was stationed as an Army intelligence specialist. By 1968, they were back in Kansas City where Ron began a career as a Catholic school teacher. The couple started a family and immersed themselves in the life of St. Charles parish. They taught baptism prep classes, visited sick parishioners, served on the liturgy and social outreach committees, and worked at the soup kitchen. Ron would become president of both the parish council and the school board.

“We were doing everything,” he recalled. “We were in it up past our ears.”

At the urging of his pastor, Ron decided to become a permanent deacon. With Mary at his side he was ordained in 1984. Two years later he left teaching to become a full-time pastoral assistant at neighboring St. Andrew parish. As their daughters reached adulthood, the dynamic duo of Mary and Ron kicked into high gear. They founded RCIA programs in several parishes and Ron worked overtime directing almost every aspect of the parish’s family ministries. He witnessed marriages and baptized babies. Marriage prep, preaching on Sunday mornings, overseeing the parish’s finances and recruiting lay ministers – Ron’s “service bone,” as he puts it, was satisfied.

But then a visit to the doctor brought devastating news – Mary had breast cancer. In the ensuing decade, the couple would exhaust every medical means, sometimes flying as far as Texas to see doctors and investigate new treatments. But the gregarious former seminarian and the pretty Irish Catholic girl always returned to the tireless volunteerism that seemed to sustain them.

Easter of 1996 the diocese gave Deacon Elliott a promotion. He was transferred to St. Mary’s, a small priestless parish in heavily Protestant Higginsville, Mo. The Elliott’s were welcomed with open arms by the some 200 families of St. Mary’s, and the parish has thrived under Ron’s leadership. He and a group of parishioners he affectionately calls the “elder engineers” renovated the church hall, and the parish choir is top-notch. At a recent celebration, a guest asked Father Ron how he got the big-city choir to come all the way out to Higginsville. And the pastor proudly tells how his tiny parish posted the diocese’s highest percentage of participation in the recent “Gift of Faith” capital campaign.

But as the parish grew more vigorous, Mary was dying.

Father Elliott shakes his head sadly recalling the final months of Mary’s battle with cancer. “I always thought I would be the first one to go,” he said. “She was the kind of person who could light up a room.”

Hope flagged in the spring of 1999 and Mary said the words that would help change the course of her husband’s life. “When we realized that the cancer was getting ahead of us,” he recalled, “Mary told me, ‘Why don’t you go back and become a priest.’”

A year after Mary’s death, with her encouragement still fresh in his mind, Elliott approached the bishop. Although the diocese traditionally limited priestly ordination to men under 50, Elliott’s extensive seminary studies at Conception, his three decades of pastoral work, and his current position as de facto pastor, persuaded Bishop Raymond Boland to make an exception.

With the enthusiastic support of his family and parishioners, Elliott embarked for Sacred Heart Seminary near Milwaukee, Wis., which specialized in second-career vocations.

“I remember driving alone out of Higginsville, headed for Wisconsin,” Father Elliott recalls. “Somewhere north of Richmond I teared up.

“I was scared,” he admits. “Here I was leaving all I’d known for 30 years, and I didn’t know if it was going to work out.”

But seminary life proved to be a comfort. Father Elliott was an A student and plowed through two years of seminary with ease, all while managing his parish’s affairs from afar by phone and fax.

Dale Sherman, a St. Mary’s parishioner, wasn’t surprised to see his pastor ace the seminary. “He’s the smartest person I’ve ever known,” Sherman said. “He’ll always be the biggest duck in the puddle.”

Father Ron's ordination picture.

Ron Elliott was ordained March 2 this year.

Although most of his duties are the same as before, Father Elliott can now also hear confessions, anoint the sick and celebrate the Eucharist, which, he says, has been an especially powerful experience.

“I’m used to being up there on the altar every day,” he said. “I’ve done it for a long time and I’m comfortable, but at the consecration I feel this tightness in my chest. It overwhelms me what is happening, and that I’m a part of it.”

For the most part, Father Elliott and his parishioners have taken the change in stride. Although he admits sometimes he still looks around for the priest when someone calls him “Father.”

Young families with small children especially appreciate his grandfatherly patience.

“On a Sunday, we can have a lot of kids, and they’ll be crying and making noise,” Father Ellott says. “I know that can take some people off stride, but to me, it’s music.”

Some parents are admittedly ill at ease “having their kids climbing over them in the pews, playing with their cars or eating cheerios. But I’ve been there, worn that hat, and had that T-shirt.”

Sherman says families in the parish have seen Elliott as a loving husband, father and grandfather; so seeing him now as a caring pastor has been an easy transition. “He suffered a lot with his wife, he raised two wonderful girls and he’s a good grandfather. There’s a compassion in him that people are drawn to. He really relates to people.”

But there’s a bad side to Deacon Elliott becoming Father Elliott. “I’m afraid we’ll lose him,” Sherman admits. “He’s so good, and he’s so smart, I’m afraid he’ll end up in the hierarchy of the Church, and our little parish will lose him.”

As for Father Elliott’s daughters, calling their father Father is perfectly natural.

“It’s really more strange for other people than it is for us,” said Georgia James, his younger daughter. “A lot of things are still the same. He’s done so much work for the Church for so long. It just kind of fits.” In fact, as a deacon, Elliott presided at his daughter’s wedding and baptized both her sons.

But James admits she still gets surprised reactions when she tells people her dad is a priest.

“I have to go into the whole story every time,” she said. “But once they hear it, people think it’s a neat thing.”

James says she’s sure her mother would be proud.

“On the day of his ordination, I could just see her smiling and praying for him,” she said. “He’s got a lot of help up there.”

The rectory is now a little quieter and a little emptier without Mary. Family portraits hang on the walls. A prominently displayed black and white photograph depicts a 24-year-old Ron Elliott, in his own words “not much to look at,” standing next to a beautiful young girl in white with a smile that seems to light up the room.

Father Ron Elliott’s life is a love story.

He believes it was the love of God that awakened him to a priestly vocation in the 6th grade and eventually led him to the seminary in the summer of 1958. He also knows that it was God’s grace that filled his soul the day he decided to leave.

And one of Mary Elliott’s last and purest expressions of love was telling her husband to “go back.”

“I don’t know how many times a day I think of Mary,” Father Elliott says with a warm smile. “I’m always asking, ‘How would Mary handle this?’”

Ron and Mary Elliott were always partners. And that hasn’t changed.

Back to Table of Contents