An Historic Moment in Time - The New Orleans Province of the ...

12
2004, Dick was quietly ushered into a New Orleans hospital
for testing, but on the following day, knowing that he had
passed all tests, he knocked for admittance at the door above.
Dick Hartnett was a true man of God and disciple of St.
Ignatius.
Francis J. Riedinger, S.J.
It could be said that Br. Frank
Riedinger, a victim of Parkinson’s
disease, and at a frail age of 89, died a
victim of Ivan, the category four
hurricane that devastated the coastal
regions near Pensacola, Florida, on
September 15, 2004. On the eve of the
storm the entire community of Ignatius
Residence departed for the safety of
Grand Coteau, but the 150 mile trip on
Interstate 10, which is normally 3 hours, took a staggering 15
hours on this frightening day. The hospitality and cheer of
Our Lady of the Oaks Retreat House did much to restore the
spirits and energies of the shaken evacuees. But on
September 17, shortly after the return trip home, Br.
Riedinger drew the final breath of his remarkable and saintly
life. He had been a Jesuit for 58 years.
In 1927, at the age of 12, Frank emigrated with his
parents from their small village near Baden-Baden, Germany,
and settled in Chicago. Frank’s parents detected his
mechanical skills and enrolled him in a technical public high
school. Though his father hoped that his son would become
an architect, Frank attended the RCA Institute with the goal
of obtaining FCC Radiotelegraph and Radiotelephone
licenses. He became an expert in radio electronics.
For five years (1936-41) Frank sailed the high seas as a
radio operator, officer, and inspector aboard U.S. merchant
ships. He remembered delivering a cargo of scrap iron to
Japan before Pearl Harbor. He was in London when WWII
erupted and the British seized a German cargo. Frank lived a
devout Catholic life through it all. The thought of a religious
life was never far from his mind, and in 1946, and after his
last 5 years of inspecting the radio installation in New
Orleans shipyards, Frank presented himself in Grand Coteau
as a brother postulant.
A Jesuit who was always available, Br. Riedinger worked
in general maintenance in Grand Coteau, at Xavier Hall in
Pass Christian, and at Jesuit High School, New Orleans, but
he is most remembered at Loyola for the years he worked in
the physics department. Encouraged by Fr. Benedetto,
department chair, Frank went to Cambridge, Massachusetts
for training in cryogenics, a branch of physics that deals with
the production and effects of very low temperatures. This,
plus a visit to the University of Illinois, resulted in Loyola’s
physics lab becoming the first facility in the state to
manufacture liquid helium.
Frank’s 33 years at Loyola were interrupted twice by
calls to bring his skills to the missions. In 1974 he went for
five years to the Caroline Islands where his main task was the
restoration and maintenance of an island-hopping mission
boat, Star of the Sea; and in 1984 he was in Fremont,
California repairing and developing radio equipment for uses
in the missions. He spent six years in California, but home
for Frank was always the Loyola physics department.
Br. Riedinger’s last difficult months were marked an
inability to rest and a state of confusion that found him trying
to communicate with his caregivers in German. At his funeral
held on the Loyola campus Brother Terry Todd, Frank’s
friend and co-worker at Loyola and in the Pacific, and in
whose arms Frank expired, told of Brother’s gentle and kind
nature, and of Frank’s quiet and extremely profitable habit of
converting every scrap of leftover metal into funds for the
missions.
E. Matthew Turk, S.J.
Fr. Mat Turk, a veteran hospital
chaplain and holder of a Masters degree
in clinical psychology, died in Miami,
Florida, on June 27, after a brief hospital
stay. While investigating a growth on his
pancreas the doctors discovered that Mat
also had bone cancer. He was one of 10
children of a fervently Catholic family.
He was 77 years old at the time of his
death and had been a Jesuit for 55 years.
Born in Mobile, Alabama in 1927, Mat entered the
Society at Grand Coteau in 1948 after graduating from a
Catholic high school in Memphis, and serving briefly in the
U.S. Navy Reserve, and studying for one year at Loyola in
New Orleans.
During his philosophy studies from1952-55, Mat spent
his Sunday afternoons teaching catechism in Crighton, a
challenging mission station in Mobile that Spring Hill Jesuits
served. In 1959, after his regency in Shreveport and New
Orleans, he went to St. Mary’s in Kansas for theology. He
was ordained at Spring Hill in 1962, and completed his
tertianship in Cleveland in 1966.
After three years of special studies in psychology and
serving as a resident chaplain at the University of Detroit,
Mat spent 16 years as a staff psychologist at Michigan mental
health clinics in Dearborn and Detroit. In 1986-87 he took
one year of sabbatical leave in Jerusalem. From 1987 until
his death in 2004, he served as chaplain at three VA hospitals,
ministering to veterans in Dayton, Ohio, and in St. Petersburg
and Miami, Florida. In Miami he was also assigned to the
pastoral staff at the Jesuit parish, Gesu.
Mat enjoyed playing his clarinet, and he was quite
proficient in the French, Spanish, and classical Hebrew and
Latin languages. He looked forward to the infrequent times
when he could be with a community of fellow Jesuits, and he
would arrange his summer vacations to join other Jesuits at
the Perdido Bay villa.
onto them, O Lord
The SouthernJesuit