By Cathy Tilzey
A lot of Montanans remember Bishop George L. Thomas from his school days in the state in the 1950s and ’60s. Some shared their stories with the Montana Catholic last week, and had good things to say about the Diocese of Helena’s new spiritual leader.
“We’re great friends,” said Brother Steve Hale, an Irish Christian Brother from Butte, who got to know the future bishop during their sophomore year at Boys’ Central High School.
Brother Hale, who was liturgy coordinator for the Cathedral of St. Helena between 1994 and 2000, said his friend got his driver’s license first and drove them around Butte in the Thomas family’s yellow station wagon.
He recalled that they occasionally skipped gym class – which both boys disliked – and hid out in the biology lab to do their homework. The bishop was a better student, Brother Hale said.
The Hale family moved to Helena in the boys’ junior year. They have kept in touch over the years and visited each other when possible. Brother Hale said he will be in Montana later this month and hopes to see Bishop Thomas.
“It’s nice to see someone I know sitting in that chair,” he stated by telephone from Florida, where he has served since last year.
Josephine McDermott was Bishop Thomas’ first-grade teacher in Harlem, Mont., and remembers him as a “very quiet, gentle little boy, really serious.”
In a telephone interview from her home in Cut Bank, she said she also taught him in a Saturday catechism class.
“He had a big dog and he’d come to visit,” the retired teacher said. Sometimes, his sister Mary Ann came with him to her house.
McDermott said she was delighted to attend Bishop Thomas’ installation, and had a great seat near the front of the nave. She traveled to Helena with two other members of St. Margaret Parish, Kathy Campbell and Lucy Durocher.
The same day, June 4, she went to Missoula to hear another former student speak at a high school graduation. “It was my day!” she declared.
“I’m so proud and so happy” for the new bishop, McDermott said, adding that the music and the setting for the installation were glorious. “I was just bursting with pride.”
Father Dan Driscoll, pastor of St. Joseph Parish in Libby, has known Bishop Thomas since they attended Boys’ Central High School in Butte together. He said they didn’t have classes together in high school but became good friends at Carroll College. Both attended St. Thomas Seminary in Seattle.
“He was the first person I talked to when I decided to become a priest,” Father Driscoll said in a telephone interview.
Together they received the ministries – introduction to the clerical state, lector and acolyte – and were ordained deacons Dec. 6, 1975, by Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen, then the metropolitan of the Seattle Archdiocese.
Deacon Driscoll attended his friend’s priestly ordination May 22, 1976, and Father Thomas concelebrated Mass at Father Driscoll’s ordination June 18.
Father Driscoll returned to the Helena Diocese, and has kept in touch with Father Thomas ever since. They also visited each other’s family homes occasionally. And Father Driscoll went to the bishop’s episcopal ordination in Seattle in 2000.
“He’s a fantastic piano player” and plays by ear, Father Driscoll said. He would play in a lounge in their Carroll College dorm and take requests. Father Driscoll’s request was usually “Mona Lisa.”
The bishop also played piano at Father Driscoll’s sister’s house. She still remembers it, he added.
“I feel privileged to be a close friend of his,” Father Driscoll said. “He has a presence … an ability to make people feel good.”
Published in The Montana Catholic, Vol. 20, No. 6, June 18, 2004.