More News of my Family, Including My Father

My brother Tom’s funeral service is being held in Reykjavik, Iceland, on Thursday, September 26, at 2 PM Icelandic time (7 AM California time).  A number of people have inquired about this in order to send their prayers that way.  Thank you for your inquiry and your generous intention. If you would like to attend virtually, it will be livestreamed HERE.

I am pleased that my sister from Chicago and niece and a step-daughter of Tom’s will be in attendance along with his wife and Icelandic family.

Also, at least one DM reader, having learned of my mother and family, has asked that I say a word about my father which I am happy to do. 

George T. Fox was an Irishman whose family originally settled in Edmonton, Canada.  As a young boy, he was not sent to school but instead worked the family farm.  When his aunts visited, they objected and urged the family to move to the south side of Chicago where my father grew up and attended St. Rita’s Augustinian high school. 

There he excelled at sports and especially football and received a football scholarship to attend Villanova University (also Augustinian led) where he starred.  When his coach, Harry Struldrehr, one of the famed “four horsemen” of Notre Dame mythology, was hired to coach at the University of Wisconsin, he told my father he had a job with him on graduating from college.  So, my mother, dad, and their first born, Tom, moved to Madison, Wisconsin where we all grew up.

When I was ordained a priest, I received a letter from a high school classmate of my father who said, “your father was the most g.d. angry person I’ve ever known.  He must have married a helluva woman to have tamed him enough to have a priest in the family.”  It is true that dad’s childhood was tough—his father got polio in his late 20’s and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair.  Money was very scarce, and Dad remembered signs saying “job available, Irish do not apply.”

After ten years at the U of W, my father left coaching and entered a painting and contracting business.  He worked very long hours and was successful (he had painted houses to help supplement his scholarship money at Villanova where he also helped support his family back home).

Dad was a very practicing Catholic and always remained grateful to the Augustinians for keeping him on a right track as a young man.  They played, I think, a fatherly role to him that was missing at home.  He had a great sense of integrity and once told me he was glad that he was in business when he was because it had become so corrupt when he was older and retired.  

Dad was republican and we kids used to joke that my parents did not have to vote because their votes cancelled out one another’s.  (Dad voted for Nixon in 1960 and Mom voted for Kennedy for example.)  After Watergate happened, my father became very reticent about Nixon and the republican party.

Dad had a strong sense of justice to him (as did my mother).  When my older sister was dying, she reminded me of the day he and mom called a family meeting and Dad said: “I don’t make enough money to send all you kids to college so here’s the deal.  You boys must find scholarships—they are easier to get for boys (this was the 1950’s after all).  I will pay for the girls to go to college.”  Tom got a scholarship to Princeton; Nat to West Point; the Dominican Order paid for my education; and Mike got a football scholarship first to Villanova and then to the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater.

My mother told me this story when I was in my late 20’s:  She said that Dad always admired physical courage but that I taught him moral courage when I got polio at 13 years of age and he was blown away how calmly I took the news.  (No doubt his experience with his father’s polio made a lasting impression on him.)  It is true that my teen age years with my father were very mutually respectful.  

Saying good bye to him when he was dying, and just a month before I was silenced for a year by the Vatican, I said to him, “I bet you wish I had been just an ordinary parish priest, don’t you?”  and he squeezed my hand tightly and said, “yes I do.”  To which I replied: “Well, I couldn’t have been the kind of priest I am without the courage you taught me.”

Three days later, the nurse was getting him dressed to go to a cancer clinic to die.  She said to him, “I hear you are going to a beautiful place today.”  And he said, “Yes I am.”  Then his head fell on his chest, and he died on the spot.

See Matthew Fox, Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest.

Banner Image: The Reykjavík cemetery where Tom Fox’s ashes will be laid to rest. Photo courtesy of Matthew Fox.

Queries for Contemplation

Are there stories here that trigger stories of your own father or family memories that are meaningful to you?

Recommended Reading

Confessions: The Making of a Post-Denominational Priest (Revised/Updated Edition)

Matthew Fox’s stirring autobiography, Confessions, reveals his personal, intellectual, and spiritual journey from altar boy, to Dominican priest, to his eventual break with the Vatican. Five new chapters in this revised and updated edition bring added perspective in light of the author’s continued journey, and his reflections on the current changes taking place in church, society and the environment.
“The unfolding story of this irrepressible spiritual revolutionary enlivens the mind and emboldens the heart — must reading for anyone interested in courage, creativity, and the future of religion.”
—Joanna Macy, author of World as Lover, World as Self