God's Hall Of Fame

NORFOLK, Va. (AP) - She must have been in the first grade or so
when the whole thing started.
Brenda Query and her family visited her great-aunt, Sister
Aubrey, who was a Catholic nun, a Sister of Charity. After their
visit, Sister Aubrey gave little Brenda a statue of St. Catherine.
About 100 years before, St. Catherine had been one of the same
order. Back in the '60s, about the time of this family visit, the
Sisters of Charity were called "Big Bonnets."
And, indeed, the little china figurine, about 5 inches tall, was
of a nun wearing a habit with a large, winged bonnet.
"Somehow, I always had a devotion to the saints," said Brenda,
a sister herself now.
She paused thoughtfully.
"I like to think of the saints as God's Hall of Fame."
That first religious statue was joined by more presents to a
little girl with an unusual enthusiasm for religious figures.
She read their biographies. She collected holy cards of the
saints.
Her mother and father, Connie and Lyons Query, recognized her
devotion and embraced it. Other girls her age collected Barbie
dolls, comic books or baseball cards. Not their Brenda.
And so her saints came marching in.
"My dad was a State Farm insurance agent, and when my parents
would travel to conventions, they started bringing me back statues
of saints."
Sometimes, there were family trips or pilgrimages to religious
shrines.
"I got this one, Brother Andre, in Montreal," she said,
picking up a statue of a religious figure wearing a brown robe.
"And this bust of Pere Frederick came from another little Canadian
town on a river. That was one trip where I got to pick."
When she chose the saint to celebrate her confirmation as a
Catholic, she was given a figure of St. Agnes, patron saint of
girls.
A statue of St. Anne joined the collection because "Anne" is
her middle name.
St. Therese and St. Anthony were favorites of her paternal
grandmother, so she got them in her honor. St. Therese, patron
saint of missionaries, is always shown carrying roses to symbolize
something she was to have said: "When I'm in heaven, I will shower
down roses." St. Anthony, the patron saint of lost articles, was a
saint with whom her grandmother Hilda had something in common
because she tended to misplace things.
There are a lot of patron saints in the Catholic church and no
end to the reasons, it seemed, to let them gather in the home of
their young devotee.
When her collection first started, her family lived in a house
in Bel-Aire off Little Creek Road in Norfolk. A staircase to the
second floor seemed the perfect place for the figurines.
"Pretty soon, we had one statue on each step until, one day, my
cousin and I were coming down in a hurry and one of the saints lost
its head."
When her parents moved the family, their second house in
Camellia Shores had a big picture window in the living room. Again,
the statues got a new home. They sat on different ledges close to
the glass, facing the sun. Some of their colors faded over the
years.
"In our third house, my father built bookshelves in our living
room and the statues were lined up there," she said, recalling
their home in Meadowbrook Forest. "When visitors came over, we'd
test them to see how many they knew."
She laughed, then confessed something: She and her younger
brothers, Joseph and Lyons Jr., even quizzed their priest when he
came to visit.
Eventually, the young lover of saints - graduated from Norfolk
Catholic High School when it was on Granby Street beside DePaul
Hospital- and left for the convent in 1971. The day she took her
vows four years later, her parents gave her a statue of Jesus the
Good Shepherd.
The saints had done their job, it seemed. So on the bookshelves
in her parents' home is where, for 30 years, the statues of her
childhood stayed. It seemed a good place since most of them had
come from her mother and father anyway.
"I wasn't going to take them with me from convent to convent."
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Sister Brenda is now 56 and lives at St. Pius X Convent in
Norfolk. Her order is known as Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate
Heart of Mary. She wears lace-up shoes, a black skirt wide enough
to allow for her brisk stride, a white blouse with the tiniest bit
of embroidery on the collar, a button-up vest and a veil.
She works as Catholic director of religious education at the
Naval Amphibious Base Chapel at Little Creek and treasures the fact
that she is once again living close to family. During the day, she
has young relatives sitting in classes across the street at St.
Pius X School.
The convent is sensibly outfitted with furniture likely chosen
as much for durability as comfort. The Catholic sisters do not have
or display many personal belongings in their dormlike rooms.
Three years ago, her parents downsized and gave her saints back
to her. She keeps the religious figures she collected as a child
and young woman wrapped and stored.
At one time she had close to 40 statues of saints, Jesus, Mary
and Joseph. It's hard to say which one is the most special to her,
but one might be a carefully crafted St. Francis of Assisi, lover
of nature and God's creatures.
"My maternal grandmother had a little hobby of ceramics and she
made St. Francis for me," she said, adjusting the figure on the
altar in the convent's chapel where she had arranged the statues so
she could tell their stories.
Some time ago, she decided to begin passing her collection to
family and people in her ministry. It gives her great joy to spread
the devotion, she says.
The first one to get a new home was St. Lucy, the patron of
eyesight, who went to a friend having eye surgery.
She gave away her St. Benedict to celebrate another friend's
silver jubilee at St. Gregory the Great Catholic Church in Virginia
Beach. "He was a little worse for the wear, so I gave him to the
art teacher at St. Pius school and, after being held captive for
several weeks, he was refurbished."
Two cousins, one starting college at James Madison University,
the other returning to Virginia Tech,received statues of Jesus the
Good Shepherd as a reminder to let the Good Shepherd guide them in
their college years.
And her St. Gerard, patron saint of expectant mothers, went to a
special couple, a Navy pilot and his wife.
"They shared with me that they both wanted the blessings of a
child and it just wasn't working."
A few months after Sister Brenda gave them St. Gerard, the
couple told her they were expecting.
Two nieces and nephew, students at St. Pius X School, also
received statues from their aunt's collection. Sixth-grader Allison
Query was given a guardian angel; her brother Ryan got a statue of
Joseph to mark his first Communion. Their cousin, Shannon Query, a
third-grader, received a statue of Elizabeth Ann Seaton after
giving a presentation on the founder of the Sisters of Charity, and
because Elizabeth is Shannon's middle name.
"Shannon's great-great-aunt, my great-aunt, was a member of
Mother Seaton's Sisters of Charity and the one who started my whole
collection," Sister Brenda said.
There are 25 left in the collection now St. Joseph carrying the
Christ Child; St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers; St.
John Neumann in his purple robe, and St. Pius, for whom her school
was named and whom she credits with having brought her full circle
home to reside in the convent where, as a child, she helped the
sisters.
A recent acquisition was a gift from a sister stationed in Lima,
Peru a clay statue of Jesus the Good Shepherd that has Peruvian
features and is wearing a native hat, striped shirt and sandals.
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Some people don't understand Catholics' love of saints, Sister
Brenda said. Part of the explanation is in a story she likes to
tell when she talks to adults and children about them.
In that tale, a little boy asks his mother about the various
saints he sees pictured in the stained glass of church windows. By
the time he is in kindergarten and is asked to explain what a saint
is, he replies, "Saints are people the sun shines through."
"Sun," she always tells those listening to the story, also can
be taken to mean "son," so that saints are the people that God
shines through.