I was brought up as a Catholic. As a child there was a lot of fear at that time. People didn’t express in Catholicism that God is a loving person. I can remember going to missions and we’d have the redemptions you know, it was all fire and brimstone.

When I was a young – and I had an uncle that was a priest and I can remember him saying to me, “If you marry a Protestant I’ll never marry you.”

I said, “That’s fine, you don’t have to.”

I dated, you know, a couple men who were Jewish. I looked at the person. I think that God doesn’t say you have to be of this faith and I knew hypocrites who were of the same faith.

There was a time when I was in maybe my late 20s or early 30s I didn’t go to church sometimes, but then I missed it. It was something I really needed.

I always feel sorry for people who feel so hopeless; despair, that they don’t have a support system. I’ve seen it with patients and I’ve seen it with friends.

A friend of mine was dying and she just was so upset with the minister and I used to say, you know, my last words to her were, “I hope God brings you peace because that’s what you really need.”

But, I saw the people in Georgia that they really were very religious and it meant a lot to them.

I find now as I’m getting older that I participate in adoration, Eucharistic adoration. I’ve signed up as a Eucharistic minister, but when I was working in San Francisco I went to a church on California Street, St. Edwards, and there was a young Dominican preaching. His homily was that God is forgiving, that God loves you no matter if you have sinned or not and that you don’t have to have fear, and he was a physician.

He impressed me so that I went up to him as I left and said, “You know I wish I had heard that as a child that God was so loving, that he’ll take you back no matter what as long as you say you are sorry.”

That sort of changed me and I looked at religion in a different way. I had gone to gone to Dominican churches and I went to St. Vincent de Paul. When I moved to Santa Clara I went to the Jesuits so I have always gone to order churches.

I fortunately was very lucky at St. Joseph’s because they have excellent priests and they have order priests there as well. Well, they treat you like an adult. Many of those people were educated to be paternalistic and not looking as a loving father and, I mean, I had family members like a friend’s mother and people turned them off in the church. It turned a lot of people away.