Remembering my Aunt Agnes’ 104 years of faith

Not long after I made my first holy Communion as a second grader at St. Clare School in Essex more than four decades ago, I received a beautiful typewritten note from my Aunt Agnes Vanecek in New Jersey.

Congratulating me on reaching a spiritual milestone, my paternal aunt described how she liked to “play a game” with Jesus every time she received the Blessed Sacrament.

As part of her prayers after Communion, my aunt said, she would kneel and invite Christ into her heart. Then she promised to do all she could to stay close to him.

If I would do the same, she said, I would know Christ’s love more deeply in my life and I would grow in faith.

It was simple advice, written for a child – yet as profound as anything ever taught by the most learned theologian.

I thought of Aunt Agnes’ note recently after she died Oct. 15 at age 104.

Throughout her very long life, which began during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson and the papacy of Pope Benedict XV, Aunt Agnes clung tenaciously to her Catholic faith.

A child of immigrants from what is now the Czech Republic, Aunt Agnes learned her catechism at home and at St. Wenceslaus in East Baltimore, her childhood parish where she attended elementary school under the tutelage of the School Sisters of Notre Dame.

As a striking young woman, my aunt left Baltimore in her 20s to work as a model in New York. My father, George Matysek Sr., remembered that his eldest sister had a portfolio of photographs of herself modeling the latest fashions, but she abandoned the career after less than a year when she sensed it was not for her.  

Aunt Agnes would later work as a secretary and office manager for Lions Club International and as a volunteer for the Catholic Daughters of the Americas.

A mother of two, she would know the sorrow of losing her husband, Joseph, and both her adult children long before her life ended.

A few years ago, when Aunt Agnes was a spritely woman in her early 90s, my brother and I visited her and cousins in New Jersey where she had raised her family. I recorded an interview and found she was sharp as a tack – regaling us in her gentle, genteel way with stories of growing up with six siblings (two others died in infancy).

Aunt Agnes told me that my love for writing is genetic. My grandfather (like me) didn’t know which end of a hammer was up, Aunt Agnes said, but he excelled in the construction of sentences.

“I saw one of his report cards he brought from Europe,” my aunt recalled. “I don’t think there was a subject where he didn’t receive a 100 percent. He used to write poems for a German paper.”

In a roundabout way, I owe my very name to Aunt Agnes.

When my father was born in 1932, his mother allowed Agnes to name him. She chose “George Paul” because she thought both were strong names. It was the name my parents passed down to me and the one my wife, Treasa, and I gave our first-born son.

Aunt Agnes admitted that she doted on my father when he was a baby – proudly taking him for walks in a stroller along Collington Avenue in East Baltimore where the big family lived in a two-story rowhouse in a neighborhood overflowing with Bohemian immigrants.

I caught a glimpse of my aunt’s natural maternal love during the coronavirus pandemic when my family held video conference sessions with her while she was in a New Jersey nursing home. When Aunt Agnes saw my youngest daughter, then just 1, her face lighted up with joy as she heaped words like “precious” and “beautiful” on her grandniece.

I couldn’t help but smile as I watched the eldest Matysek meet the youngest Matysek and exchange waves via technology that was the stuff of science fiction for most of my aunt’s life.  

Aunt Agnes’ Oct. 19 funeral at St. Catherine Laboure in North Middletown, N. J., was offered in the Tridentine form – the traditional Latin Mass – she had loved throughout her life.

Father Daniel Hesko, the pastor, is a former Redemptorist who happened to have been stationed at St. Wenceslaus in Baltimore many years ago.

In his homily, Father Hesko said Aunt Agnes was “an invaluable worker” and “a woman not to be defeated.” He recalled a time many years ago when Aunt Agnes arrived at Mass with one of her church friends in a “boat of a station wagon” one bitterly cold morning.

When the pair got there, he said, the locks had frozen shut on the car. That didn’t deter them.

“They crawled through the station wagon and climbed out the back window and made it to Mass,” he said. “And this would be Agnes – a woman of great faith, of great courage and of great determination.”

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been looking for the note Aunt Agnes sent me for my first Communion. I haven’t been able to find it, but I did come across a now beaten-up up black rosary she gave me when I was a child. She had invited my brother, Greg, and me to each pick out a rosary from a collection of prayer beads she kept on a table in her home. They were our first rosaries.

When my aunt’s casket was taken down the main aisle of St. Catherine Laboure at her funeral Mass, my eye was drawn to a message inscribed over the church’s back wall. It very well could have been my aunt’s motto.

“The love of Christ urges me on,” it said in large calligraphy.

Rest in peace, Aunt Agnes.

Email George Matysek at gmatysek@CatholicReview.org

Also see

More than a ‘cracker’

Love makes room

Power of prayer works for vocations

‘Moo like a cow’

Baltimore’s strongman

‘Full of grace’

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