Cardinal Shehan to the rescue

Forty-five years ago, Patti and Donald Matulonis Sr., wanted to have their infant son baptized. But they kept hitting obstacles.

They were parishioners of St. Peter the Apostle Church in Baltimore, but the pastor, Father John Delclos, had fallen ill and left the parish, and there wasn’t a resident priest to baptize little Anthony Jason in early 1979. They asked another parish near their home, but they were turned away since they weren’t members. Anthony’s father didn’t know what to do.

“I got down on my knees and asked the Almighty to help me,” Don said. Not knowing where to turn, he decided to go downtown to the Baltimore Basilica to see if he could speak with Cardinal Lawrence Shehan, hoping he might be willing to intervene.

He talked with the cardinal’s secretary, who told him the cardinal was much too busy to see him.

“When I left the archdiocese that day, I felt alone and crushed. Again, I asked God for help. This time I wept,” Don said. “The thought came to me that I should go to the St. Patrick’s Parade downtown.”

He walked to the reviewing stand outside the Enoch Pratt Central Library to see if he could approach the cardinal.

“When the parade was over, he came out from the reviewing stands,” Don recalled. He walked up to Cardinal Shehan and asked if he could see him for a minute. The cardinal listened as the father explained his problem, how he and his wife wanted to baptize their son but didn’t have a resident priest currently at their parish.

“I told him I had spoken to his secretary, and she told me that the cardinal is much too busy to baptize my child,” Don said. “The cardinal says, ‘My secretary doesn’t speak for me. I speak for myself.’ Then the cardinal looked at me and said that he would baptize my son. When he said those words to me, I was overwhelmed with joy. I felt like I had hit the lottery.”

The secretary called Don to schedule the baptism for March 18, 1979 — which, as it turned out, happened to be Cardinal Shehan’s birthday. The cardinal met them at the Baltimore Basilica and baptized Anthony Jason, welcoming him into the Church and the Catholic faith as a new child of God.

Anthony’s mother, a convert to the Catholic faith herself, remembers how kind the cardinal was throughout the ceremony. “You just felt at ease,” said Patti.

That was 45 years ago. But the gift of that gesture has stayed with the family all those years, as the Matulonises, parishioners of Immaculate Heart of Mary in Baynesville, have now celebrated 53 years of marriage and watched their three children grow into adults with successful careers. Anthony, who was seven months old at the time, is a father of two teen boys who will retire this year from the Coast Guard.

His parents look back with gratitude for the way that the cardinal stepped forward to help when others didn’t.

“I think he realized I was troubled as a father. You have to fight for your children,” Don said. “He said, ‘I’m glad you came to me.’ What a fine example of what God calls us to do. He truly was a man of God.”

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