My father's picture and bio may never be found in some lexicon of great Catholic thinkers.

At the same time, he was everything the Catechism says he should be when it says: “Through the grace of the sacrament of marriage, parents receive the responsibility and privilege of evangelizing their children.”

My father was a working stiff from an era where being a grocer was a career for a lot of hardworking stiffs. Our family, with our dad as securely placed at the head of it as any silver-back gorilla could ever hope to be, lived within the rubrics of an economic climate that allowed a grocer to support his wife and send all 10 of his children through 12 years of Catholic schooling.

In some respects, our dad's life was a lot like the Jimmy Stewart classic movie It's A Wonderful Life, only without the guardian angel and the happy ending.

He started a business and went broke. He battled the bottle and eventually beat it. His three-pack-a-day cigarette habit, though, ran him into ground and took him away.

In short, he had that wonderful Irish gift for disaster.

Despite all of that, our dad had another part of his personality that made up for any and all defects — his faith.

In an age where politicians proudly declare how their “personal” Catholic beliefs will not interfere with their public policymaking, our dad showed us that private practice and public action went hand in glove. And he showed us the power of perseverance that can be obtained as long as one was anchored on the pillars of the Church.

I have now lived my life longer without my father than with him and time has a remarkable ability to help one focus on the important things. To an outsider, watching this chaotic mess we called our family, one might walk (or maybe run) away with a sense of complete despair. To us, all the confusion and trouble were just the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life. What made it all easier to take was the one giant constant in our existence: the Church.

Our mother was a convert because of our father. My brother is a priest because of our father, and the rest of us all reside joyfully, if imperfectly, in communion with the Church because of our father.

How did he pull this religious grand slam off?

What incredible Thomistic calisthenics were employed to train us to think that God was one in three and that he incarnated himself in order to make possible our salvation from original sin?

What did our father do? Very little, except to show, by his example, an absolutely unwavering faith in the tenets of the Church.

My father never understood Vatican II. He didn't like change and the mere mention of a “folk Mass” was enough to send him into an apoplectic fit.

But in the end it really didn't matter where one came down on “Kumbaya” or the sign of peace. What my father understood so much better than the rest of us was that God existed, he loved his creation so much that he sent his only son to die for our sins and that before Jesus found his way to the cross, he took the time to establish a Church here on Earth to represent him until his return.

What it takes theologians years to learn my dad had figured out in a few simple and universal tenets, his Roman Catholicism 101.

Our dad was downright biblical in his contradictions. To the world that worships power and money he was an abject failure, yet he was the master of our house in the very best sense of the word. His authority came from a power none of his 10 children was willing to contradict even if at times we were prone to challenge that authority on the premise we were going to get away with it.

But if we really stepped out of line, if one of us 10 had really gotten ourselves in a fix, our dad, the stern disciplinarian, was always there in a calm, compassionate and totally selfless way.

Our dad's faith was not worn as an outer garment for all the world to see and marvel at. He wore a medal under his work shirt and ashes on one Wednesday out of the year. His faith was unwavering, his devotion to the Blessed Mary equally strong.

We 10, his children, knew all of this not because he told us but because he showed us. Our dad was a theologian and didn't even know it. He understood you never missed Mass. We, his children, might miss Mass sometimes when one of us was too sick to attend, but somehow our father was either never sick or never sick enough not to get up and get himself to church.

Our dad also knew you needed to go to confession, give up something important to you for Lent and celebrate the true meaning of Christmas and Easter.

And just like all of the Gospel indicators from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John that have told us those who are first will be last and those who are last will be first, our father left us all those many years ago empty by the measure of the materialistic world but full with the deposit of faith he had accumulated in his wife and the 10 children he so powerfully and profoundly influenced.

All of my father's children love their faith and to a man and woman have tried to live conscientiously within the Church.

That makes our dad 10 for 10 for Christ.

Not bad for a theologian, but even greater for a grocer.