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Photograph by Skye Dunlap
Divine Intervention: Father Mateo Sheedy will preside over his first Christmas Mass in two years this Saturday at Sacred Heart church. In March 1998, the priest was diagnosed with lung cancer.
A Test of Faith
Father Mateo wasn't expected to recover from cancer-then a miracle happened
By Sarah Gaffney
A Christmas miracle came early this year to Father Mateo Sheedy of Sacred Heart Church on Willow Street. After a nearly two-year battle with cancer and six months of paralysis, the cancer is contained and the priest is walking again. He will preside over Mass at his 70-year-old church on Christmas morning.
"Most of the time, I feel pretty good ... the cancer itself hasn't spread ... it seems to be contained at the moment," says Father Mateo, who now walks with the assistance of a walker. "I do get much more tired than I used to."
In March 1998, the priest was diagnosed with a rare strain of lung cancer that had already progressed to its deadliest phase, stage IV. The priest, who is a nonsmoker, said his only symptom was shortness of breath.
"A couple of weeks before I was diagnosed, I had been jogging and ran out of breath and so I walked home. I didn't think anything about it," Father Mateo remembers. "A couple of days later, I was jogging and the same thing happened. And a couple of days later, walking, the same thing happened, so I went to the doctor."
A grueling six months of chemotherapy followed, which shrunk the cancer by 50 percent. Father Mateo then traveled to New York for a second opinion. There, he discovered the cancer had metastasized to one of his vertebrae, which was compressing his spinal cord. The 47-year-old priest underwent surgery, which left him paralyzed from the waist down.
He returned to his rectory home and round-the-clock care by a legion of priests, sisters, parishioners and former seminary classmates. Sister Maggie McGraw has been his principal caregiver during his illness, and she coordinated Father Mateo's crew of volunteer caregivers. "When he first came back, we had people around the clock, every four hours," recalls Sister Maggie, a former registered nurse. "The pastor from St. Francis of Assisi came once a week ... from four until eight in the morning."
Last spring, the ailing priest began a new regimen of chemotherapy that he describes as "less intense," which enabled him to rebuild his strength. Then in May, the unbelievable happened. He moved his foot.
"I had no movement below my waist, so I had to be carried everywhere, but I started to build more strength," says the priest, who recalls his story in a whisper. "Then, all of the sudden, in May, Father Robert was moving me from a chair to a wheelchair, and I put my foot in his hand so that he could put it in the footrest of the wheelchair. ... He looked at me like I was crazy. He said, 'What did you do?'"
Father Robert Bracato, a priest at Sacred Heart for the past five years, routinely assisted Father Mateo in getting to and from his wheelchair. Although he says the priest's foot moved ever so slightly, he describes his amazement and Father Mateo's surprise at the event.
"I just reached over to grab his foot, and he lifted it up a little bit as if he was trying to help me," Father Robert recalls. "I said, 'Mateo, you just moved your foot a little bit,' and he said, 'I did?'"
After that, the priest began physical therapy. Sister Maggie and other volunteers were trained how to perform the strength-building exercises which have enabled him now to walk with the walker.
"It's just mindblowing, really," says the sister. "People that I had worked with when I was a nurse, some people came in after automobile accidents that had severed spinal cords with no hope of ever regaining anything. With him, there was always a slender hope that this would be restored."
Although he has now regained movement and is giving Mass again, the priest acknowledges the emotional pain that cancer has brought to his contemplative life.
"It's been a real painful time. There's lots of depression and questions," says the priest, carefully choosing his words. "My faith has been tested. I feel like my faith has sustained me through it, but there's lots ups and downs; lots of time of doubt and questions, wondering and grief. There's a lot of grief."
Father Mateo has served at Sacred Heart in the heart of Washington-Gardner neighborhood for the past 15 years. A native of Gilroy, he spent much of his youth in the agricultural fields with farmworkers, celebrating Mass in the camps where the migrant workers lived. He also learned Spanish.
"The priests in my parish were very much involved with the people who worked in the fields, with the farmworkers and going to the camps for Mass and for catechism," says the priest of his childhood parish. "So, whenever I was home [from the seminary], they'd invite me to go with them and that just began a kind of relationship and a model of ministry that really carried me all the way through the seminary."
Shortly after his arrival at Sacred Heart, the church suffered devastating damage from the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The church was closed for five years, waiting in disrepair for funding, while Masses continued in the small parish hall next door. Father Mateo was instrumental in raising the $2 million needed to complete the church's restoration, as well as in uniting the church's Hispanic parishioners with its former Italian parishioners, many of whom left the parish 30 years earlier to move into Willow Glen and join the new St. Christopher's parish.
"One of the things we did was bring groups of people together from different times in the life of the parish ... one day we were sitting on the floor in the sanctuary of the church and it was all braced up, talking about what to do and how we were going to find the resources to put this back together," Father Mateo remembers. "And somebody started talking about what their experience was living in a house down the street. Well, somebody else had lived in the same house and had exactly the same experience 30 years before. Those kinds of experiences, as people told the story, really made a big difference in bringing people together."
Throughout the priest's illness, current and former parishioners came together to hold prayer vigils, often uncertain whether Father Mateo would live to see the next day.
"People were literally counting the days, he was that sick," says Maricela Henderson, a lifelong parishioner of Sacred Heart. "Then slowly things began to change, and it seems all of the sudden he's back giving Masses again. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing."
Father Robert describes people's reactions to Father Mateo's recovery.
"When someone hears about the fact that he actually is moving his legs or that he actually is standing up or that he is walking, then people are just astounded, and they say 'That's the power of prayer.'"
This Saturday morning, Father Mateo will preside over his first Christmas morning Mass in two years. He reflects on the meaning of Christmas.
"I think Christmas seems to be, for lots of people ... some connection to the church, but yet they may not be around very often. It's a day when people are really drawn to remember, to celebrate, to give thanks, to pray for peace, to sing together, to be in a warm place that they knew as children. All of that comes together, and it comes together on Christmas."
And, he jokingly adds, "Everybody knows the songs."
Sacred Heart Church is at 325 Willow St. Father Mateo will preside over the 4 p.m. Mass on Christmas eve and the 9 a.m. Mass on Christmas morning.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
