LAFAYETTE – Nearly 90 minutes after the cars started snaking through the asphalt of St. Boniface School’s playground Sunday afternoon, Sr. Lenore Schwartz, principal at the Catholic elementary at Ninth and Ferry streets, called over to Fr. Tim Alkire: “The end is in sight.”
The Lafayette parish initially had planned a farewell for Alkire – who grew up at St. Boniface, later returning as a priest in 1991, and then spending the past 25 years as pastor – at the Long Center for the Performing Arts, a downtown theater that could accommodate a retirement tribute for a congregation of roughly 1,200.
Coronavirus concerns, the same ones that continue to limit capacity during services in the 167-year-old church, nixed that idea. Instead, parish leaders arranged a drive-through farewell – “Something where we could be eyeball to eyeball, many of us for the first time in months,” Alkire said.
So, on Sunday, cars stretched from Franciscan Health Central hospital campus nearly a mile away, down Erie Street and turning on Ninth Street to the school playground, where Alkire – along with Fr. Daniel Shine and Fr. Stephen Duquaine, soon to go to other parish assignments – sat with his dog, Wrigley, on a makeshift, socially distanced parade review stand.
Passing by and stopping for a few moments were parishioners that he’d baptized, that he’d married, that he’d counseled, that he’d encouraged – in the words of St. Boniface member Jose Valle – “to be more like a saint.”
Jokes mixed with prayers and blessings shared from the windows of close to 200 cars. The priests posed for portraits shot with cellphone cameras. Cards were stuffed into a scale replica of St. Boniface that a congregation member constructed. In a flow of English and Spanish, Alkire pressed for the kind of tidbits – back-to-school updates, driver’s ed updates, wedding plans and the prospects of the next trip to see the Cubs – that could fit into fewer than 30 seconds.
There more than a few full-fledged bouts of sobbing behind the wheel.
“These are the people,” Alkire said, wiping his eyes occasionally with the sleeves of his black cassock, “I’ve been allowed to walk beside.”
In nearly two hours of the farewell parade, the end was in sight for Alkire, even as he had been telling the congregation in recent days that he wished he could stay with them “until my last breath.”
“I would have liked that, too,” Mary Schnerre, a lifelong St. Boniface member and cantor at the church, said. “He came here when I was in high school. He’s been my pastor my entire adult life. Fr. Tim has been a constant for a lot of us. Looking around, there’s a real feeling of being orphaned.”
Alkire was among the parish priests saying goodbye across the Lafayette diocese in recent days. In March, Lafayette Bishop Timothy Doherty told the St. Boniface congregation that as part of a larger Uniting in Heart: 2030 Pastoral Plan, the congregations would share a pastor with St. Lawrence, a parish in Lafayette’s north end. Fr. Andrew Dudzinski will take on that role.
Alkire, who said he health “wasn’t as robust as it was in years past,” decided it was time to retire. (Shine is going to serve in Winamac. Duquaine will be in Oxford.)
Alkire, who attended St. Boniface School before graduating from McCutcheon High School in 1976 and Purdue University after that, served in parishes in Muncie and Fowler before being assigned to his childhood parish in 1991. At the time, Alkire said, then-Bishop William Higi was looking for someone fluent in Spanish to help minister to Latino and Hispanic families settling in Lafayette.
Alkire helped establish a Mass in Spanish once a month. About 20 people came to those first services at St. Boniface. By 1994, Mass celebrated in Spanish was a weekly feature, turning into a standing-room-only service at times.
“What I can tell you most is about the welcome he gave to the community,” Valle, who started attending St. Boniface in 1996, said.
“Fr. Tim always tells everyone, ‘This is your home.’ No matter where we go, St. Boniface is the place we know is our home. Fr. Tim made sure we knew that,” Valle said. “Things feel a little out of place for us, right now.”
Sheila Cochran is a St. Boniface member who helped organize German Fest, a street party with bands, carnival rides and specialty namesake beer made by People’s Brewing Co. of Lafayette. The festival, filled with Munich-style stein lifting contests and a lead priest dressed in lederhosen, played to the congregation’s founding by German immigrants.
“Fr. Tim was always game for something new and something big,” Cochran said. “And something fun. He always had fun.”
Alkire called German Fest the sort of out-of-the-box thinking that helped put a roof on the church.
“Since its founding in 1853, we’ve never had two extra nickels to rub together,” Alkire said. “It’s been a place for the working class, often for the poorest of the poor. God has always given us what we need. Much of that has to do with the call people in this congregation have to do the hard work and to serve. ...
“These are the people you see passing by today.”
What’s next? Alkire will lead his final Mass at St. Boniface early Wednesday morning. He has appointments the following week at the Mayo Clinic, where he’s gone each of the past five years to check the progress of two tumors he’s nicknamed Hans and Fritz. (“Just because,” he said. “I have to live with them, why not give them names?”) Alkire said he’s offered the bishop his services in any way to help the church. And he plans to settle in Lafayette in retirement.
The slow procession of cars, gently encouraged to keep moving Sunday afternoon to empty a queue backed up to the hospital lot, didn’t allow time for substantial conversations. But Alkire had already shared much of his feelings during sermons delivered at Mass that morning and in a tribute livestreamed a week earlier, when the Long Center event was forfeited.
“If they were a little more honest,” Alkire told the congregation amid more than an hour of stories and accolades, “they would have said what they gave to me and the parish, in all these many ways.”
The work continued after the last car wheeled through, nearly two hours after the first. More than a dozen St. Boniface members quietly disassembled pop-up tents and gathered the posts and ropes that marked the procession.
As Duquaine corralled Wrigley, Alkire again wiped his eyes with his sleeve.
“Blessed,” Alkire said. “Just so blessed by this, my home.”
Reach Dave Bangert at 765-420-5258 or at dbangert@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.
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One car at a time, St. Boniface lines up to say farewell to Fr. Tim Alkire - Journal & Courier
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