In Memory of Fr. Denny Dempsey

The news of Denny Dempsey’s sudden death, hit by a car as he was bicycling along County Road 42 in Rosemount, has hit all the people he served as a priest very hard. Whether it be in New Prague, Northfield, at Jesu Cristo Resucitado in Venezuela, St Anne and St James, Risen Savior, we are all grieving the death of this great man. I am not the only one in this Archdiocese that regards his death as a great loss of one of the few remaining good priests in this Archdiocese.

Was Denny perfect? Of course not. Just like you and me, he is flawed, but dang, only his closest confidants would know those flaws. To the rest of us, he was the epitome of the priest as the Servant Christ, ready to wash the feet of those he served. As a priest, he was the antithesis of many who have been ordained the past 20/30 years, who, by their actions see ministerial priesthood not that of Christ as Servant, but as cultic, demi-god priests.

Denny Dempsey, a priest modeled after that of Christ as Servant.

When Denny was the associate pastor of St Wenceslas in New Prague, I think the only time he actually spent in the rectory was to sleep. Otherwise, he was out with the people in the town. You could find Denny bailing hay with the farmers in the area, carving a wooden sculpture out of the trunk of a dead tree at Bruzek’s Funeral Home, leading teens on bike trips to Pike’s Peak, down Highway 1 from Seattle to San Francisco, working with young adults, and often times, over at my house watching movies on the VCR Ruthie and I owned. You could find him in the backyard of the rectory in the Spring, tuning up and fixing the bicycles of the kids in the parish. Or, as happened one Easter Sunday afternoon, in my basement, fixing my broken washing machine.

Stories of Denny.

We all have our stories of Denny. I remember one Saturday afternoon when my four kids were raising all sorts of hell at home, when Denny showed up at the door. He lasted all about 15 minutes at my house at which he said, “There is a blessing to celibacy. You see, I can leave, but you have got to stay and deal with this.” Then he left the chaos of my home.

Ruthie worked most of our married life as an RN, working nights at a nursing home. Denny, usually dressed in a tee shirt and jeans, would often show up at my house around 9 pm, around the time Ruth was getting ready to go to work, dressed in her nursing scrubs. The one night a week Ruth was home at night, she would often be dressed in her nightgown and bathrobe. Because I often had to work in the morning, on those nights Ruth was home, she and Denny would watch movies into the late of night, me usually sleeping in my chair, or in bed. At a St Wenceslaus Christmas Staff party, when Ruthie and I got to the party, Denny was already there, dressed in his clerics. Ruthie was dressed to the nines. Denny greeted her, “Hi Ruth!” She greeted him back, “Hi Denny!” He responded, “I didn’t recognize you in your clothes.” She responded back, “I didn’t recognize you in your clothes.” The room turned silent. Shaking my head, I said to both of them, you had better explain to all these people what you mean about not recognizing each other in your clothes.

Denny was a good friend, and my spiritual mentor. When I was working on my graduate project in graduate school, I chose Denny as my graduate project advisor. I would go to him for spiritual direction. He admitted that the most difficult hour of the Liturgy of the Hours (a series of prayers deacons, priests, and religious pray every day) was Evening Prayer. So to keep from skipping that prayer, he would come over to my house and pray Evening Prayer with me during Lent. Facing a moral conundrum in my life, Denny taught me the importance of the Church teaching of the Primacy of Conscience, ending the lesson with the words, “Remember, the Church teaches to the general, but not to the particular.”

One last story about Denny … My sister, Mary Ruth, was chronically ill most of her life with Crohn’s Disease. She was suffering from Crohn’s long before they had a name for her disease. Every year, we could count on Mary having intestinal surgery to her alleviate the horrible pain that Crohn’s caused her. As she got older and the disease progressed, her surgeries became more intense, many of them 6 to 7 hours long, with a great uncertainty as to whether she would survive the surgery. One cold winter day, she had another very long, intense surgery, and the outcome was extremely uncertain. I think Ruthie and I arrived at St Joseph’s Hospital around 8 am, and Mary was in surgery from 9 am to 4 pm. She spent a considerable amount of time in post-op, before finally being brought up to her room. Upon reaching her room, we said goodbye to her and walked to the cold parking ramp where our Aerostar was parked. We began the long drive home, emotionally and physically exhausted by the day. Two thirds of the way home, the power steering went out on the Aerostar. I remarked to Ruthie that the power steering belt must have broken. When we pulled up in front of our house, I told Ruth to go in while I pulled the broken power steering belt out from the motor of the Aerostar. When I opened the hood of the vehicle and reached him to pull out the belt, I pulled out instead the tail of a cat. The cat must have crawled inside the motor to escape the cold when we had been parked on the ramp. I heard this pathetic, weak “meow.”

I was horribly distraught. It was not enough that my sister had barely made it through her surgery alive, but now I had a poor cat pulled apart in the engine of my Aerostar. I rushed into the house. My oldest son, Andy, asked, “How’s Aunt Mary?” I shouted back, “I don’t give a sh!t about Aunt Mary, I have a damn cat pulled apart in my engine!” I called the local cops for help. And, received back from them, “Do you have a bat? Do you have a garbage bag? Pull the cat out of the engine, and hit it on the head with the baseball bat, and throw the body in the garbage bag.” I told them to go to hell!

Not knowing who to turn to, I called my friend, Denny Dempsey. Denny told he that he would be right over. He added that he was bored working on some report for the Archbishop. He ended the conversation by asking, “Do you have a baseball bat?” I replied, “Yes.” He then asked, “Do you have a garbage bag.” Again, I said, “Yes.” He ended our conversation saying, “I will be right over.”

Denny pulled up so that his headlight shown in the front of my car. He got out and said, “I hear your engine has lost its purr. I understand you no longer have a tiger in your tank.” I just said, “Shut up, Denny.” We didn’t need the bat. Denny reached in and pulled out the dead cat, put the body in the garbage bag. Then he came and sat with me in the house as I poured out my soul to him, comforting me from the emotional stress of the day.

Closing Remarks and a Song.

Denny lived a life of Gospel poverty. In many ways, he would have made a great Franciscan. As an associate at St Wenceslaus, he drove a used mini-Toyota pickup truck with a little camper on the back. He chose to live simply. When he was assigned to St Michael’s in St Michael, MN, he took only that which he could pack in the back of that pickup truck. He had been gifted with a canoe from the parish, which was secured to the top of the truck. He had his bicycle, a few books, a few clothes and that was pretty much it. He didn’t need much to find happiness. He loved to ride his bike, run, and canoe. He loved to be with the people he was sent to serve. He often chewed the same piece of chewing gum for days, parking the gum on a gum caddy in his room … though, that is taking Gospel Poverty to the extreme, in my opinion. He loved to play his guitar, and when not presiding at Mass, would sometimes join the Guitar Group I had formed at St Wenceslaus when I first worked in the parish as director of liturgical music.

In talking with Fr Kevin Clinton, yesterday, he told me that Denny had spoke to him these words, “When I was ordained a priest, I found myself walking in the middle of the road in the Church. Now, I find myself walking in the ditch on the left side of that road.” Denny, like many of us formed by the teaching and wisdom of Vatican II, now find ourselves on the margins and fringes of the Church, placed there by the present crop of priests who want to return the Catholic Church to that miserable time in the life of the Church in the 1600s. The priests of our present time, could learn a lot from Denny Dempsey.

In 2016, I composed a song for him and sent it to him. I often compose music, and dedicate the song to people as a gift. I will let this song express my great love, appreciation, and respect for this great man of God.