Hubert and Odessa: caught in a web of grace

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 8, 1995 by Tim Unsworth

This is the story of two people with the unlikely names of Hubert Sonnenschein and Odessa Madre. Hubert was a priest; Odessa was a prostitute. It's also a story about prevenient grace, that divine grace operating in the human win even before it turns to God.

We'll start with the grace-filled life of Hubert Sonnenschein. He was born in Holland 70 years ago. Only a teenager when Hitler invaded Holland, his brother was nearly slaughtered by the Nazis because his surname is one shared with Jews.

Hubert entered the seminary of the White Fathers, now called the Missionaries of Africa, in Boxtel, Holland. In 1951, he was ordained in Jedburgh, Scotland. The society, famous for its flowing white habit and red fez, assigned him to Malawi, a country about the size of Pennsylvania, located in southeast Africa, next to Zambia and Tanzania. It is now 19 percent Catholic, thanks to the White Fathers who arrived there in 1889, two years before it became a British protectorate named Nyasaland. It became Malawi in 1964 but suffered under corrupt one-party rule until 1994.

It's a tough place to live; men average only 39 years, women only 41. Only 3 percent of its people are over 65, compared with 48 percent under 15. Seventy-five percent of its nearly 10 million people are illiterate.

It was worse than that when Fr. Sonnenschein arrived more than 40 years ago. He spent 22 years there, 12 of them as pastor of the cathedral in Bembeke, a parish about the size of New Jersey. While pastor, he built at least eight brick outstation churches to replace the mud-sided, grass-roofed ones that were caving in.

He also pressed for a married priesthood in a country where single men are objects of ridicule. "A man was not considered a complete person if he didn't have a wife. He had no authority," Sonnenschein's wife, Mary Anne, recalled years later.

After more than two decades of service, his position on celibacy and other issues such as the treatment of women caused him to be banned from the mission by the bishop. Refused permission to return after his sabbatical, he left his chalice and books at his mission and, after a respite in Holland, went to Los Angeles to do development work for the congregation.

But in the summer of 1973, he resigned from the community, earned a master's degree at Loyola-Marymount and became director of a school for mentally handicapped children in Sunland, Calif.

While in Africa, he met Mary Anne, a White Sister from Washington, D.C. "I was only 23 when I first met him," she recalled. "He was on his motorcycle. In those days the only time a nun spoke to a priest was in confession. So I barely knew him."

Mary Anne left her community, too, and returned to Washington. From California, Sonnenschein wrote her a characteristically frank letter and asked, "Do you think we can make it?" They were married in 1974 at St. Paul's Church in Los Angeles.

Hubert served as director of the United Cerebral Palsy Center in Stockton, Calif. Then he and Mary Anne relocated to Washington to take care of her mother who had suffered a stroke. Hubert took a job as a translator - he was fluent in eight languages - and later as a math teacher at Gonzaga Prep in the capitol city.

Hubert and Mary Anne settled in St. Camillus Parish in Silver Spring, Md., where they were active as teachers in the catechumenate and in a weekly scripture-sharing class. Hubert also edited a prayer network newsletter and did countless other ministerial tasks that kept his ordination oils glistening for all to see. His theology was as simple as the Our Father. "What would Christ do?" he would ask himself, then plunge ahead.

A bypass operation in 1982 slowed him considerably, however. By 1987, his kidneys failed and he was forced to go on disability and hemodialysis. He had to spend three afternoons each week at a dialysis center near DuPont Circle. It was a debilitating process that sent his blood pressure plunging and left him terribly weak. He was assigned to one of those recliner chairs in a large room along with 40 other dialysis patients.

The patient in the next chair was Odessa Madre.

Madre was born in a depressed Washington area known as Cowtown in 1907. Her grandfather had fought in the Union Army in the Civil War. She grew up in a black ghetto that nestled alongside an Irish ghetto. It was a time when blacks fought with blacks and the Irish with Irish. Somehow segregation kept the two groups from warring with each other.

Madre was smart. She attended Catholic school and by 1925 managed to complete high school. But the Depression soon followed and Odessa, black and poor, could find no real job. She was driven into prostitution, gambling and, later, drugs.

It's hard to catalog the accomplishments of a madam but, in the years that followed, Odessa became the proprietor of four or five thriving bordellos. (The Irish boys with whom she had been raised had gone on the D.C. police force. They closed their eyes to their friend's employment.)

Odessa succeeded in her world as well as Hubert had in his missionary work. She was bright, colorful, flamboyant. Odessa could often be seen, her 220-pound body swathed in furs, relaxing in the back of her limousine, traveling from one franchise to another. She was as generous as she was colorful, one of the easiest touches in town. Odessa probably gave away as much money as she laundered.