Father Richard T. Saale

The Saale family was originally from Alsace-Lorraine (on the border of France and Germany). Records indicate that Adam and Joliana Saale immigrated to north central Missouri about the middle of the 19th century. Chillicothe became home to the Saale family. They celebrated baptisms, weddings and funerals at St. Columban’s Church, where a large stained glass window, installed about 1892, is dedicated to the memory of Adam Saale. He is remembered for helping Father (later Bishop) John Hogan establish the parish.

Adam’s great-grandson, Richard Thomas Saale, was born in Chillicothe on Oct. 13, 1925, the sixth of nine children of Edward and Grace Saale. Two infant daughters had died soon after birth.

“Dick” was very interested in sports. “All my brothers were athletes,” he remembered more than 70 years later. “I grew up in a very competitive atmosphere. I loved baseball, softball and basketball, especially baseball, even as a little kid. We all played softball and baseball in a stadium in a city park. We had our own softball team: Seven Saale brothers and two Saale cousins. We were hard to beat!”

The brothers and their friends swam in the Grand River, went on fishing expeditions and roughhoused with each other, forging a close relationship. In high school, they learned to box, and Dick was quite good at it. He boxed in the Golden Gloves, winning a Bantam weight trophy at a match in St. Joseph. He wasn’t quite 16 years old at the time. In a family history later written by his mother, Grace Saale said she eventually “grew tired of all the boys having bloody noses and loose teeth so she threw the boxing stuff in the furnace and watched it burn.”

Dick quit boxing but remained a fan for a long time. He also became friends with legendary boxing and wrestling promoter Gust Karras, who years later got Father Saale and another priest ringside tickets to see “Gorgeous George.”

Edward Saale quietly hoped one of his seven boys would become a priest.

“Dad was very close to his church,” Father Saale said. “He kept the parish books and managed the parish cemetery. He loved his church. He was subtle about it, but he wanted at least one of his sons to be a priest. He sent several of my brothers to St. Benedict’s High School in Atchison, Kan., with that hope. I went to St. Joseph’s Academy in Chillicothe.” The academy, which closed in 1969, had been run by the School Sisters of St. Francis from Conception, since 1935.

Dick entered Conception Seminary in 1943, right after high school. His father was very pleased, although “he never showed much emotion. Dad was very interested in what I was studying at Conception and took care of any fees without any compunction,” Father Saale recalled.

Father Saale was ordained a priest for the Diocese of St. Joseph on May 25, 1950 at the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception by Bishop Charles H. LeBlond and celebrated his first Mass at St. Columban’s. His first assignment was to St. Munchin’s in Cameron as administrator under Father John McKeon.

“I did a lot of filling in for pastors and other priests when I was first ordained,” Father Saale said. “I filled in for the pastor at St. Munchin’s for four or five months.” Father McKeon had become ill and later died. When Father Denis O’Duignan was named pastor in late 1950, Father Saale was appointed assistant at Immaculate Conception, the German national parish in St. Joseph.

A family story is that when his youngest brother Jim was married in 1951, the young couple had no money for a honeymoon, but wanted to go somewhere. Father Saale invited them to stay at the Immaculate Conception parish rectory for their wedding night. Their daughter Toby Saale Minnis said her parents took the bus to St. Joseph and stayed at the rectory with big brother Father Saale that night.

Father Saale grinned at the recollection. “Kept ‘em good.”

In 1956, the dioceses of St. Joseph and Kansas City were merged. Father Saale, now a priest of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, continued serving as an administrator or assistant at several parishes. In 1961, he was named pastor of Sacred Heart Parish in Hamilton, where he had previously served as administrator. From the beginning of his service at Sacred Heart in 1959, Father Saale had been involved in and supportive of the community even, according to the 1992 Diocesan history, This Far by Faith, promoting the building of the town’s swimming pool.

In 1963, he was appointed pastor of Blessed Sacrament in Kansas City, and served in the Kansas City area until his retirement.

The eight years Father Saale served at Blessed Sacrament were turbulent years in the history of the United States. Civil rights, civil rights activists and social unrest made headlines almost daily.

By the early 1960s, the streets around Blessed Sacrament Church had become used to “white flight,” and many of the people moving into the parish were not Catholic. Father Saale jumped into the community with open arms. He served as secretary for the 16-member Board of Directors of the Heart of America Boys Club, which provided services to 400 neighborhood boys each month.

In 1965, Father Saale encouraged the parish to begin a program designed to enable area residents who had not graduated from high school to pass the General Education Development (GED) test, which would help them obtain better jobs. The volunteer-staffed program started in February 1966 with 43 adults. Catholic Family and Community Services took charge of it in 1968 using federal funds for a nine-month program at nine centers, including Blessed Sacrament.

Racial tensions were at an all-time high in the mid 1960s. Almost a century after the Fifteenth Amendment gave blacks the right to vote, they still had difficulty registering in areas of the south, especially Alabama. In March 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other civil rights leaders planned a non-violent march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capitol, a distance of about 50 miles. Twice the marchers were stopped at the Edmund Pettis Bridge by sheriff’s deputies, mounted state troopers and local toughs armed with tear gas, rocks, guns and batons. Dr. King obtained federal backing for a third march. Even so, the threats continued.

Back in Kansas City, Father Saale and Father (later Msgr.) Victor Moser, then-pastor of Annunciation Parish, were working to raise funds and volunteers for another delegation and closely following the news from Selma. The Chicago-based Catholic Interracial Council called for nuns and priests to join King’s march from Selma to Montgomery.

Father Saale recalled being more worried about the nuns than about himself. “I was a former Golden Gloves boxer,” he told The Key in 2005, “so I wasn’t really worried about me. But I was worried about the sisters. We flew into Montgomery and rode in vans to Selma … white kids started throwing rocks at the van. It was ironic, we were white, and that was the white welcome … But the black citizens received us with open arms.”

His niece said Father Saale’s “boxing in the Golden Gloves was kind of an allegory for his priesthood,” especially during his years at Blessed Sacrament. “He was a real fighter for people he thought were being mistreated in any way.”

Father Saale said that if “the occasion arose he’d fight for the little guy,” although not literally, he quickly added.

Long-time friend Father Bob Mahoney said that Father Saale established “real rapport with his parishioners, even radical elements, and was a contributor to more reasoned and just approaches, seasoning his dialogues with a wry and disarming humor, without pulling any punches.”

In the late 1960s, a group called Soul Brothers formed at nearby Holy Name Parish to try and bring about social change and improve area living conditions. Father Timothy Gibbons, a Dominican priest who had worked with Soul Brothers was transferred out of Kansas City in 1967, and the group was unhappy. They tried to get him reassigned to Holy Name parish, but Bishop Charles Helmsing was out of town and no one was able to explain the situation to their satisfaction. Father Saale’s assistant, Father James Lock, who had met some of the Soul Brothers through Father Gibbons, was called in to defuse the situation. As a result of that conversation, Father Saale opened Blessed Sacrament’s church basement for Saturday night teenage dances. Almost 500 teenagers packed the basement every weekend, supervised by parents, youth leaders, one of the priests and several local police officers.

Father Saale later invited Soul Brothers to use the rectory basement as a food distribution center for the needy. From 1967 through 1969 large amounts of food were donated by grocery stores, churches, community organizations and individuals and distributed personally to hundreds of hungry families by the black youths of Soul Brothers.

Jesuit Father Michael Caruso was attending Conception Seminary College in the early 1970s when he became acquainted with Father Saale, then pastor of Assumption Parish.

In a phone interview from Chicago, Father Caruso said, “The first time I met Father Saale I was driving my beat up old car home and ran out of gas in front of Assumption Church (now St. Anthony). Now in that area of town, he was used to knocks on the door and knights of the road asking for money. I knocked on the door and asked to borrow some gas from a gas can! Father Saale had real substance; he projected the image of a strong man with a good heart,” Father Caruso, recently appointed president of Ignatius Prep School in Chicago, said.

A few years later when Father Saale became pastor of Holy Cross, Father Caruso’s home parish, the young seminarian got to know him better. By then Mike Caruso was a senior at Conception, soon to enter St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, Ill. “He was only at Holy Cross for a year or two, but he made an impression on me. He was very gentle, very good with sick people. He was the kind of priest who read the Bible with one hand and the newspaper with the other: Very active in community organizations, big in to strengthening neighborhoods, and a wonderful example of a caring priest, a good and faithful priest.”

In 1979, Kansas City Mayor Richard Berkley appointed Father Saale to the Housing Authority Board of Commissioners. The board was designed to determine policy and administer local public housing programs.

Father Saale was appointed pastor of Guardian Angels Parish in 1980. He hired a young mom named Maurine Gardner to work part-time as bookkeeper. She “loved working for Father Saale. He was quiet and didn’t mingle a lot, but he knew everybody in the parish and the neighborhood.” Gardner, now business manager at Church of the Good Shepherd in Smithville, recalled Father Saale’s “unbelievable” generosity.

“In his quiet way there was nobody he wouldn’t try to help,” she said. “Street people, people on hard times. He was a big supporter of the food pantry at Guardian Angels.”

Having served in several poor parishes, he was committed to the poor, she said. But “he was very down to earth. Once I was concerned about giving street people money when I suspected they wouldn’t spend it on food. He told me ‘Maurine, it’s no sin to be conned. It’s up to them for what they are doing.’

“Working for him was great,” she said. “I learned a lot about how the Church works. He gave me a broader understanding of the Church and its people. It amazed me that if he didn’t know the answer to a question he always knew where to go to get it.

“Father Saale was a great storyteller, and he knew all the priests. I never minded working a lot of hours. He was good with both kids and adults of the parish and the neighborhood.”

In his leisure hours he enjoyed playing golf and poker. Gardner laughed and said, “He loved golf. In fact, Father Saale agreed to get his hip replaced because it was affecting his golf game. He had a regular poker game going. He would tell us he was going to a paste-board seminar. It took a while before I figured out he was talking about a card game.”

Father Mahoney also remembered the card games. “Dick’s priestly character and his succinct sharply humorous and pungent commentaries on religious and secular issues of the day as well as his pastoral devotion won him a staunch circle of close friends among his fellow priests. For many years eight or nine priests in this group would meet every three weeks for an evening of soft drinks, snacks, spirited conversation, much laughter and hotly contested card games.”

Father Saale retired in 1995 after serving as pastor of Our Lady of Lourdes in Raytown since 1988.

Father Matt Rotert, pastor of St. Mary Parish in Independence, got to know Father Saale when Father Rotert was assigned to St. Columban’s in the mid 1990s: “He struck me as a person of profound common sense,” Father Rotert said. “Very plain spoken.”

And so generous. “It’s a lot to ask a retired priest to fill in for you when he lives more than 50 miles away from your parish, but Father Saale was a great find when I was pastor in Chillicothe,” Father Rotert said. “He was always willing to drive up and the parishioners were always thrilled to have him home. He knew the community, and kept in touch with Chillicothe even after 50 years.”

Echoing Father Saale’s niece Toby Minnis, Father Rotert said, “Father Saale was not confrontational, but wouldn’t shy away from a fight. He was a great ally to have on your side. He boxed in the Golden Gloves — a kind of analogy of his priesthood: not combative but he stood up for people he thought had been taken advantage of, like the people of Selma,” he said.

“Dick didn’t have a whole lot of patience with people who were not straight-forward or wishy-washy. He chose clarity over nuance,” Father Rotert said. “He was a strong individual personality, a real character — and extremely generous. I am most grateful for all the help he gave me.”

Father Mahoney said of Father Saale’s service — in small town parishes, urban and suburban settings — especially in times of limited resources and unlimited challenges, “he coped, and more than coped; he made a difference!”

Several years ago Father Saale was invited to live at the Jeanne Jugan Center of the Little Sisters of the Poor. Just recently he moved to the nursing wing.

Father John McCormack, chaplain at Jeanne Jugan Center, has known Father Saale for many years. He described his brother priest as a colorful person in a wonderful way.

“I taught English and Latin at old St. Joseph’s Academy while serving as assistant at St. Columban’s,” he recalled. “Father Saale would come up to hunt duck and geese or fish with Spike (Father Lawrence Speichinger) and a bunch of old friends, like Bill McCoy. They would gather at the rectory. Saale and Spike together, oh they were great ones with the words. The stories they would weave. They knew Livingston County like the back of their hands. And while he was there, Father Saale would take communion to his parents.”

Father Saale’s days are quieter now, but serene. In summing up his six decades of priestly service, he said, “I tried to be a pastor to the people of the parish I was in. I tried to fit into the tone of the parish, to sympathize and empathize with their likes and differences.”

According to family, friends and former parishioners, he succeeded.

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