April 11, 2004

Photo by Dan McWilliams
A MAN AND HIS DOG Jack Kramer spends some time on his deck with his dog, Snuffy. Mr. Kramer recently stepped down as the director of Hispanic Ministry after serving as director or co-director since the diocesan office was formed in July 1989.

Jack Kramer resigns as director of Hispanic Ministry but will stay on as a consultant to the diocesan office.

Parkinson’s disease may have forced Jack Kramer to step down as director of Hispanic Ministry, but he will still maintain close ties to the Spanish-speaking Catholics of East Tennessee by serving as a part-time consultant to the diocesan office.

Mr. Kramer’s resignation, effective March 16, ended nearly 15 years of full-time service that dated back to the ministry’s establishment in the infancy of the diocese. His assistant of six years, Jeannine De La Torre Ugarte, will serve as acting director until a search committee—soon to be formed—locates a new director.

“I’ll still be connected with the diocese as a consultant, so I will be at the office on Monday afternoons and on Wednesdays,” he said. “I’ll still be able to work on projects, make phone calls, help with the bulletin, do research, make pastoral visits, do some low-level counseling, and help maintain our files.”

Bishop Joseph E. Kurtz said he was “delighted” Mr. Kramer will continue serving in the office and that the diocese has been blessed by his leadership.

“Not only is ‘Señor Jack’ knowledgeable in the language of Spanish and the Hispanic culture, but God has blessed him with a ‘Spanish heart,’” the bishop said. “Consistently Jack has been the servant-leader, which our Lord Jesus lived perfectly and called his followers to embrace.

“I have observed Jack’s compassion and love in action. He has also been bold in advocating for newly arrived immigrants in our diocese over the last decade and a half.”

April 15 has a certain significance for Americans, but for Mr. Kramer tax day this year will mark the 10th anniversary of his diagnosis with Parkinson’s. The degenerative disease of the central nervous system causes tremors, muscular-coordination difficulties, and fatigue, among other problems.

Mr. Kramer, 60, said the difficult-to-diagnose disease first appeared more than two years before doctors could nail it down as Parkinson’s.

“It may at first appear as some type of arthritis or just tiredness,” he said. “You have all these tests done, and everything seems to be fine with you.

“As the disease progresses, certain things happen. The natural swing of arm movement when you’re walking disappears. Some people have the telltale sign of a resting tremor. I have the opposite: the extension tremor. That showed up when I was doing push-ups one day. I did one and my whole arm started quaking, as if I had done 50 or so.”

Those symptoms, added to many others, eventually caused him to give up driving and finally made his job as director extremely difficult.

He has become adept at locating silver linings, though, one of which he finds in his use of public transit. Mr. Kramer said he sees a “whole new mission field” when he rides a city bus with workers and commuters from all walks of life.

“It’s been a gift that I’ve been able to meet the marginalized people who use the bus,” he said.

Mr. Kramer became co-director of Hispanic Ministry with Father Mike Roark when the office took flight July 1, 1989.

“For this diocese we’ve been the advance party of the growth of the church, especially in reaching out to the newcomers, the Hispanic work force that’s coming to our country to find a better way of life,” he said.

The sole director of the office since July 12, 1994, Mr. Kramer has overseen a ministry that has helped those workers deal with health care, housing, and many other needs.

“Some of the people, in an effort to save all their money to send back home, would accept very poor, unsanitary, and unhealthy housing, even living in a creek bottom or something like that,” Mr. Kramer said.

“They didn’t have the skills to hunt an apartment. Many of them unknowingly qualified for citizenship by their birth in the United States but were never told and didn’t realize that their birth was registered somewhere. To find that out was an early aim of ours.”

Representing the church in East Tennessee, the office under Mr. Kramer’s tutelage has long assisted individuals and families in finding the nearest parish or locating a church that offers a Mass in Spanish.

“We’ve generally tried to teach them that the church of their ancestors, the church of their culture, family, and we hope of their choosing is the Roman Catholic Church,” he said. “Both of our bishops have been very cooperative. They’ve seen that clergy and other pastoral agents are trained in Spanish language and culture so we can help meet these needs. In the last 15 years or so we’ve gone from having two Masses a month to more than 40.”

Mr. Kramer said he hopes to reflect more in coming days on the spiritual journey of his life and how it was affected by a wide variety of experiences—from serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War to meeting Blessed Mother Teresa to teaching at a school named for Alabama segregationist Gov. George C. Wallace.

Bishop Kurtz, Bishop Anthony J. O’Connell, Father Roark, and Mrs. De La Torre Ugarte are among numerous people Mr. Kramer thanked for their support of him and of the Hispanic Ministry Office.

He said he was also grateful to St. Joseph School teacher—and his wife of 20 years—Kathleen Kramer, “who’s been a caretaker for these difficult years”; Southeast Pastoral Institute founding director Father Mario Vizcaino, “to whom I owe my 16 years here”; Andrea Cox, executive secretary to the bishop, and former diocesan parish-systems consultant Linda Taylor, “who have always been friends of mine; Father Bill Gahagan and Father Jim Vick “for their cooperation with the ministry”; Father David Boettner, “who’s been an inspiration to me”; and all of the ministry volunteers “too numerous to mention.”

Mr. Kramer said he was especially grateful to the Spanish-speaking people of the diocese. “They have accepted me as an amigo and an hermano—a friend and a brother.”

He said he looks upon his battle with Parkinson’s as a “pure gift from God” and not a punishment.

“When God created everything, he looked around and said it was good,” Mr. Kramer said. “For me [Parkinson’s] is the great pearl in the field. Like I say kiddingly sometimes, the pearl comes in bad packaging, and you’ve got to get in there and go through all of the Styrofoam to find it. But it’s certainly changed my life, and I hope for the better.”