As a child helping her father milk cows on their farm in Van Buren, Maine, Pauline Fournier listened to him encourage troubled neighbors coming to him with their problems.
“There was a steady stream of visitors with woes,” she recalled. “Here was an ordinary farmer with a way of listening and helping people heal broken lives. He was nonjudgmental and compassionate.
“I learned listening skills from him,” remarked the director of public relations and member of the retreat team at Mount St. Alphonsus, the Redemptorist Fathers Retreat House in Esopus.
Dr. Fournier lives on the premises of “The Mount,” which observes its 100th anniversary this year. Originally opened as a seminary, the property overlooks the Hudson River. Its chapel is known for Italian marble floors, stained-glass windows made according to the Munich technique, with real gold leaf used in the red pigment, and mosaics featuring 12 angels representing as many virtues.
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Milking cows, mastering theology
Fournier was born to a French-speaking family, entering school with no knowledge of English and, by the end of her first year, began teaching her parents and grandparents to speak English.
As the oldest of four children, she presented herself at age 10 at the milking stables and told her father she wanted to learn to milk cows. “We had 30 milking cows, and I milked 15 in the morning before school and 15 at night.” When she was in high school, her father died, and the operation of the entire farm fell to her. This did not prevent her from emerging as the top student in her senior class.
“I told them I would do the graduation address, but forget the class dance,” she said.
Soon after that graduation, her mother decided to sell the farm and its animals, taking up residence in town. This freed the daughter to join a community of nuns, the Good Shepherd Sisters of Quebec. During 20 years with the order, she earned a bachelor”™s degree from Emmanuel College in Boston and a master”™s degree in theology from St. Louis (Mo.) University.
“I came to feel that I was called to minister as a lay person without the restrictions of
community life,” Fournier said. She completed her studies for a doctorate of ministry at Catholic University while working as retreat director at Marian Home of Prayer.
She then spent eight years at Washington Theological Union supervising future priests. When her Catholic University classmate Father Jack Kingsbury was named Mount St. Alphonsus rector, he invited her to join the staff to arrange retreats. That was 10 years ago.
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”˜Floating on air”™
Fournier is especially proud of a course she created about the mystics and saints. She reports that more than 14,000 individuals come to “The Mount” annually. Retreats are painstakingly designed for particular groups such as women religious, lay women or seniors. There are also Taize prayer chants and Advent musical festivals.
The Fournier career has had its good and bad days. One that started out poorly wound up happily when she was invited back to her home parish in Van Buren to give a retreat. “They had never had a woman give a retreat before,” she said. “There were people there that had seen me in diapers. It”™s hard to be a prophet in one”™s own country. One man seemed to resist going in, and a man with him said, ”˜Look, she”™s one of us. I”™m going in.”™ They both went in. I was floating on air.”
A part of her heart remains in the nation”™s capital, where she purchased a small house in Hyattsville, Md., suburban to Washington.
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