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PROFILE:Everything I have done, I have done as a response to someone who asked, someone who inspired
By SUSAN DE MATTEO
LONGVIEW – Being a teacher of her faith has made Pauline Beaumier Green a student of her faith.
Pauline, 52, is administrative assistant to Amy Allen, principal of St. Mary Catholic School in Longview. She also has served for some 25 years as a catechist, youth minister, director of religious education RCIA coordinator and trainer in the diocesan Ethics and Integrity program.
All of that, she said, has led her down a lifelong journey of learning.
“I was born and raised Catholic,” said Pauline, a native of Houston, “but my parents weren’t what you’d call devoted churchgoers. They are very fine and decent people, and they gave us a wonderful upbringing, but we just didn’t go to Mass regularly. They did make sure, though, that we had all our sacramental preparation and that we went to CCD. So I at least had that.”
Even so, she admits, it was a sketchy foundation.
“I made my first Holy Communion, and then Vatican II hit, so nobody knew what they were supposed to do for years,” she said. “In junior high (CCD) we just sort of sat around and listened to ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ and rock operas and talked about them with our teachers, who were all kind of hippies. I’m part of that ‘lost generation’ that never had a good, solid formation in the faith.”
Even so, what she had was enough to make an impression.
“In high school, I was very active in my CYO group, and I think that sort of set the path for me later in terms of involvement,” she said.
After graduating from high school, Pauline went to Sam Houston State University in Huntsville with dreams of becoming a journalist. She decided, however, “that journalism in college wasn’t anything like it had been in high school” and dropped that major. She also decided to transfer to The University of Texas at Austin at the end of the year.
But her time at Sam Houston did yield one major benefit.
Her parents had moved to San Antonio, “and some friends I knew from there arranged for a couple of us to get a ride home to visit. And then these two freshman jazz trumpeters showed up.”
One of the trumpeters was Gary Green, “and we just sort of fell in love.”
The two married in 1979, and have never looked back.
However, “Gary realized he’d probably need to do something besides playing jazz trumpet to make a living,” Pauline said, “so at the end of his freshman year he transferred to UT and became an engineer.”
Gary wasn’t Catholic, but that was never a problem for Pauline.
“I didn’t feel I had the right to make my marrying him contingent on him becoming Catholic. He was a good, decent, loving man, and I knew he’d be a wonderful husband and father. So faith was never an issue.”
The two remained in Austin until 1981, when Gary and several others, including an engineer named Gavin Vaverek, were hired by Texas Eastman and transferred to Longview. Pauline got a job at the Longview News-Journal and worked in advertising for two years, “then left when I was tremendously pregnant with our first child.”
That pregnancy also served to jolt Pauline back into the practice of her faith.
“When I was about halfway through the pregnancy,” she said, “I just kind of woke up and realized, ‘I need to do something.’ So I wandered into St. Mary (Church) and met the lovely Fran, and she got me set up with baptism classes.”
Fran Baker, longtime secretary at St. Mary’s, “has been credited with getting many people on the right path,” Pauline said. “She’s just incredible. She’s one of those stalwarts who hold the church together.”
Besides getting Pauline and Gary into baptism classes, Fran also got Pauline involved in helping her in the office.
“I started doing the bulletin, because of my advertising background, and I remember putting it together at my kitchen table,” Pauline said. “Then another engineer’s wife, who was running the CCD program, asked me to be assistant in one of the classes. I said yes.”
The students were 11th graders, and, originally, Pauline was only there as backup.
“The man running the class made it very clear that he was in charge, and that I was just to sit in the back and be quiet. And I did.
“Then, about two weeks into the class,” she recalled, “he got mad about something and just left. And all of a sudden, every one of the kids in that class turned around and looked at me.”
Pauline had just gotten a promotion, and one she admits she was in no way prepared for.
“I was about 27 or so,” she said, “and I had not really had any formal training except for the randomness of my own CCD classes. And I knew that wasn’t good enough. I could have turned away from the challenge, but, instead, it set me to learning. I thought, ‘I can’t go in there and not know what I’m talking about,’ so I started buying every book I could find and reading, just trying to figure my way through it.
“I had to know what the church taught,” she said. “I refused to go in there and just pass off what I thought or believed, because that wasn’t why those kids were there. That was the beginning of my real education in the Catholic faith.”
It was also the beginning of her involvement with youth. At the end of that year, her students asked her to become their youth director.
“I can’t tell you what an honor that was, to have those kids ask me,” she said. “It meant I had been doing something right. So I said yes, and did that for two or three years.”
By the end of that time, she was pregnant with her third child, “and I decided to let someone less encumbered by kids and family take over.”
Her involvement, however, wasn’t nearly over.
Around 1988, the Greens moved to St. Anthony Church, where the priest reminded Pauline “of some of the ones I’d known in my own youth, the looser, more informal ones with the folk Masses and such right after Vatican II. I’d grown up with that, and that was what I was used to. When we came to St. Mary’s, it was a much more traditional style of worship, which was good for me. I needed that at the time; it gave me a nice balance in my own faith. But I also liked what was happening at St. Anthony’s, so we went there for a while.”
She stressed that “I’ve never changed parishes because I was trying to get away from something. I’ve never left a parish because of a negative. It’s always been because I was going toward something, because I saw something that I liked or felt I could do. And that’s an important distinction, because it means you leave without any hard feelings, without any anger or bitterness. It also means you can always come back.”
At St. Anthony’s, “I got into the little people business,” Pauline said with a laugh. “I started teaching pre-schoolers. And I just fell in love with them. They’re just like little sponges.”
She also witnessed a demonstration of the power of a child’s faith.
“Again, I had never asked Gary to become Catholic. His dad was in the Air Force and he grew up all over the world, so he never had a settled background. His mom was Jewish and his dad was Baptist, and he remembers his mom taking him to all the non-denomination Bible study classes for the military kids. He didn’t really have a solid faith foundation. But I never really thought about that, because he always went to Mass with us. And that was enough for me.”
Not, however, for daughter Aly.
“Aly was making her first Communion,” Pauline recalled, “and one day at Mass, she turned to Gary and asked, ‘Daddy, why don’t you go up with us to get Jesus?’ When we got home that afternoon, he looked at me and said, ‘I didn’t have an answer for her.’”
He entered RCIA that fall, and joined the church in 1994. Soon he was as active as Pauline, serving as a lector and on various parish committees and boards.
Pauline’s involvement continued to grow. From teacher, she moved up to director of religious education and eventually became RCIA coordinator. When St. Matthew Church opened in 1998, she and the family moved their membership again – “the church was a lot closer to where we lived” – and helped establish its education program.
“Msgr. (John) Flynn asked, and I said yes,” she said.
And that has been the pattern of her life.
“As I look back,” she said, “I realize that everything I have done (in the church), I have done as a response to someone who asked, someone who inspired me to respond. Fran Baker, Father Dan Gonzalez (at St. Anthony), Msgr. Flynn and then (Msgr. Xavier Pappu) at St. Matthew. All these people saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself, saw gifts or abilities I wasn’t aware I had, and they invited me to use them. And because of who they were, I felt I needed to respond. I needed to say yes.”
Now, however, she feels a new obligation.
“After a few years at St. Matthew, I began to see other people, younger people, come in. I saw a new youth minister come in who reminded me of who I’d been at her age, and I realized it was my turn to mentor. All these people in my life had encouraged me, and now I needed to do it. And I think that’s an important realization for those of us who’ve been at this a while. We have to be the ones to invite, to encourage, to mentor. We have to help others say yes.”
Now, Pauline is at St. Mary School and back in St. Mary Parish.
“We’d been at St. Matthew’s for several years, and we were all involved,” she said. “The kids had been altar servers, (son) Austin was a lector, Aly was an extraordinary minister of Communion, Bri played flute in the music group, and Gary was a lector. For me, there were the religious ed classes on Sundays and RCIA on Wednesdays, and there was always a meeting somewhere. I finally realized that I was separating myself from my family, and that I needed to pull back. So I called Deacon John Shaffer, who was just finishing his year as interim principal (at St. Mary School) and asked if there might be a position as a teacher’s aide or something.”
Amy Allen was preparing to come in as the new principal, and offered Pauline a job as her administrative assistant. Amy had taught Pauline’s son Austin seventh grade language arts at Foster Magnet School and remembered Pauline. And Pauline had been impressed by Amy’s abilities as a teacher.
“My math- and science-loving son had always hated language arts,” she said with a laugh. “But, in Amy’s class, he thrived and loved it. And I thought, ‘If she can do that for him, she’s good!’”
With that in mind, once more, Pauline said yes. And she and Gary ended up back where they’d begun, at St. Mary Parish, whose pastor is a former engineer named Father Gavin Vaverek.
“With the school now forming so much of my community,” she said, “it just seemed right to come back to this parish. Again, not running away from anything, but just going to what feels right.”
And St. Mary School definitely feels right.
“I love this place,” Pauline said. “You know, I can sit at my desk and get bogged down in paperwork, but when I take a break and step into the hall, I see tiny little three-year-olds just trying to learn how to walk in a line, and six-feet-tall eighth-graders you’ve known since they were babies. Children I once taught are parents now themselves and have children here, and you realize, ‘I had a part in that.’ It’s absolutely amazing.”
Pauline has been a catechist in one form or another for some 25 years now, teaching children and adults, yet she said she has learned more than she has ever taught.
“I have learned about the wonders and beauty of my faith,” she said, “I have learned what the church is and what it teaches, and I have learned why I need the church in my life. And I have learned that saying yes is, really, only the first step, and that once you take that step, you will be amazed at where it will take you.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” she said. “I don’t know if this,” she gestured around her office, “is where I’ll stay or if there’s something else down the road. But I do know that, whatever happens, it will be okay as long as I trust in God and stay true to my faith.
“And I have to say that, so far,” Pauline smiled, “it’s been an incredible life.” o
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