Home / News & Publications / Michigan Catholic News / 2009 / At 100, she's still giving to her parish
At 100, she's still giving to her parish
by Robert Delaney of The Michigan Catholic
Published July 24, 2009
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Robert Delaney | The Michigan Catholic
Helen Nehrenberg (left) with her daughter, Helen Kaczperski, in their Richmond home. |
Richmond - After nearly six decades of giving of her time and talent to her parish, Helen Nehrenberg continued to give rather than receive at her 100th birthday party.
Besides celebrating her centennial and honoring her for her active involvement in St. Augustine Parish, party-goers helped raise money for a new handicapped access ramp for the church.
"Instead of gifts, she asked that people make a donation to the St. Augustine Church Ramp Fund," explains her daughter, Helen Kaczperski, who lives with her. That $3,500 brought to $5,000 the amount raised toward the estimated $40,000 needed to replace the crumbling concrete ramp.
Given her recent bout of ill health, it's fortunate that fellow parishioners celebrated with her June 2, rather than waiting for the actual day, a month later.
Campaigning for a new handicapped ramp is just the latest in Nehrenberg's history of activity. "I think you enjoy your religion better when you're more involved - and you understand your religion better," she says.
Up until late last month, Nehrenberg had only missed Mass a few times in the past year. But a recent hospitalization and the need to be hooked up to oxygen has kept her away for several weeks - and she's hating it.
Once she's approved for a portable oxygen unit, however, it's a sure bet she'll back in the pews at the church she has been attending since 1950. In the meantime, she watches CTND, the Catholic cable TV channel, and reads The Michigan Catholic.
Nehrenberg says she sometimes prays using prayers she learned as a little girl at St. Anthony School in Detroit: "I figure God hears me now just like He did when I was in the first grade."
And she frequently prays the rosary, although she admits she sometimes drops off to sleep before finishing it.
Tina Kovalcik, director of religious education at St. Augustine, calls Nehrenberg "a pillar of the church."
Besides more than a half-century in the Altar Sodality and the Daughters of Isabella, Kovalcik also notes Nehrenberg became a catechist back in the 1950s, not only teaching young public school children, but developing programs for "late bloomers" out-of-sync with regular classes.
Then, after the Second Vatican Council, Nehrenberg was a pioneer in greater involvement for women in ministry, she continues. "Helen was, and still is, very passionate about women in ministry and family involvement in ministry.
"Helen and her second husband, Walter, ministered together, one of the first couple teams in our parish - Walter as lector and Helen as an extraordinary minister of the Eucharist," Kovalcik says, adding that the couple started the program of taking Communion to the homebound and to shut-ins at an area nursing home.
And Nehrenberg was involved as co-founder of other activities, including the annual rummage sale and the funeral committee, which coordinates the funeral luncheons.
When Vatican II called for more lay involvement in ministry, "Helen and Walter took the challenge with humility and diligence," says fellow long-time St. Augustine parishioner Karen Knapp. (Walter Nehrenberg died in 2001.)
Knapp says of Nehrenberg, "When a job had to be done at St. Augustine, she made sure it got done."
Nehrenberg was born Helen Campbell, one of 12 children of Alex and Helen Campbell in a house on what was then Field Avenue north of Harper, when that part of Detroit was still Hamtramck Township.
The Campbells were vegetable farmers, raising produce they sold at Eastern Market, explains Kaczperski. The family moved several times, eventually to (then) Warren Township. "As the city moved, they moved," Kaczperski says.
From age 14, Nehrenberg was sent with her brothers to sell their produce. "She met my father, Edward Spranger, when she was 16, but they didn't get married until years later, in 1935. In those days you didn't get married until you could afford to. Then, he died in 1937 of acute appendicitis," Kaczperski says.
But in early 1949 she was introduced to Walter Nehrenberg. They were married that Sept. 1, and stayed married until his death 52 years later.
He was a widower, and brought three children with him. Kaczperski says "we were all family - family was a love issue, not a blood issue."
In 1950 the Nehrenbergs bought a farm in Richmond, where they grew vegetables, and Walter worked delivering milk.
Nehrenberg says, "I don't know what you'd do without faith. What would you cling to if there were nothing there?"
As to her longevity, Nehrenberg credits a diet of mostly vegetables. "She's almost a vegetarian, only seldom eating meat," says her daughter.
"I thank God every day," adds Nehrenberg.
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