DIVINE INTERVENTION?

This is a typical story really about seven Paulist Fathers, a floating Tiki Bar and a kayaker.

It all started when Greg Barrett, a captain for Tiki Tours, offered the Paulist Fathers - actually two fathers and five seminarians - a free, relaxing tour around Lake George, which is 60 miles north of Albany, N.Y., in August. 

Paulist Father Frank Desiderio, C.S.P., is the director of St. Mary’s of the Lake, the summer retreat on the lake for the fathers since 1875, and Barrett lives next door to their housekeeper, Vicki Butz.

Barrett was talking with Butz one night on his back porch about taking the Paulist Fathers out on the boat saying, “my mother was a very devout Catholic, and I said these guys need to come out on the Tiki boat. (And a couple of months later,) the guys said, ‘Let’s go!’ ”

“He just wanted to give our guys a nice day, so he offered the free time slot,” Father Desiderio added. 

The floating Tiki bar is essentially a round barge that normally holds partiers - not priests - on the popular upstate New York lake. The seminarians and novices, who are studying at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., were staying at the retreat for 10 weeks this summer to get out of the city during the pandemic. It was a typical day on the lake with moderate chop on the water and broken clouds, said Father Desiderio, until the group noticed a man, wearing an ill-fitting life jacket, struggling to hang on to his overturned kayak after losing his paddle.

Barrett added after he picked up the Paulist Fathers, instead of going up the west side of the lake and returning on the east side, because of the weather, he went in the opposite direction. It proved to be a fateful decision as Barrett and the fathers came across the kayaker, Jimmy MacDonald, in distress.

“I noticed his paddle, that is the first thing that caught my attention,” Barrett said. “I beeped my horn to get the guy’s attention. I thought the person at the time was not paying attention or on his phone and when we got closer, we saw the kayak flipped over and then we heard him yelling for help and we rolled over there to get him out of the water.”

Along with the deckhand, novices Chris Malano, from Hawaii, and Noah Ismael, from Maryland, help drag MacDonald to safety.

“They were very happy to be able to help,” said Father Desiderio, who added another novice on board, Ben Chisholm, was captain of the Fordham swim team. 

“The first thing I said was, ‘You are in good hands, you are with priests’ ” Barrett said, “and he said, ‘I am with priests?’

“(MacDonald, a recovering addict,) asked for a prayer as soon as he got on board and I said to him, ‘Are you with somebody?’ He gets on the phone and tells his wife, ‘Guess where I am at? I am on the Tiki boat,’ and he says, ‘It gets better, I am here with a bunch of priests.’

The retreat has a prominent dock and boathouse and Father Desiderio said this was not the first time that the Paulist Fathers have helped people to safety or given them directions. In August, the Warren County Sheriff’s Office used the dock as a staging area in its efforts to search for a drowned swimmer. 

“Once a year we see someone in trouble,” Father Desiderio said.

But it always helps to have a little divine intervention!