Father, have ya got a blessing for a horse?” said Anne McCaffrey to Richard Woods, OP, sometime during their first meeting. Anne had shortly tried her hand at raising racehorses, and this was the occasion when Nickel Run was first due to run. Richard rose to the occasion and produced some good words, but sadly Divine Providence demanded otherwise for poor Nickel.

Though the whole Dragonhold lot—a group of horse-mad girls who had attached themselves to Anne in the early ’70s and grown into women who remained her close friends—were wary of a Dominican priest, Richard wooed them all. He continued to woo them and me when I met him. Richard is the sort of person who gives religion and the Catholic Church a good name.

Anne had given up on the Catholic Church in the midst of the Second World War when her father was missing somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, her little brother was getting ready to die of osteomyelitis, her older brother was in Hawaii awaiting possible invasion, and she herself was sent down South to a boarding school. Conversations with Richard seemed to have changed that, so much so that Anne came to write “Beyond Between,” decided to be buried rather than cremated, and had a cross on her casket.

Richard wryly commented that Anne had either a “Presbytolic” or a “Catholitarian” funeral service. My brother, sister, and I asked if Richard could say something at her service, and he found the most excellent words of both praise and comfort.