(The following reflection is excerpted from an article by Carol Zimmermann in The Tablet, the newspaper of the Diocese of Brooklyn, and is reposted with permission.)

“First of all, it’s pretty well known that I grew up in a single-parent home,” Washington Cardinal Wilton Gregory said, noting that he was raised by his mother and grandmother, who were “sources of light and life growing up.”

He said they instilled values in him and his two sisters, sending them to a Catholic elementary school in Chicago when they weren’t Catholic at that time, because they firmly believed in the “great value of education.”

One thing he remembers about his mother, Ethel Duncan Gregory, a professional singer who died in 2013, was her “love of music and the importance of praising God in song.”

He said his mom, who “played such a pivotal role in my life,” attended his major events, from his priesthood ordination in the Archdiocese of Chicago in 1973 to his installation as the archbishop of Atlanta in 2005. Although she died before he was named archbishop of Washington in 2019 and elevated to cardinal a year later, he is confident that she is praying for him.

“She’s praying I don’t forget the hard lessons she imparted,” he said.

(Carol Zimmermann is the senior national correspondent for The Tablet newspaper of the Diocese of Brooklyn, New York. Her entire article on “Lessons from Mom: U.S. Catholic leaders on what they learned from their mothers,” can be accessed by signing onto The Tablet’s website.)