Deacon Beckendorf's scarred, sacred sidewalk

On Palm Sunday, April 15, 1962, the sidewalk in front of the old Carrollton Tavern, located just five blocks from Notre Dame Seminary, became for 11-year-old Eddy Beckendorf a Polaroid moment in Calvary and blood.

For a child who grew up in a dysfunctional family, watching his police officer father and mother wail away at each other at the slightest provocation, what unfolded was too impossible to believe.

Eddy’s mother, infuriated by her husband Edward’s philandering in plain sight with another woman on the sidewalk in front of the tavern, went home and stuffed her husband’s belongings and his revolver into a Schwegmann’s grocery bag.

When she returned to the bar, she saw her husband still chatting with his girlfriend in a crowd outside the front door. Dorothy Beckendorf, then 31, hurled the bag of clothes at her husband, which included Edward’s holstered gun. Eddy’s dad had sold his service revolver for cash, so the handgun he used on a regular basis was the one with its safety mechanism removed, which gave him an edge in winning “quick draw” contests for beer money.

When the bag hit the window and then fell to the sidewalk, a single bullet fired and pierced his father’s groin. Edward Beckendorf was pronounced dead at Charity Hospital a short time later.

The Times-Picayune reported his death laconically on Page 1 the next day: “N.O. Policeman Shot to Death: Sgt. Beckendorf Victim of Freak Accident.”

It was a freak accident waiting to happen.

Eddy had seen his parents fight before in their shotgun house on Burdette Street near Claiborne Avenue. When he was 10, trying to sleep, Eddy covered his ears whenever the words and fists started flying. His simple prayer was: “Please, God, make this stop.”

One night, his father yelled for him to come to the room where he and Dorothy were fighting. His mother yelled for him to stay put in his bed. Not knowing what to do, Eddy finally came into the room and saw his parents struggling over a large kitchen knife. Eddy’s father got control of the knife and handed it to his son, telling him to drop it in the kitchen sink.

Eddy hid it under the sink instead.

In his riveting new book about growing up within a vortex of domestic violence – “The Silver Bullet of Faith” – Deacon Eddy Beckendorf offers a candid account of his tinderbox childhood, a book not intended to shock the senses but rather to give witness to the reality of God’s love overcoming even the worst of evil.

Imagine, Eddy writes, what it felt like going to Mater Dolorosa School in the days after your mom accidentally shot your cheating dad to death.

“Because the church found my daddy in adultery, they wouldn’t bury him in the church,” Deacon Beckendorf said. “When I was at Mater Dolorosa and a kid lost a parent or grandparent, the entire school went to the Funeral Mass to support their fellow student and their family. When my dad died, they wouldn’t give him any Catholic services. So, at the end of that year, we started running. We ran to another private school. We ran out to Metairie. We spent our lives running.

“When my daddy died on April 15, 1962, our entire life before that disappeared. My mother never went back to the house. All the photographs were taken off the walls. I never saw a picture of my sister and me in our childhood until my mother died in 2003.”     

In the 30-plus years since his ordination to the permanent diaconate in 1991, Deacon Beckendorf, now 72, has long since stopped running and occasionally has drawn back the curtain on his scarred life. Sometimes, his candid homilies have met with fierce resistance.

“One time I told the story about a beating and a lady came up to me after Mass and said, ‘How dare you talk about your mother in front of everybody at church,’” Deacon Beckendorf recalled. “I told her, ‘Ma’am, I don’t know what happened to you in your lifetime that caused you to carry this pain, but I’ve shared my story, not my mother’s.’”

Deacon Beckendorf offered to have coffee with the woman if there was anything he could do to help.

“She called me a week or two later and we went and had coffee,” Deacon Beckendorf said, which was the beginning of their regular coffee conversations.

The rest of the story

As it turned out, the woman had struggled with the fact that her son was gay and had contracted AIDS, and she later developed cancer. She also was an abuse victim herself.

“When she was dying, I was at her bedside,” Deacon Beckendorf said. “She was an abused wife. I then realized that sharing my life actually reached out and touched people.”

As Deacon Beckendorf began to reveal more of his life through his homilies, Mary Queen of Peace parishioner Kim Chatelain, a former reporter and editor for The Times-Picayune, suggested that he write a book. Chatelain collaborated with Deacon Beckendorf on the quick read that they hope may be used on retreats or in parish settings to help people who are carrying around decades of hidden wounds.

The family violence affected little Eddy’s academics, and he twice had to repeat grades. He made the decision following high school to join the Navy, determined that the military was his “route to a productive life.” He wrote to his girlfriend Susan every day in boot camp, and they were married on Wednesday, March 19, 1969 – St. Joseph’s Day.

“Our wedding was one of the most pivotal spiritual events of my life,” he wrote.

A servant’s heart
Over the course of his diaconate ministry – which coincided with his day job as a police officer (yes, he was determined to become the police officer his father never was) – Deacon Beckendorf discovered an innate ability to listen to people’s problems and soothe them.

He was an administrator at the St. Charles Parish courthouse one day, checking the security cameras, when he saw a young female friend, an attorney in the District Attorney’s office, weeping. He had heard from his son that Regina Heine was pregnant.

Deacon Beckendorf asked if there was anything he could do. Heine had just been informed that the baby girl she was carrying had full Trisomy 18, a birth defect that causes stillbirths in 50% of the cases. Ninety-five percent of babies with Trisomy 18 die within a year after birth, many in the first month.

All Heine was thinking about was having her daughter baptized while she was still alive.

Deacon Beckendorf told Heine he would keep vigil at the hospital and then baptize her baby immediately after birth. A few seconds after Anne Grace Heine was cleaned up from the Cesarean delivery, Deacon Beckendorf, in medical scrubs, held a tiny plastic bottle of holy water over her head.

The black-and-white photo of the baptism is one of the treasures of Deacon Beckendorf’s ministry: It shows a lone drop of water falling down on Anne Grace’s forehead.

“It’s gorgeous,” Deacon Beckendorf said.

Anne Grace died 47 minutes later.

Challenged by priest
Deacon Beckendorf said it was a homily he heard from then-Father Thomas Rodi – the current archbishop of Mobile who was a parochial vicar at St. Christopher the Martyr Parish in Metairie – that prompted him to begin taking his faith more seriously. Eddy’s and Susan’s son Klint was preparing for his first Communion.

“He said, ‘If you want your children to follow you through your faith, you need to provide an example of that faith for them,’” Deacon Beckendorf recalled. “You need to get involved in your parish, and you need to be the Christian example of mother and father to that child.”

In fact, it was their younger son, Kasey, who poked his dad in the ribs one Sunday in church – after hearing a talk about the permanent diaconate – and suggested that he apply for the upcoming formation class.

When Eddy and Susan arrived for the first discernment meeting, the room was packed. All Eddy saw and heard were doctors, lawyers and business executives.

“It was like 60 men and their spouses – just packed with people,” he said. “And I just felt like a failure all over again, that it’s just not going to happen. It was just me and my lack of total faith and trusting in the Lord. It was too much Eddy Beckendorf.”

The tapes in his mind began to loop, the tapes about his first-born daughter Keri being born with developmental disabilities as a punishment from God.

“My grandmother convinced me that Keri was born with a disability because God didn’t like me,” Deacon Beckendorf said. “I did something wrong, and I needed to go fix what that was. I had no idea what it was that I needed to fix other than the fact that I asked my parents to stop fighting, and my daddy died.”

In the crowded room, Eddy felt like his doubts were sitting in the chair next to him, but he persevered.

A memorial of the heart
Strangely enough, Notre Dame Seminary, where Eddy took most of his diaconate courses, was five blocks from the sidewalk where his father died on Palm Sunday, 1962.

“When I left the seminary at night after the diaconate formation classes and took a right-hand turn and went to the interstate, I passed it every night,” he said.

The sidewalk was at 3423 South Carrollton Ave. There’s a Valero gas station there today.

Deacon Beckendorf will sign copies of his book April 22 after the 9 a.m. Mass at Mary Queen of Peace Church in Mandeville.

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