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From the Amarillo Daily News, October 30, 1928. Author unknown:

…One of these factions is Catholic, the other protestant. I know that Protestants pray, because I have prayed with them. And I know that Catholics pray, – and pray direct to God, – for not long since I passed by a little Catholic graveyard in the vicinity of Umbarger, Texas. It was small and its grave stones were simple and humble indeed. There, kneeling by a grave, was a man and five little children, each pair of hands in prayerful attitude, and each face lifted toward heaven. I was touched by this sorrowful scene. I asked the inhabitants of the neighborhood about it, and was told that the man is a Catholic, and that once each week he and his children repair to this little cemetery and offer prayer beside the humble grave of a departed wife and mother. 

There was a man with me who was wearing a button on the lapel of his coat with this inscription: “I am a Democrat for Hoover.” I saw him pull off that button and quietly drop it to the ground, as he remarked:

“I had but one reason for wearing that button. I will not vote against my party on account of any man’s religion or his method of worshiping God." 

The man praying by the grave was my great-grandfather, Paul Artho. The oldest of the five children in prayerful attitude was my grandmother. She was seven.

We found this newspaper clipping in my grandmother’s attic after her house burned down in February (the day before my second son was born). In that house that burned, she and I used to pray an "Our Father” over meals, and then I’d listen as she prayed for the souls of the faithful departed in their journeys through Purgatory. 

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