When the organist at St. Bernard Catholic Church died near Easter Sunday in 1942, the priest called Margy McCafferty’s mother.
The church was searching for another organ player. Rev. Joseph Keating knew McCafferty — then barely a teenager — had played in daily services since grade school and wanted the girl to step in for the Easter Mass.
“I thought, nobody ever asked me. It was mother that said I could,” McCafferty recalled with a laugh.
Nearly 80 years later, St. Bernard’s last regular organist touched the keys for the final time at Mass last weekend, following countless services, weddings and funerals for generations of local Catholics.
“This is a dying art,” said parishioner Lisa Cosby, a longtime St. Bernard song leader. “There are just not organists around every corner, and the fact that she shared her gift with the church for so many years with all her obstacles … she’s just a blessing.”
McCafferty, now in her 90s, first learned to play music from her grandmother who bought her first piano. She began pipe organ lessons in grade school at St. Bernard under the direction of the nuns.
The young musician was soon playing for the 8 a.m. requiem Mass in the old downtown church, accompanied by the children’s choir. At the time, the organ was the only instrument allowed in Catholic services and any music had to be sung in Latin.
On the Easter shortly before her 14th birthday, McCafferty took her seat at the organ, gazing out at the white sanctuary flanked by statues of Joseph and Mary.
“I must have been a little nervous because I broke out in a rash,” she said.
Later, her high school friends would sit in the choir loft while she played through Mass. Boyfriends would be waiting on the sidewalk when services let out.
“My mother would never let me date county boys because they had cars and she didn’t want me car dating, so I married one,” McCafferty said, sitting next to her husband of 72 years, Dave, in the church.
“He’s from Darlington,” she added.
The couple first met during the Easter season. “It seemed like every date that I had, I picked her up at the church. I thought she lived there,” Dave McCafferty joked.
Friends soon asked Margy McCafferty to be the organist for weddings and funerals at other churches. She was granted permission from the bishop to play at her cousin’s vows, which she considered blanket approval to perform at her friends’ non-Catholic weddings.
After the structural changes made by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, the role of music expanded in the Catholic Church.
Pianos were allowed in the sanctuary and parish members encouraged to sing at Mass. McCafferty, the first parish council member elected after Vatican II, accompanied cantors at the organ.
“Margy and I got together years ago and she was always wonderful,” Cosby said. “She would copy the music at home and drive it over and put it in my mailbox so I could practice it.”
In recent years, McCafferty was part of a rotating group of organists assigned to the Saturday evening Mass. Other musicians handle the church’s weekly Spanish Mass or services at Wabash College, where McCafferty spent years playing at the Newman Center, the campus Catholic ministry.
After developing problems with her eyesight, she decided to retire. During McCafferty’s final Mass as organist Saturday, Cosby presented her friend with a wooden plaque reading “grateful,” quoting a verse from the book of Hebrews.
Fewer organists across the nation are taking part in worship services. In a 2014 survey of American Guild of Organists members, 3,582 organists said they played in a religious institution.
More than half of members surveyed had served a religious organization for more than 30 years.
In the darkened sanctuary on a recent afternoon, McCafferty flipped on the light of the church’s computer organ, which she went with one of the priests to buy. Music swelled through the room.
“I’ll still come to church. I’ll miss getting ready for it,” McCafferty said of her pre-Mass routine before sitting at the organ. “Dave won’t miss that because I had music strung out all over the house and practice like crazy before I play.”
