By Jay Sorgi
for the Register
The hands and feet of Regina Colbert have pushed the pedals of an organ and led musical worship at St. Patrick Parish in Manley, Cass County for approximately 10,000 Masses.
That’s what Regina Colbert, 94, estimates after averaging about two-and-a-half Masses every week as the parish’s organist for 78 years before her retirement in March.
“I broke in a lot of priests,” joked Colbert, a mother of four children, grandmother of seven and great-grandmother to four. “It’s anywhere between seven and 10.”
“I’ve been a priest getting close to nine years and I’m not even close to 10,000 Masses, and I celebrate Mass every day and sometimes two times a day,” said one of the priests she “broke in,” Father Jason Doher, the pastor of both St. Patrick in Manley and St. Mary in nearby Elmwood.
“Music is a vital and essential part of liturgy,” he said, “and for her to give of her time for so long for so many years in service to the Church is absolutely amazing. There’s not a whole lot that we can do to express our gratitude for such an incredible gift to the Church.”
St. Patrick Church might not have received that gift had it not been for a really good crop from her family’s corn farm in 1947, and weekly long-distance rides to Omaha in a mail truck as a teenager.
“My dad was a farmer, and we lived on the farm, of course. Dad had a good crop one year, and he wanted to give something to the church, so he decided he would give them an organ,” said Colbert, well-known to her fellow parishioners as Jean.
“I had already been taking some piano lessons. Back then, almost all the young people took piano lessons, but playing the organ was different and it required some additional lessons.”
Colbert didn’t have a choice of local organ teachers, because no one in the vicinity taught the instrument, so her dad sent her to the place in Omaha where he bought the organ.
But there was one problem: They weren’t able to regularly drive her to Omaha, so she had to essentially hitchhike with someone trustworthy.
“My folks being farmers, they couldn’t take me every week, so I had to find a way to get there,” she admitted.
“We had a mail truck that came from down south, a pickup with a large box on the back of it. He would travel every day, coming from the south, coming through Manley and into Omaha. He would wait for a while, and then he would load his truck back up and return the same way he came. That’s how I got my trip to Omaha. I would ride with the mail carrier. Sometimes I’d get to ride in front with him, and sometimes I’d have to sit back with the box of mail.”
Those lessons allowed her the training to sit at the organ for more than three quarters of a century inside St. Patrick Church.
She became a fixture that spanned eight papacies, changes in the Mass after the Second Vatican Council, and changes in music.
“The change was slow,” she recalled. “The kind of music that we played was what we call the older hymns. As time progressed, we just sort of slipped in from the older hymns into the newer ones, as they do today. It’s just kind of a gradual change.”
She said that in her tenure, many people were able to “go along with the tide” in the changes in Mass music, but some missed the old hymns and might even be singing older lyrics to songs that use familiar church melodies, but use newer words.
“For us older folks, it’s a little hard to adapt. Rhythm is different. Words are different,” she said.
“We even find some of the older songs where they’ve changed the words, and you’ll find us old folks will be singing something and somebody else is reading the new ones out of the book singing something else.”
She said that her first Masses often used the Marian hymn “On This Day,” while songs like “Holy God We Praise Thy Name” spanned all eight decades of her service.
The parish honored her in recent years with a plaque marking her service, then threw her a cake-filled retirement party on St. Patrick’s Day, the namesake of their parish.
It was all to celebrate the 36-year schoolteacher and high school track coach who made church-organ playing her avocation, and in some ways, the rock of her own faith as she tries to live long enough to top her mother’s 101 years of life.
“It’s probably one of the things that kept faith in me and, and in the family as we grew up,” she said. “When everyone else was kneeling and praying, I was praying through my music.”
