Editor's Note: Many bishops across the country gave priests permission to work full time for the encounter. Some helped out in a parish during the week, but they spent weekends as team priests. They served in their own diocese but also flew anywhere in the country that needed a priest for a Weekend. Later some flew anywhere in the world that needed a priest. They attended speaker's nights as well as community (image sharing) nights and renewal nights. They gave the Weekends, but each diocese has always had diocesan and order priests who give several Weekends a year in addition to their school and parish work.

The big goal of 1969 was is have a full Weekend. We were always aiming to fill the retreat house. That meant we needed 18 couples. It was mid-October of 1969 when we filled the house for the first time. But we also had three Weekends that month, another first. One other first came in December. We had multiple encounters taking place on the same weekend.

Matrimony: Had you started any follow up activities that first year?
Father Chuck: We had nights of renewal once a month at St. Ignatius. It was supposedly for the rookies right off the Weekends but everyone came, especially all the teams. So it was like one big reunion for everybody each month.

Matrimony: Who led the encounter during those first years?
Father Chuck: I worked with Ed and Harriet Gazerro, who were the first executive team couple. The second couple I worked with was Jim and Mattie Harper. They had been with the Teams of Our Lady, and were very dedicated and committed also. The third executive team was myself with Bob and Geri Campbell. It was during our leadership term that expansion really took off. Bob and Geri were tremendously organized. Bob is a very gentle man. Geri is more driving. Both were driving in their dedication to spread the encounter, however. Bob worked as many hours for us as for his job. Geri was on that phone from the time she got up until she went to bed. She just never got off the phone, initially, nationally and ultimately internationally. They were a beautiful pair together. Bob is quite ill now with heart trouble, and Geri has cancer. I really ask that you pray for them.

Matrimony: Tell us about the expansion under you and Campbells.
Father Chuck: We started in January, 1970 with at least one Weekend every weekend. By March we were holding two Weekends every weekend. And then month by month it multiplied. 1972, 1973 and 1974 were our banner years! I don't have the exact figurer but I do know that during 1973 and for most of 1974 we ran 17 encounters every single weekend in Nassau and Suffolk counties alone. They were running full too. Those were 25 couple Weekends. The only two weekends per year when we didn't have a Weekend were the ones between Christmas and New Years and Easter! Every other weekend including Mother's Day, the 4th of July and Super Bowl Sunday, we had a Weekend. In other words, in Nassau and Suffolk we encountered 425 couples per weekend, times fifty weekends per year. Now that's 21,250 couples in just that narrow area. Of course that was our best, but there were an awful lot of Weekends (at least one per weekend) given in New Jersey too, during those early years. Of course by 1973 we were giving Weekends all across the country. Los Angeles was going gang busters by then. I would estimate that we gave the encounter to more than 300,000 couples those three years. In New York alone, in 1969 we had 285 couples, in 1970 we had 1890 and in 1971 we had 4250. In 1972 the numbers really jumped and in 1973 we went bonkers!

Matrimony: The teams must have been giving an incredible number of Weekends. How did you prepare for them?
Father Chuck: First of all, we didn't have any team training weekends until 1970. What we did was meet together as a team twice and go over the talks. Then we had "in home" training with six or seven rookie teams, about every two weeks. We didn't have an outline per se. We had scribbled notes and insights, and a huge book of all the talks any had given! On the second team training weekend in 1970, we brought together all the teams who had ever given a Weekend, plus all the new ones. By 1973 we had three main centers across the country in New York, St. Louis and California, and each had a team training almost every month. Those were big Weekends, with forty and more couples and sometimes 10 priests on each being trained.

Matrimony; Tell us some stories about early encounter Weekends.
Father Chuck: Most people in the Encounter don't know that the early teams didn't dialogue on the Weekends. They only started dialoguing because they were too noisy in the kitchen fixing meals! It happened this way. In the very first year of the encounter, 1969, we ran Weekends in a Jewish bungalow colony. I had been stationed in Monroe, New York and the owners were friends of mine. It was a huge hall. They used it as a night club during the summer. It was a barn-like structure and we took out the stage and the tables and chairs and it became our presentation room. Then there were cottages off by the side of the hall.

All the dialogues were done in the big room except for the open ended Saturday night when the couples went back to their cottages. The trouble was that the big hall was not heated. So we rented big blowers; big kerosene blowers like you see at the side lines of football games. They made so much noise however, that we turned them off during the presentations. Normally this made the room freezing cold. We all wore overcoats, and when the writing time came, everyone would head for the blowers and huddle around them. Once I almost froze the couples to death. I thought I was turning on a heating vent and instead it was a ventilator. For food, we got franks and beans for Saturday lunch, lasagna for Saturday supper, cereal, toast and danish for breakfasts and shrimp salad for Sunday lunch. It was the same every weekend. One weekend the teams were in the kitchen as usual preparing lunch while the couples wrote and dialogued. They were making so much noise they were disturbing the couples. The kitchen was just off the big hall. So I went to the kitchen and told them they all deserved to make the weekend and to go dialogue themselves. My actual motivation was to keep the noise down. But it worked out beautifully, they thought it was wonderful. So I would go into the kitchen and heat up these big pots of franks and beans and then serve it when the dialogue was over. I will tell you a funny story. It was maybe 1970 or 1971, and a missionary priest from Brazil made the encounter here in the states. He took it back to his people and since he had no couples he gave it himself. However, believe it or not, he wrote the talks in three parts: husband, wife, and priest. He would start, "Now he says..., now she says..., now my sharing is..." And do you know what? It actually worked!

Matrimony: We've heard stories abort the weekend when the encounter discovered feelings. Tell us about it.
Father Chuck: Our first team training was so good that we scheduled another. It was March or April of 1970 I believe. We thought it would be joyful but it wasn't. Once again we had invited the "old" along with the new teams. The old teams went into the pits. (Remember nine of us had been at this more than one year.) They discovered they had not been dialoguing and they felt hypocritical. The sharing was heavy water. It started to pick up after the God's Plan talk. One of the wives said she had discovered that "love is a kick in the ass” That became an expression the couples used for a long time, Bob Campbell, on Sunday after the Sacrament talk said, "This weekend we've discovered that our little church is in ruins, but now were going to build a cathedral!" But a team couple thought it was all a set up, start to finish. And they stood up and said so. "We feel you are all hypocrites talking about ruined churches and cathedrals, etc." And the whole house of cards just tumbled around us. I couldn't say a word because we all believed that feelings weren't right or wrong. And they had said they had to share their feelings with us. So I just thanked them, and we couldn't wait to get out of there

I was driving home and all of a sudden it just struck me. "That's not a feeling, that's a judgment!!!" I had been frustrated before because I knew instinctively that what they had said wasn't right. First of all, it wasn't true, but even if it had been, it wasn't fair to share it that way. Now I knew why it wasn't right! So I got on the phone and called everybody who had been on that weekend and explained the whole thing. Thus we discovered the little rule saying, "Anytime you can put “that” in the sentence, and it makes sense, it's not a feeling, it's a judgment."

Matrimony: How did you fill so many Weekends every weekend?
Father Chuck: Like today, we asked couples to list and then recruit the six best marriages they knew. Unlike today, we asked for addresses and phone numbers. Now they could give us more than six names but not less. If they didn't have them, we told them to get them and we'd call them the next day. The team divided the list and called the Weekend couples during the week. On the phone, we gave them one week to recruit their friends. Then we'd call them ourselves. A big push was put on getting them to a speaker's night held every other Sunday. The second week the team would call those names who didn't turn up or didn't sign up on Sunday night. If that didn't get them, their names were turned over to a follow up committee. We had bunches of wives who literally called hundreds of names of people who had already been called twice before. The percentages that were finally recruited weren't high but the numbers of recruits that came out of it was high because there were so many names turned in. We would get at least 200 names off every Weekend.

Matrimony: All of you were really gutsy then. Didn't you turn a lot of people off?
Father Chuck: We always said that if we weren't turning anybody off, we sure weren't turning anybody on! On those early Weekends we used to leave the doors of the empty rooms open. Each time we passed them we were reminded that there was some couple God wanted us to have on that Weekend that we hadn't gotten. It was a beautiful way to increase our urgency for recruiting. Then on Sunday, we told those making the Weekend that there were couples who should have been there and weren't and we didn't want it to be one of their couples on the next Weekend.

The Meynards were our scheduling couple. They were incredible. They had backups for backups. We had couples who were alerted and would be ready to come as late as 7:30 on Friday night if someone cancelled. By the time we started in 1970 we didn't have any empty roosts to grieve over. We didn't recruit only for the couple's relationship. Early on we all realized that the Weekend was a tremendous way to reconcile people with the Church. My best recollection is that about one third of the couples who made the Weekend returned to the Sacraments after two or more years away. I've mentioned that figure to a lot of team priests and they agree with that estimate. So we had to be relentless in our efforts. Too much was at stake for our Church!

Matrimony: That word “encounter” hurt us in those early years, didn't it?
Father Chuck: We really had to fight that word. There were so many "encounters" of a questionable nature going on around the country then. When someone heard of an encounter that had to do with marriage, they often assumed the worst and thought of sexual orgies etc. I was at a cocktail party one night trying to persuade a couple to make a Weekend. One wife looked at me and with all sincerity said, "Well the stripping I could take, but sex with other men is not for me!" What stunned me and really made me silent (l know you won t believe this but I really went silent) was that she seemed to feel virtuous about taking off her clothes! We really had to fight these kinds of assumptions back then.

Another thing we fought was the idea that this was a weekend for relaxing and having fun. One of my more embarrassing moments came about one Friday night when a couple came in to make the Weekend and were carrying everything in but the kitchen sink. I always helped carry suitcases and I groaned when I saw the size of the portable television they had brought. I was hoping I could convince them to leave it in the car: it was a long walk to their room. I really forgot it was only Friday night of the Weekend. I told the guy he wouldn’t need the T.V. He replied that watching T.V. was the only way his wife could get to sleep. Without thinking I said. "Well, if that's the case, you sure aren't doing your job!'' Anyway, they used the set on Friday night, but they sure didn’t use it on Saturday night!

One of my best memories is of the family that had three generations make the Weekend. First, the parents, the "middle" couple came, then their kids, and then the grandparents. The oldest couple that I knew of who made the Weekend was married 54 years.

Matrimony: There were many meetings of the leaders around the country then weren't there?
Father Chuck: We had bi-monthly leadership conferences. Every two months all the executive couples from around the country would meet in some city. State plans, experience new ideas, and get motivated and energized again. Then they would go home and do the same for their people. There were presentations at these conferences but it was the stories and new ideas passed back and forth between presentations that made these meetings vital for our growth. The old timers will remember something told to all new teams then. With all the Weekends being held, our needs were so great that we used to tell teams preparing to give their first Weekend; "We can't afford to have you cancel out. The only legitimate excuse you have to not appear on this weekend is death -yours -in which case get the body there on time and well prop you up as an example of non-verbal communication!" Once there was a Weekend given where a lot of "ladies of the evening" were floating around the hotel. I wasn't the team priest: I just heard the story. The wives simply wouldn’t let their husbands go to the rooms alone because these ladies of private enterprise were knocking on the doors and asking the husbands if they wanted any company!

Matrimony: What led to the encounter being given in other faiths?
Father Chuck: In the beginning we had almost no couples who weren't Catholic. It was my conviction that the encounter was something for the whole church, not just for Catholics. We very definitely wanted to share with our brothers and sisters of other faiths. So we set up a "quota" system whereby we held 20% of the room for interfaith and other faith marriages. It is almost tragic what has happened through the years. The 20's is looked on now as a restriction. When actually it was established as a gift, so we wouldn’t be selfish with a Weekend that was so good. The next step we took was to actually introduce it into the Jewish faith then the Protestant faith communities. We wanted 20% of other faiths present on the Catholic Weekends. But, we wanted more; we wanted to immerse them in their own faith experience. And that is why we helped the other religions begin.

Matrimony: Do you have a favorite story?
Father Chuck: One that stands out in my mind right now is of a team weekend in St. Louis. It was one of those awful hassled Friday nights when you think you'll never get started. When we finally began, the pay phone in the hall started to ring. I just ignored it. Afterwards I realized that every mother in the room was convinced that the phone was ringing for her, telling her of some emergency. One of her kids was hanging from a tree or had gotten in a motor-cycle accident and so on. They were all furious with me. But blithely went on. At the end of the first presentation, Barbara McBride stood up at the sharing time and just shook her little finger at me and said, "I’ve spent 30 odd years becoming the woman that l am, Chuck Gallagher, and you're not going to change me!” I just smiled and thanked her for her sharing. Afterwards when they were writing I went over and gave her a hug, and this made her madder than ever because now she couldn't be mad at me.

Matrimony: When did you finish your leadership in the encounter?
Father Chuck: On Palm Sunday, 1974, Bob and Geri Campbell and I resigned and the new executive team was Ray and Norma Palowski and Father Ed Schramm By this time we were pretty well established across the country. The game plan in 1971 had been to go to the ten most Catholic cities in the United States and introduce the Weekend within the next two years. This was accomplished.

Matrimony: So then you left the encounter?
Father Chuck: That’s when I left leadership. I have never left you.

Click here for a printable page (PDF, 59KB)