Spend any time at a Midwest parish (really any Catholic parish) and you’ll find some Garys and Debbies around. I’m talking about the parish fixtures, the small group of guys and gals who make the parish go ‘round. They volunteer to everything, run everything, sacrifice for everything. They know everyone and anticipate needs. They do the thankless jobs nobody else wants to do. They, with the Holy Spirit, are the lifeblood of the parish. The Garys and Debbies get stuff done. 

Sure, these parish people have their rough patches. They can be stuck in their ways, scoff at the younger generations, grumble because people don’t step up, and move about within exclusive circles that seem impenetrable to the outsider. But the toughness of their callouses makes them endearing to those willing to appreciate them. 

I appreciate these parish Garys and Debbies, and I appreciate them more and more each day. My Family of Parishes is filled with them. But they are a dying breed, an endangered species on the verge of extinction.

These are the same kinds of Garys and Debbies that Stephen Wilson Jr. sings about in “Gary,” a tragic ballad about the decline of the working class. You can read more about the inspiration behind “Gary” in this article, but to pull a few of Stephen’s comments for you:

The song is sad. I mean, that’s the thing. I’m definitely celebrating a working-class human, but at the same time, it’s a very sad story. I wasn’t trying to make Gary some superhuman. I wanted to try to be real about the situation, because the Garys are endangered. We experienced that when we had this ice storm in Tennessee [in late January 2026]. We had to import Garys from all over the country to get everybody’s power back on. There’s logistical evidence that we just saw recently to prove that, yeah, these Garys? We’re running out of them, and maybe we should pay attention to that because we rely on them to fix things. … Instead of just letting them drive off into the abyss to go save another person’s day, how about we give them a moment and celebrate them?

And that’s what I wanted to do with this little post, to pay tribute to the Garys and Debbies out there — my fathers and mothers in the faith on whose shoulders we built our parishes and who still, today, silently carry the often unnoticed burden.