That Was Father Stu: A Memoir of My Priestly Brother and Friend

By Bart Tolleson

This inspiring, insightful, and often humorous look at the life of Father Stuart Long is told by his close friend Father Bart Tolleson. After their relationship began and almost ended with a practical joke, the two men were ordained together and forged a strong, lasting friendship. As the exuberant, edgy Father Stu confronted a rare degenerative disease, the former brawler and professional boxer used every ounce of his declining strength to fight the good fight for souls.

Also included in this book is the enduring legacy of Father Stu, whose moving story continues to draw people closer to God, especially in times of suffering. His life inspired actor Mark Wahlberg to produce the film drama Father Stu, in which Wahlberg plays the title role. Father Bart, who was consulted by the makers of the film, provides interesting background on the movie.

Illustrated with many photos.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Oct 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781642292695

Book preview

PART I

From Pugilist to Priest

It’s a gift that Christ has given to me, to be a priest.

— Father Stuart Long

1

A Real Character

Stuart Long and I had a lot in common. We were both ordained Roman Catholic priests for the Diocese of Helena, Montana, side by side, on December 14, 2007. We were also both Catholic converts, having been fully initiated—years before we met—on the same day: April 2, 1994. We shared similar views about the Church and oftentimes battled with the same difficulties in our priesthood. Both of our dads were named Bill, and we were also both problem children of a sort. Just ask our mothers.

Our differences, however, are what bring the character of Father Stu into greater relief. He was raised without religion, and I was raised with a bucketful of it. He was a hell-raiser, and I was more of a hell-no-er. He favored courage over prudence, and I the opposite. He didn’t mind plunging into trouble, and I was always looking for a way to bail out of it. He was rough and tumble, and I was just tumble. He loved Franciscans, and I loved Carmelites. And in the Franciscan tradition of Brother Ass, Stu was a smart dumb ass, and I was a dumb smart ass. We were opposite sides of the same coin. He believed in Bigfoot, and I thought he was crazy. Yes, he really thought that Sasquatch was real and would spend countless hours trying to convince others of its existence.

The guy was a spiritual dynamo to some and a pain in the neck to others. He was both to me. I recall three traits that made him stand out as a man and as a priest. Sometimes these characteristics worked to his advantage; at other times they made him almost intolerable.

First, he was tenacious, and this sometimes led to stubbornness. He was always reasonable, but if he had a belief or a perception that he thought was true, he simply wouldn’t budge. Once he made up his mind about something, it was his way or the highway. He was particularly passionate about God. For those who disagreed with him about the existence God, he would work tirelessly to convince them that God was real. He was so relentless, that he would slowly draw the doubters into friendship and gain their respect. In the end, if they still didn’t embrace Stu’s faith, they couldn’t help but love Stu for trying to share it with them.

Second, Stu was fearless. He feared nothing except God. He didn’t fear his enemies. He didn’t fear the devil. He eventually stopped fearing his disease and weakness. At times he demonstrated amazing fortitude, even while trying to accept his limitations—however reluctantly. Sometimes Stu was brazenly foolish in his boldness, as when in the dead of winter he left the nursing home in his electric wheelchair to visit someone in the nearby hospital. Everyone knows electric wheelchairs aren’t designed for sub-zero temperatures and snow, but that didn’t stop Stu.

The one thing he did fear was the Almighty. Having sufficiently reflected on his life and death, he knew he couldn’t be certain about his eternal salvation. He was hopeful, however. He trusted in God and believed Jesus Christ would save him if he let him, but he sometimes worried that when the final test arrived, he might refuse God’s mercy. He always asked people, no matter who they were, to pray for him both then and at the hour of his death. He would also request that they pray for him during his likely long stay in purgatory.

Finally, Stu had a solid sense of humor, even in the darkest of times. Instead of being discouraged when he failed, he would laugh. He always let humor precipitate joy. Sometimes other people laughed along with him, but at other times he was the only one laughing. If he cracked a joke that no one understood, or found funny, he didn’t care. He would almost choke to death on his own cackling even while others watched him, dumbfounded. I could never help but laugh while he giggled at his own cornball jokes. Sometimes I bore the brunt of his humor, and the first joke he played on me, before I even met him, almost sabotaged my becoming a priest in the Diocese of Helena.

2

Practical Joker

During the 2005–2006 school year, studying at Saint Mary Seminary in Houston, as a seminarian for the Diocese of Dallas, I began to discern a move to Montana. My only sibling, Tammy, had moved to Montana in the early 1990s, and soon afterward my parents purchased a place near her and were spending more and more time there with the arrival of grandchildren. I found that every time I went to visit them, I came back loving Montana. Moving from one diocese to another as a seminarian is not easy. Along with prayer and discernment, a formal process must be followed.

To initiate all of this, I decided to become acquainted with some priests and seminarians from the Diocese of Helena. At the time, the bishop of Helena used Mount Angel Seminary in Oregon to prepare future priests. I asked a friend there if he knew anyone from Helena studying at Mount Angel, and he sent me the name of seminarian Stuart Long. I e-mailed Stu and introduced myself. I gave him a little background and told him about my interest in moving to Helena. Stu wrote back, and we began a correspondence.

Several e-mails later, I told Stu that I was planning an official visit to the diocese over the 2005 Christmas break and asked if he would be around. He replied that he wouldn’t be available to meet me during my trip (I later found out that he was in Oregon recovering from hip replacement surgery). He suggested I go to the cathedral in Helena to meet Monsignor Kevin O’Neill, the vicar general. Bishop Thomas was not going to be in town at the time of my visit, and the vicar general was the man in charge during his absence. Stu suggested that I ask Monsignor O’Neill to take me to lunch at a place called Hap’s. Not having ever visited Helena before, I assumed Hap’s was a popular luncheon establishment.

I met Monsignor in the sacristy after the daily Mass on a beautiful January day in 2006. He was gracious, kind, and warm, and he asked if I would like to go to lunch to further our discussion.

That’d be great, I said.

Is there any place you might like to go? he asked.

Can we go to Hap’s?

Monsignor O’Neill stared at me as if I had lost my mind, and I suddenly became nervous. He gave me a look that said he had already sized me up as unfit for service in the diocese.

Little did I know that historic Hap’s Bar is a joint where many of Helena’s natives taste their first alcoholic beverage, toast their birthdays, or play pool with their friends. It’s known for beer, peanuts, and late-night socializing. The ideal venue for a serious conversation about joining the diocese as a future priest? Not so much.

I stammered and said, Stuart Long suggested you take me there.

Suddenly, everything went from awkward to fine. Stu’s reputation was already well known, and it was clear to the vicar general that I had been on the receiving end of one of Stu’s practical jokes. Monsignor O’Neill suggested another place and off we went.

Many months later, when I told Stu the story of what happened, he couldn’t stop laughing. It turned out that he used to work at Hap’s as a bouncer.

Thanks a lot, buddy! I retorted, but by then I, too, was laughing.

In June of 2006, as a newly accepted transfer seminarian for the Diocese of Helena, I attended a priestly ordination at the cathedral. That was the first time I met Stu face to face. Before the ceremony began, we warmly shook hands and started talking and telling jokes. I could tell immediately that he was deceptively clever despite his aw, shucks attitude. He was slightly taller, bigger, and more rugged than I was. I stood at five eleven, and he was six two.

Stu invited me to sit next to him, and after the ordination, he suggested that I come spend a few days with him in Browning on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, where he was stationed for his summer seminarian assignment. Since he and I had hit it off, I made the arrangements without hesitation. I arrived in Browning a few weeks later, and it was there that he and I became friends. We went out for tacos on the first night, and when we returned to the rectory, a small condominium, we retreated to the den. Stu stretched out on a couch, and I sat on the floor propped up by a few pillows. We both sipped glasses of water, and Stu grabbed a bowl of seasonal cherries sitting on the counter as he said, Let’s tell our stories. You go first.

3

Swapping Our Stories

It was a little after 7:00 P.M., and we didn’t finish our conversation until about 1:00 A.M. We hardly moved the entire time. As Stu suggested, I went first.

I was born in Dallas, Texas, on October 5, 1966, at a Catholic hospital. It was a sign of things to come, because even though I was raised as a somewhat anti-Catholic Protestant, I entered the Catholic Church in my post-college years. My parents were devout Christians and we attended the United Methodist Church, but in my youth my mindset was more like that of an evangelical Christian. Upon graduating from high school, I received a full scholarship to study at Wheaton College outside of Chicago, a school many consider to be one of the bastions of academic evangelical Protestantism.

With so much religion in my youth, I subconsciously started to veer away from it. I wanted to major in communication and take as few Bible and religion classes as I could. Despite being at Wheaton with its strong emphasis on faith, I began to drift away from the confines of organized religion. I still had a faith of sorts, but I was feeling more and more agnostic on the inside.

With the tragic suicide of a friend late in my junior year, I shifted gears and began to search for God again. But I needed something new, a faith connected to my past but also one that went beyond it. Some of my college friends invited me to visit an Episcopalian church, and it was there, for the first time in my life, that I discovered the mystery of the Christian liturgy. Something about it profoundly struck me, but not enough to change my faith affiliation at the time.

After Wheaton, I attended New York University for graduate school, where I almost drifted altogether from the confines of organized morality, never mind organized religion. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew there was a God, and I knew that he was pursuing me. It was almost as if a spiritual force was chasing me, calling me back to practicing a faith I had been running from.

After New York, realizing I needed to give Christianity an opportunity to prove itself, I chose to attend a Christian school, Regent University in Virginia, to continue my studies in communication and pursue a Ph.D. On campus I met Catholics who invited me to my first Mass. We formed a wonderful community of young adults sharing fellowship and prayer. God’s ways are indeed mysterious. I was now hungering for the same faith that years earlier had prompted so much suspicion.

After I became a Catholic, I continued with my doctoral studies, and once I finished my coursework, I began to consider whether I had a vocation to the priesthood. Along with the challenges presented by celibacy, figuring out where to be a priest was difficult for me. Over the course of several years, I looked into several possibilities and even seriously considered joining the Discalced Carmelites. Eventually, I decided to pursue diocesan priesthood in the place where I was born and raised: Dallas. After years in the seminary there, I chose to leave Texas, which wasn’t an easy decision.

Having listened to all this, Stu shifted on the couch, took a sip of water, and grabbed a handful of cherries. He asked, How did you know for sure God was calling you to Montana? Deep inside, beyond circumstance, how did you know you should come here?

I told him how, in July of 2005, while on summer break, I had my first experience of climbing a Montana mountain. My sister had given me directions and sent me on my way to a trailhead outside the small town of Alberton. For company, she sent her faithful servants, two dogs named Sophie and Dillon.

They’ll sniff out bears or any other wild animal you might come across, she said.

Wild animals? Having spent my entire life up to that point in metropolitan areas, the only wild animals I had ever seen were muggers and speeding drivers.

As I set out on my hike with the canine companions at my side, I came to a quick realization: this wasn’t going to be easy. As I huffed and puffed my way up the trail, the dogs ran circles around me, seemingly wondering why I was moving so slowly. At least they didn’t abandon me. And in that moment, I felt God’s presence. He had not abandoned me either. A few hours later, I reached the mountaintop and sat down on a rock to catch my breath and take in the gorgeous view. I saw no wild animals apart from the beautiful birds soaring in the sky and the guardian angel dogs moving back and forth. Montana was calling me, and I pondered how I could move there.

Arrangements had to be made and details ironed out. And, of course, that’s when this wandering seminarian wandered into you, Stu, I said. And you wanted to send me to Hap’s with Monsignor O’Neill!

Stu chuckled, still sprawled on the couch. Your story is preeeetty gooood, he said, drawing out his words. (He often used that line.) Yeah, I think you belong in Montana. And you’re like me in more ways than you realize. So … here’s part of my story.

With that, he began to share some of his life’s journey.

Stu was born in Seattle to Kathleen and William Bill Long on July 26, 1963. Prior to her marriage to Bill, Kathleen had borne two children: Jennifer and Scott. About four years after Stu entered the world, his brother Stephen came along, followed by his sister Amy. Before Stu turned two, his parents decided to move back to Helena, their hometown.

When Stephen was not quite five, he died of meningococcal disease. Stu thought that sounded kinda weird and looked it up in an encyclopedia, but the nine-year-old could not make any sense out of what happened to his little brother. His mother and father couldn’t make sense of it either. Although they had attended various Christian churches over the years, they had no strong faith affiliation to help them through their grief. My parents took it really hard, Stu said. They were actively drinking. They didn’t know what to do.

Stu vividly recalled the way his parents broke the terrible news. I said, ‘Dad, where’s Stephen?’ And Dad said, ‘Well, he’s at the hospital.’ And I said, ‘When is he coming home from the hospital?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know.’ And then my parents said that he died. And I said, ‘Where’s Stephen?’ And Dad pointed up to the sky.

This memory stuck with Stu and affected him for the rest of his life. He felt tremendous sadness about the loss of his little brother and wondered why he had been taken so young. Although lacking in religious training, Stu wanted to pray for Stephen, remember him, and miss him, and he contemplated seeing him again in heaven someday.

Stu proceeded with tales of his boyhood. He and his friends liked to sit on the roof of a buddy’s house, and sometimes from this perch they would chuck apples plucked from a nearby tree at out-of-town visitors riding in an open-air tour train. To this day, the tour train still carries loads of tourists to see the sights of Helena.

When Stu was in grade school, the easiest route between his grandmother’s house and the school was directly through Saint Helena Cathedral. He and his buddies would cut through the church regularly, testing the patience of the rector. Time and again they were told to stop, but they never listened. When running through, I’d see a bunch of ladies sitting in the pews, and many years later, I found out they were praying the Rosary, Stu said. I imagine one of them said some prayers for me. He added that cutting through the cathedral was the closest thing he came to organized religion growing up.

At the age of fourteen, on the way to show off his new ten-speed bicycle to his friends, Stu was