My mother, Nora Moynihan, was County Kerry Irish Catholic, from Cloughnareeny, a place not important or even large enough for sophisticated maps of the world to show....

My duty was to swing the censer, made of a tin can containing hot water, which I replenished whenever the steam ("smoke") died down.His family experienced a brief period of financial difficulty when competitors to his father's business began operating in St. Louis.

Tettemer would later recall that "Father used the incident to instill in us some understanding of a people that had experienced harsh tribulations throughout its history, and to lay on us the precept of judging men as individuals and children of God, not accepting ready-made, often prejudiced estimates.

His discomforts made him "sensitive to emotional appeals, in music, in tales of heroism and pathos, and to beauty in color," and "equipped [him] with a spontaneous sympathy for the feelings of others, whether human beings or animals, and with a sense of the utter wrongness of doing anything that may hurt."

[9] During summer breaks, he resided on the Montgomery County, Missouri farm of an aunt and uncle "about ninety miles from St. Louis," where he "rode horseback full-tilt over the countryside," and helped with grain threshing.

His father then helped him obtain a job with the John L. Boland Book & Stationery Company, "the largest wholesale bookstore west of Chicago," for which he was paid $15 per month to assist with office work and run errands.

[10] While recuperating at home from a cold at the age of 16, his mother gave him several religious books to read, including Alban Butler's The Lives of Saints which, he later said, "aroused in [him] a burning desire to do something with [his] own life that would have worth."

At this juncture, he began reading only books which were religious in nature, "especially longer biographies of the saints," and became increasingly enthralled by the life stories of monks, whom he had come to believe were "the only ones who comprehended the true meaning of existence."

Sometime around this time, his 19-year-old sister, Nora, with whom he had shared an interest in entering the religious life, fell ill with a severe cold; she died from pneumonia just a few weeks later.

[11] John Moynihan Tettemer subsequently "entered the Passionist Order of Monks in 1894," according to the Sydney Morning Herald, "and made his theological studies in Rome, where he was ordained by Cardinal Respighi in 1901.

My brother and I said our Masses for Father at the two side-altars while the solemn requiem was being celebrated at the high altar, with the sanctuary crowded with priests.After decades of religious training and service in one of the most austere branches of his church, he began to suffer health problems, and was ordered by his physician to take time away from his job to rest.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported in its July 3 edition that the she had suffered a stroke the previous Tuesday, and that "[s]olemn high mass [would] be sung at St. Paul's Church in Pine Lawn by her son, the Rev.

Still active religiously during the 1920s, the Right Reverend John M. Tettemer, Auxiliary Bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church, was one of several celebrants at the opening ceremonies of the Theosophical Society in America's convention in Chicago, Illinois in August 1926.

[23] John M. Tettemer then also officiated at the 1927 wedding of Susan L. Warfield, of Hollywood, to the Right Reverend Irving S. Cooper, Regionary Bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church in the United States and a lecturer for the Theosophical Society in America.

In 1928, he wed Ruth Elizabeth Roberts (1905-1982), a native of Great Britain and, in 1934, began to make a new life with her in California in "the mountains behind Beverly Hills," according to the foreword to his book, I Was a Monk.

[27] When filing an application for a U.S. Passport in 1921, Tettemer stated that he was planning a trip both for his health and “to import American manufactured goods & raw materials to Europe.”[28] From 1937 to 1943, he was cast in three uncredited film roles in Hollywood.

[29] A 1940 edition of The Pittsburgh Press revealed more about how he became involved in the motion picture industry:[30] A handsome, white-haired man, dressed like a clergyman, stood on a crowded platform and delivered an opening invocation for a national political convention.

The delegates and gallery guests were extras hired for Frank Capra's "Meet John Doe" ... part of the script written by Robert Rlskin.

Tettemer came to California, ran a filling station, managed apartment houses, began tutoring college students, bought a small corner of the old Raymond Hitchcock estate near Hollywood and now lives there with his wife.

Much of his part had to be cut out, but Capra sought him again for "Meet John Doe," and there's little doubt that Hollywood's greatest scholar will have plenty of character roles after this if he wants 'em.

[33] Nicknamed "John the Divine" by his friends, Tettemer was an "expert athlete [and] equally skillful chess-player [who] was as much at home with people as with solitude," according to Jean Burden, the woman who wrote the foreword to his book.