Jean Aubrey Dementi's Life Celebrated
Episcopal News Service. September 15, 1988 [88191]
FAIRBANKS, Alaska (DPS, Sep. 15) -- A Requiem Eucharist for the Rev. Jean Aubrey Dementi, who spent 37 years in Alaska as nurse, missionary, and priest for the Episcopal Church, was held Monday, July 25 at Sacred Heart Cathedral, here. Bishop David R. Cochran, retired bishop of Alaska was the celebrant.
The Rev. Mrs. Dementi, 68, died May 22 at the Pioneers Home. Born October 17, 1919 in Santa Barbara, Calif., Dementi grew up in the Southern California area. She graduated from the Bishop Johnson College of Nursing in Los Angeles, and received a bachelor of science degree in public health from UCLA. While in school and following graduation she worked as a visiting public health nurse.
In 1951, Dementi came to Alaska and began work as an appointed medical missionary for the Episcopal Church. Her first assignment was at St. Mark's Mission in Nenana, where the Church had a boarding school. From there she went to the Hudson Stuck Memorial Hospital in Fort Yukon, and then served as a nurse-evangelist at St. Luke's in Shageluk.
In Shageluk she met and married her husband of 29 years, Jim Dementi, an Athabascan. Their daughter, Beth, was born in 1960.
The Dementis moved to Anchorage in 1965, and there she worked for the borough health department as a public health nurse for four years.
Returning to fulltime church work in the late 1960s, Dementi and her family moved back to the Yukon River area and Christ Church in Anvik. With encouragement from Bishop William Gordon, she studied for the diaconate and was ordained deacon in 1972. Five years later, she became the first woman ordained priest in Alaska.
In 1978, she was called as the first vicar of St. Jude's, North Pole, and she served as editor of the Alaskan Epiphany, the diocesan publication. She took an active role in the Commission on Ministry, and continued to serve at North Pole until her retirement in 1985.
Diagnosed with liver cancer in 1982, Dementi chose to accept her illness and not let it dominate her ministry. Her words at the time were: "It has not affected my basic outlook on life; it has reinforced it. I have never believed that God sends us cancer or any of the other devastating things that happen. But, on the other hand, these things can help us grow."
Jean received an honorary doctor of humanities degree from the University of Alaska in 1983 and an honorary doctor of divinity degree from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in 1987. She was also a co-recipient of the William Spofford Award given by the Episcopal Church Publishing Co., presented to those making an outstanding contribution to the social mission of the church.
Perhaps the honor she most appreciated -- and one that was to give her national celebrity -- was the opportunity to meet Pope John Paul II in May 1984 during his historic visit to Fairbanks. While among a group of handicapped and severely ill people gathered to greet the Pope personally, she shook hands with him, and passed him a simple note: "Your Holiness: we women priests add a new dimension to our Lord's work." A photograph of the scene was widely published.
Jean is survived by her husband, daughter Beth Dementi Leonard, and a brother and sister.
In accordance with her wishes, memorial gifts may be made to the Fairbanks Pioneers Home.