With hard work and Southern charm, NC native helped shape the Diocese of Charlotte
When Rev. John Putnam first met Mary Lou Hildreth in 1992, his first impression was that she was a serious person.
The young priest, born in Catawba County and not raised Catholic, was coming to the Diocese of Charlotte in response to a call for help with the diocese’s Tribunal, a body in the church primarily known for handling requests for marriage annulments.
Hildreth, the director of the Tribunal who already had almost two decades of experience under her belt, became his teacher.
“When you first met her, she came across as very kind of stoic. … She had a good poker face,” he said.
In time, Putnam said, Hildreth — who died Sept. 20 at 89 — became like a grandmother to him.
“She guided me when I was leaving school and studying canon law,” he said. “She was the first person I’d call if I needed something, or if I had a question and needed some kind of resource.”
After all, Hildreth was, he added, the architect of the Diocese of Charlotte Tribunal from the time she joined the diocese in 1973, soon after its founding in 1972.
“Everybody was really scrambling, and she connected with people in the Province of Atlanta, which Charlotte’s a part of, and got the information and continued learning,” he said. “And it really was a resource. There was not a priest in the diocese at that point that didn’t know Mary Lou.”
Her steady hand guided the Tribunal for decades, through changes in leadership and changing times, and an intense workload of often more than 250 cases a year that took as long as six months to a year to resolve. Even after her retirement in 2005, the diocese noted, she continued to work on “special projects” part time until 2011.
“Just a cultured Southern lady,” Putnam said, “who would work hard, quietly. She would get things done and not expect any accolades for it.”
Her years of service did earn her honors from the Vatican, including being awarded the Cross of Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice by Pope Benedict XVI. It’s one of the highest honors a lay person can receive from the pope.
“It was a lucky strike for me, because I had never worked before,” she told the Catholic News Herald when she received the award in December 2005. “I was educated — (the diocese) sent me to school two or three times a year.”
A dedicated Southern mom
Throughout her career, her son Tom Hildreth said, she was a constant presence for her family, as well, which came to include five kids, 11 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
“She was always very supportive of all the things that we were doing,” he said.
Both Tom Hildreth and Putnam said Mary Lou was in many ways the quintessential “Southern lady.”
She especially loved to cook — per Tom, she made “the best” fried chicken and potato salad around. And she would always include members of her work family in big meals and celebrations, too.
“Each Tribunal would come together each year in a different location in a different diocese and have a provincial meeting, and when it came to Charlotte, Mary Lou would host a dinner at her house in Dilworth and transform it into a perfect example of Southern hospitality,” Putnam recalled. “She was the lady of the house and greeted everybody and, you know, just charmed them and welcomed them and made them feel at ease.”
Tom Hildreth recalled seeing priests and bishops file back to the house after midnight Mass services on Christmas Eve for “huge breakfasts made at about 2 in the morning.”
“We were always around priests and the bishop, and so that just seemed like a normal part of life,” he said. “Later on in life, I found out that most people in the diocese never really get to meet the bishop or necessarily develop what I would call regular friendships with the clergy, and that was just something we had growing up that we didn’t even think about. It was just a normal part of life for us.”
A well-traveled North Carolinian
Hildreth called North Carolina home throughout her life; she was born in Davidson and grew up in Marshville before spending many years in Charlotte and then moving to Indian Trail.
But she loved to travel, especially with her family, Tom Hildreth said. The family was able to go on trips frequently in part because of Mary Lou’s husband, the late Charles Hildreth, working for many years for Eastern Airlines.
“I think she just enjoyed anywhere that the family was going to be. … We went to a lot of different places, and she always made sure everything ran smoothly,” Tom Hildreth said of their trips.
Mary Lou and Charles, who met when she was living in a boarding house in Charlotte, were married for 62 years before his death in 2016. The couple shared a love of music, their son noted.
“Back in the day, they would go down to Greenville to see an orchestra and go to dances and things like that,” he said.
In her younger years, Tom Hildreth added, Mary Lou also worked as a dance instructor for Arthur Murray Dance Studios.
That experience was emblematic, he said, of her “diverse interests,” something that helped her connect with her kids as they grew up and developed their own hobbies.
“We never felt like Mom was gone because she was busy doing other stuff,” he said. “She was really the best mom anybody could ever ask to get.”
