People

By Kathy McGee Burns

Musician Mick Moloney will be returning to St. Malachy’s Church in Philadelphia for his annual concert on Sunday, November 1. The event raises money for the operating costs of St. Malachy’s School, a mission school and “beacon of hope” in North Philadelphia that serves mainly low-income children.

But this year, something is different. Sr. Cecile Reiley, SSJ, will not be there, physically, to guide us. She passed away on April 24, 2015. She and Mick worked on this event for 28 years and, as Mick said, “Sister Cecile was one of the loveliest people I have ever known. A living Saint, really. The most gentle of souls but with a calm inner strength that was extraordinary.”

Sister Cecile, a native of Pottsville, joined the Sisters of St. Joseph as a young woman in 1957. She double majored in music and art at Chestnut Hill College and later got an MS in pastoral counseling. She was a teacher and an immigration counselor in the Diocese of Allentown and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. She was a member of the Catholic Peace Fellowship which has met at St. Malachy’s—her ministry up until her death—for more than 30 years.

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Kathy DeAngelo and Dennis Gormley

Emma Gormley was kicking to the beat of the bodhran in utero, laying as an infant at the foot of her mother’s harp, and up on stage at the age of three singing the Irish folk song, “Johnny Todd,” to a huge audience for which her musician parents, Dennis Gormley and Kathy DeAngelo, were providing “the background music.”

DeAngelo laughs as she recalls the moment. “They weren’t paying any attention to us as they drank their glasses of wine, then suddenly, when they heard this big voice coming out of this little girl, they started listening. Dennis said to me, ‘She’s going to be just like you!”

When Emma took up the violin at school, her parents weren’t surprised. Between them, they play a full orchestra’s worth of instruments. Kathy is a self-taught guitarist, fiddler, and harper who also plays mandolin and banjo; Dennis plays anything with strings, flute and whistle. The entire family sings. They occasionally perform together. (See a photo of the whole family below.)

Kathy and Dennis, who met when they were college students in New Jersey in 1973, have been the Irish trad duo (and sometimes trio, with other performers), McDermott’s Handy since 1978. They have two CDs, the latest of which is “Bound for Amerikay: The Irish Emigrant Experience: Coming to America as Told Through Music, Song & Story.” They recorded and mixed it in their own basement studio.

Their lives have been steeped in music. But in 1997, when Emma was 10, her parents thought she needed a group of kids her own age to play with. Then that year, a friend who was director of the Garden State Discovery Museum in Cherry Hill asked DeAngelo if some of her and Dennis’s students could play Irish music during multicultural month celebrations. They rounded up a few kids, asked friend and fellow music teacher Chris Brennan-Hagy of Philadelphia to bring some of hers, and booked Tom Slattery, an Irish storyteller, for the event. “This is how things always happen,” says DeAngelo. “You think, okay, this will be easy!”

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