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| Michael Kottar had recently taken leave as pastor of St. Mary Help of Christians Catholic Church in Shelby - a position he'd held since 2007. |
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NC Catholic priest, diagnosed with rare brain disease just last month, dies at age 53
Charlotte Observer`
Mon May 24, 2021
Area: Charlotte
Father Michael Kottar, a Roman Catholic priest who had served in the Diocese of Charlotte for more than 21 years and who revealed earlier this month that a rare brain disease would soon take his life, died on Saturday night in Pickerington, Ohio. He was 53.
The cause was Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that the CDC distinguishes as “rapidly progressive and always fatal.” Kottar had recently taken leave as pastor of St. Mary Help of Christians Catholic Church in Shelby and Christ the King Catholic Mission in Kings Mountain — positions he’d held since 2007 — and returned to Ohio to be with his family while receiving end-of-life care.
“I kept thinking, they’re gonna find out what’s wrong, fix it, he’ll be back ... no problem,” recalled his longtime friend Father Herbert Burke, pastor of Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in Forest City, of when Kottar was in the hospital earlier this spring. “Then he told me (it was terminal) probably about two or three weeks ago, and he just went downhill from there, worse and worse. He said that he was getting more of a brain fog.
“I didn’t know what to do. You just do your prayers. But I guess God decided it was time.”
A big brother to identical twin sisters, Kottar was born and raised in Youngstown, Ohio, by a father who worked on an assembly line for General Motors and a mother who worked as a Catholic school secretary and library tech. He graduated at the top of his high school class, according to the Diocese of Charlotte, and “shocked” his sisters when he announced he wanted to become a priest.
He studied at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Ohio, then at St. Alphonsus Redemptorist Seminary in Connecticut, before ultimately earning his master of divinity from Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Maryland in 1994. He was ordained later that year for the Diocese of Metuchen, N.J.
In 1999, Father Kottar moved from New Jersey to the Diocese of Charlotte, where he served first at St. Matthew Catholic Church in Charlotte, one of the largest Catholic parishes in the country.
He then served as administrator at St. John Baptist de la Salle Catholic Church in North Wilkesboro, before moving in 2002 to the Charlotte Diocese’s smallest parish, Holy Redeemer Catholic Church in Andrews, where he served first as administrator and then as pastor.
Kottar was remembered by those who knew him as a caring, thoughtful and engaged man of God.
“He was always Christ-like, always asking about how his one-time parish here in very far western North Carolina was faring,” wrote Father George David Byers, current pastor at Holy Redeemer, of his interactions with Kottar. “He would ask about people by name. He was available to Jesus to keep this parish open and thriving.”
“He was very reverent, very kind — always kind to everybody,” added Burke, who went to seminary with Kottar, became friends with him after they were assigned to Charlotte, and served with him as cruise chaplains at sea many times. “Prayerful, traditional, good with the simple things, did well with the kids.”
According to the Diocese of Charlotte, Kottar began feeling dizzy in December, and at times felt poorly enough that he had to cancel Mass. He underwent a battery of tests over the next several months before receiving the terminal diagnosis in April, the Diocese said.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease is found in only about 1 to 2 individuals per 1 million every year, according to the CDC, and may be inherited, or be transmitted by coming into contact with infected tissue (e.g., from an organ transplant or ingesting contaminated meat), though most of the cases occur for no known reason. A type of prion disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob is difficult to diagnose and not treatable.
Everyone who contracts it dies, usually within one year.
Burke said he was stunned to hear of his friend’s illness.
“We would get on the treadmill at the gym at the cruise ship and I would work up to 4 miles an hour — but he’d start out at 4 miles an hour and he’d do 7 miles an hour for an hour,” Burke said. “He was in unbelievable shape. Thin and trim. ... And he was 53, I’m 58. I expected him to outlive me easy. I’m the one on blood pressure pills and sugar medicine and everything and he wasn’t on any of that stuff. So, a very big surprise.”
But Kottar will perhaps be remembered best for his grace in the face of his own impending death.
“It was hard to hear,” Kottar said of the diagnosis earlier this month in a story published by the Catholic News Herald. “I thought I’d have a few more years. But if God wants me now, then that’s what will be. I just can’t understand how anyone could get through something like this without faith.”
The day before flying back to Ohio, Kottar made his final public appearance — while sitting in a wheelchair on the lawn outside Atrium Health’s Carolinas Rehabilitation center in Belmont — delivering an address to more than two dozen young men who are studying to become priests.
“I have a few words for the future: It’s a good future,” the priest told the gathering, looking and sounding obviously weakened, in remarks captured in a video of the occasion.
“I wish I could stay a little longer, and maybe I will, but you are going to be the future — and I think liberal, conservative, it’s not that so much. It’s about having faith. Having faith in God.
“So keep the faith.”
It was a powerful moment not just because of the heart-wrenching circumstances but also simply because of the uniqueness of them: a priest who should still have had decades of life ahead of him faced with the stark reality of his own mortality.
“There’s something really sobering about that, because (people in a parish) just don’t think that he has the same problems that they do. So it resonates differently and you realize, yeah, we’re all in the same boat,” said Father Patrick Winslow, who is the Diocese of Charlotte’s vicar general and chancellor and is also pastor of St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Charlotte. “We’re all facing an eternal horizon, and sometimes it’s closer than we thought. ...
“Anyone who’s surprised by a sudden or an abrupt diagnosis with an imminent passing, it’s an opportunity for all of us to put things into perspective. Even in the dark time of facing that loss, there is a giftedness in the perspective that is afforded to the rest of us in gaining a proper perspective, where small things are small again, and the important things are important again. Because routine has a way of getting all of that a little upside down.
“So that sort of general orientation toward that eternal horizon as being something that we all face — even priests — is an experience that I think everybody has been sharing in.”
Kottar is survived by his father Michael H. Kottar of Pickerington, Ohio; his sister Amy (Michael) Akers of Pickerington, Ohio; his sister Renee (Gregory) Selby of Nazareth, Pa.; and four nieces and nephews.
He will be buried at the Belmont Abbey monastery in Belmont. Funeral arrangements will be announced by the parish as soon as they are finalized.
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