Catherine "Katie" Scharle

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Thomas Hugh Quiery, an immigrant from Belfast, Ireland, and Margaret Graham Quiery, a registered nurse. Katie and her five siblings shared gifts of music, humor, and storytelling.

After graduating from St. Monica’s grade school, she attended Holy Angels Academy, where she was elected Sodality Prefect her senior year. Upon graduation, Katie joined The Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Dubuque, Iowa. Her first teaching assignment was at Our Lady of the Angels in Chicago, where she taught for six years. Months after assuming a new position in Iowa, she was called back to her original post after its historic 1958 fire killed 92 children, most of whom she had taught, and three of her nun friends, who died in heroic attempts to save their students. She taught by day and visited the families of the deceased children by night.

In 1959, the order asked for a volunteer to teach the deaf for Catholic Charities. Katie boldly stepped forward to Northwestern University to earn a master’s degree in Education of the Deaf. She left the convent in 1969 to live and teach near Margie, her only sister and lifelong best friend. Set up on a blind date with Theodore Scharle, a philosophy professor at Bradley University, she found his “dancing needed help, but his personality was adorable.” Their love took root in mutual admiration of each other’s deep faith and goodness. They married on June 26, 1971.

Having moved to Peoria, Illinois, Katie supervised the education of children living with disabilities for the school district. She resigned her position after a year in the hope of having a baby, and at the age of 43 gave birth to their only child, Margaret (Meg) in 1973. She later mused, “For a moment I thought I heard some distant music and felt like reaching up and holding time still—where the first pure note is struck for the melody of a relationship.” Her wonder at unanticipated motherhood never faded.

When Meg entered first grade, Katie commenced 19 years of teaching English at Peoria Notre Dame High School. She supervised the school newspaper and literary magazine and transformed her classroom into a hub for political action that sharpened student pens into swords: her class letters to newspapers and public officials sparked a media blitz that forced the nearby town to construct a new sewer system after many years of dumping raw sewage into the Illinois River. As Katie later wrote in her article published in English Journal, “We English teachers worry about teaching students to write, but we don’t often give them much of significance to write about. We fret that they can’t think, spell, and compose, but our assignments may be dull, lifeless, or abstract. Yet the real world is out there listening and waiting to hear their ideas and arguments.”

Having retired from teaching in 1998, she brushed up on mathematics to become a real estate agent sourcing HUD loans for low-income families. In 2004, when Meg and her husband called from Portland, Oregon to announce their pregnancy, Katie and Ted exclaimed, “We are moving!” Settling in across the bridge in Vancouver, Washington, Katie served as president of the local chapter of the American Association of University Women, wrote letters to the editor, served as a delegate to the Washington caucus, sang in the church choir, and assumed her central role as Meg’s daily advisor. She taught all three grandchildren to read, delighted them with her stories, relished beating them in board games, and challenged them to live a life of service and faith.

Katie remained true to herself through many transformations, each turn catching the glint of Christ’s light. She sparkled. To her, the world pulsed with stories, and even a chance encounter with a stranger opened a portal into a new world. Sitting next to her on a plane would change you forever—upon landing, you were almost certainly going back to school, switching careers, voting for a new candidate, or viewing a relationship in a new way. Bold and fearless in penetrating the depths of a person to draw out truth, she touched many. She experienced no barriers between herself and others: she even traveled to Europe with pocket-sized language dictionaries so that through a combination of hand gestures, laughter, and basic phrases she could continue engaging townsfolk across the continent. Anyone encountering her left with the feeling they had never met a person quite like her. Born without a dimmer switch and utterly ageless in her vitality, it almost seemed impossible that she could ever die, making her swift and gentle passage into eternal life on Good Friday so appropriate.

Preceded in death by her husband Ted, Katie is survived by her daughter, son-in-law, and three grandchildren. A funeral mass will be held Saturday, April 23 at 11 a.m. PST at Saint Mary Magdalene Catholic Church (3123 NE 24th Ave. Portland, OR 97212) with a luncheon following in the Parish Hall. Donations in her memory can be made to Catholic Charities, who funded her scholarship to Northwestern University to teach at their schools for deaf children, or to the Portland Rescue Mission.