An honor guard stands over the casket of former first lady Nancy Reagan at the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif., March 9. (CNS photo/Reuters, pool) The late Nancy Reagan was a “very quiet and unassuming person”, the priest who accompanied the Reagans during their 1984 visit to President Ronald Reagan’s ancestral home has said.
“I met her twice,” Fr Éanna Condon told The Irish Catholic, “the first time in the rose garden of White House a couple of years before the visit”. Fr Condon was then a curate in the Tipperary village of Ballyporeen, from where President Reagan’s great-grandfather Michael Regan had emigrated in the 19th Century.
While he was “sad to hear” of the 94-year-old’s death on March 6, Fr Condon said he was not surprised by the news.
He recalled how he had had a “casual chat with her” during her June 3, 1984 visit. He remembered too, he said, how despite her being surrounded by numerous aides, she spent a long time “trying to get rid of her handbag in the parochial house before going across to church, and she had no one to take it”.
photo: CNS