Every morning before Mass, I check the Archdiocesan Ordo, a small booklet of liturgical instructions presented day by day that makes clear what Mass to celebrate, what readings, and so forth. Below the instructions for each day about the Gloria and proper Preface, there is a list of priests and deacons, each noted with a year. This is the day’s necrology: who died that day in history, that we may pray for them.
This morning, August 10, the Feast of Saint Lawrence deacon and martyr, the first name was Msgr. Bernard Gerhard, a priest of great significance in my life, about whom I wrote in this space a few weeks after his death in 2007. But next was Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle, who died in 1987. I never met him, but he affected my life, and yours, more than most people know.
Cardinal O’Boyle was the first “real” Archbishop of Washington. When the Archdiocese was erected in 1939 over the objections of the Michael Curley, Archbishop of Baltimore, and from his territory, he himself was also its first Archbishop. That’s right: Curley was Archbishop of two dioceses -- and you can guess which one he preferred -- until his death in 1948. So finally, in that year, Washington got its own Archbishop, and at the same time five counties of Maryland were joined to the District of Columbia, including Montgomery. This means Saint Bernadette became part of Washington that same year, the same year it was elevated from mission status to parish.
Patrick O’Boyle was from Scranton, Pennsylvania, where as a boy he had applied to seminary but was told they couldn’t take him, because they already had more candidates for priesthood than they needed. Imagine the day! So, through some acquaintance, he was accepted for study for the Archdiocese of New York, at their St Joseph’s Seminary in Dunwoodie. His years of formation there were accompanied my mockery from his sophisticated (sic) urban classmates because of his “hillbilly” roots in coal country.
His skills were prized by the Archbishops however, and after being assigned increasingly responsible positions, he was put in charge of the national Catholic relief effort to Europe after World War II, with his office in the Empire State building.
Named to Washington, he was the first US priest to be made an Archbishop without starting as a Bishop. He started strong and continued that way, overseeing the building of many churches and schools to serve Catholics in Washington’s burgeoning suburbs. Because he was Archbishop when our church was constructed in 1958, it is his coat of arms that is displayed on the wall behind the altar, on the right side. His personal arms feature a tree, and his episcopal motto, State in Fide (Stand firm in the Faith, 1 Cor 16:13).
In the 1950’s, well before any government mandate, he integrated all the schools in the Archdiocese. In 1968, he gave the invocation before Martin Luther King Jr.'s I have a dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial. That same year, when CUA theologians instigated a revolt against Pope Saint Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae, he moved just as strongly to give the rebellious Archdiocesan priests a stark choice: adhere to the teaching of the Church, or cease to be a priest. Most returned to fidelity; a few chose the latter course.
More personally, in addition to a sharp sense of humor, he was known to insist that every priest wear a proper hat when out of doors. With civilization and its attendant expectations already deteriorating, that expectation gained far less traction. Alas!
Created Cardinal in 1967 and retiring upon reaching the newly-instituted age limit in 1973, he handed over the reins of the Archdiocese to Archbishop, later Cardinal, William Baum, but remained in his residence just off Tenley Circle until his death in 1987. I have been told by alumnae of Immaculata High School, whose athletic fields were just across Warren Street NW from the house, that they occasionally got a glimpse of “Ol’ Pat,” perhaps as he walked out to get his morning paper.
I lived in that same handsome house 2004 – 2005 while with Cardinal Baum, and in addition to the beautiful purpose-built chapel that Cardinal O’Boyle added, it still had his enormous old formal desk from his office in the Empire State building, and by the fireplace, to make sure nobody forgot who lived there or where he came from, a large brass coal scuttle filled with black lumps of Pennsylvania anthracite. God rest him.
Monsignor Smith
