MY FIRST MASS AND MY LAST MASS

On April 2, 1949 Archbishop Edward F. Hoban ordained me along with six of my classmates to the priesthood after eight years of study following high school graduation. The downtown cathedral was jammed with our relatives and friends. The next day I celebrated my first Mass at my home parish of Our Lady of the Angels on Rocky River Drive. My family, relatives and friends filled the church. After the Mass, about 300 relatives and close friends were invited to a dinner at the Lake Shore Hotel in Lakewood, Ohio. In the evening there was a reception for friends and relatives who were not invited to the dinner. Many handed me envelopes with money or a check enclosed. The generosity of friends and family enabled me to pay for the dinner and to buy a new Ford.

About a week later, a letter from the archbishop informed me that I would be an assistant at Saint Mary Church in Elyria. I spent four years there, a year at Saint Thomas Aquinas parish, six years as an English and Latin teacher at Borromeo seminary, six years as principal of Holy Name High School and eight years as dean of the graduate division of Saint John College and director of clergy continuing education. I also earned a doctorate at Western Reserve University by taking evening and Saturday classes at the university.

During four of those years, I resided at Saint Colman rectory where Father Vincent Haas was pastor. If there is any priest in this diocese who will be a candidate for sainthood, it will be Vinny Haas. Dinner with him was an educational experience. We did not talk about sports or clerical gossip but the decrees of the Second Vatican Council, the shortage of priests, the ordination of women, racial segregation, a just wage, war and peace, and politics. (Like me he was a Democrat).

When Haas was pastor of a storefront Church in Akron, he refused to build a new church for black Catholics which Archbishop Hoban and Monsignor John Krol (later Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia) wanted to erect because they felt blacks would feel more comfortable worshiping with their own kind.

Haas did not buy this. He recognized it as a ploy by rich white Catholics in Akron to keep their churches segregated. He said that black Catholics should attend parishes in their own neighborhoods. His stance infuriated Krol, but Haas would not back down. The storefront church was eventually torn down and the new Saint Peter Claver Church was never built. Haas had won but his victory took a toll on his health. He developed kidney disease, which eventually claimed his life on April 16, 1977.

When Saint John College closed, Bishop Hickey asked me what I wanted to do. When I told him I wanted to remain in Catholic education, he told me that there was no room for me in Catholic education in the diocese of Cleveland but that I was free to look for a job in Catholic or secular education anywhere in the country and was always free to return to Cleveland as a pastor.

I was not surprised by this. When Hickey closed Saint John College, which had given the diocese high quality teachers and nurses for 47 years, he had only been in Cleveland for four months. I was dean of the graduate division, but found out about the closing when I read the morning paper on Halloween, 1974. For a year or more Hickey and I had a series of heated confrontations about the closing of the college, always behind closed doors and never in the media.

With Haas’s advice I worked for a year in the East Cleveland public school system and then took a position as director of graduate education at Siena Heights College in Adrian, Michigan. It was there that I decided to apply to return to the lay state and marry Anita Dixon. I mailed all the documents to Father Bob O’Donnell in Rome.

Every Friday night I would drive from Adrian back to Cleveland to visit Anita and Vin Haas whose health was failing rapidly.

The last time I saw Vin, I told him that I had applied for a dispensation to be laicized. He was sitting in the front room and rose to congratulate me. He then asked me to join him in concelebrating Mass in the living room of Saint Colman’s and told me that Saint Thomas More would never consider being ordained a priest.

That was the last Mass I celebrated. A couple of weeks later, the date was April 16, 1977, I got two phone calls. One was from John Lavelle, the pastor of Saint Colman, telling me that Vin Haas had died. An hour later I got a call from Bob O’Donnell in Rome telling me that he had walked my documents over to the Vatican and that I was now a layman.

Some would call that coincidence; I believe it was providence.

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