NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE I n his last homily at Los Angeles’s cathedral before he was murdered, Bishop Dave O’Connell talked about Mary, the mother of Jesus — and a pilgrimage we led together to the Marian shrines Fátima in Portugal and Lourdes, France. The Los Angeles auxiliary recalled weeping in Lourdes. His own mother had died two decades before, and for the first time since he last visited her in his native Ireland, he said, he felt the loving welcome of a mother.
He wept because he felt deeply. Specifically, he had a heart for the vulnerable. News reports have talked about his work with gang members and prisoners. He was an instrument of peace and conversion. Because he was so approachable — and persistent — he himself was able to issue the kind of welcome all Christians would if we lived what Jesus Christ taught during His Sermon on the Mount.
In conversation after our 2017 trip, he talked with me about how the Fátima and Lourdes shrines are about Mary appearing to children. Poor children. Children who would otherwise be unknown to the world. He had a heart for the same. And he was convinced that while meeting material needs were obviously important, both that child in pain and that gang member could be taught to have a relationship with Mary and Jesus. In that last sermon, remembering the wedding feast at Cana, Bishop Dave, as he was known, said that he was pretty sure that Jesus, because of “his great love for his mother, won’t refuse her anything. He honors his mother so much, and he will always — he will always help when she asks him to help.” And so he said that when he was looking for help, he would always “talk to Our Blessed Mother first.”
She’s so important, he said, because all she wants for us is what God wants. And isn’t that exactly what a believer should want? He said: “She said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’ I think that’s what she tells us, that also — do whatever Jesus tells you. Because when you start living in the will of Jesus, and doing what he asks you to do — then you enter into this kind of space where, well, you will be blessed. And that space, that’s where healing happens. That’s where new life happens. That’s where consolation occurs. That’s where new hope emerges, living in that relationship where you are putting yourself completely under the authority of Jesus.”
The authority of Jesus was a power O’Connell believed we didn’t tap into enough on this earth. He talked with me about the “unclean spirits” that we see everywhere, every day “in the forms of people’s rage, self-hate, with addiction. All these unclean sprits that are plaguing people.” And many times, people pick them up because of choices other people make in their families and lives. All too often, people look to others to heal them of these, leading to only more pain. He said that he has seen the suffering of “people . . . plagued with . . . self-hate or shame because they were victims of abuse” mushroom into unbearable pain that manifests itself in “anxiety, depression, rage.” He observed that “it becomes so much that it takes all the energy out of their lives and becomes itself an energy force in their lives.” What they need to know is that the Creator of the world loved them into life and is available to them for unending love and healing. That can be discovered only in relationship. He believed that the child or the gang member could speak to Jesus and Mary — or reverse the order, because a mother might be less threatening than God Himself — in his heart.
It is difficult — if not seemingly impossible — for people in agonizing pain to believe this about themselves. That they are loved and can have a personal relationship with God. That there is hope beyond the misery they are experiencing — and has likely been inflicted on them. There was an authenticity about Bishop Dave that made it believable. He radiated a joy, in the midst of violence and poverty and brokenness, that was convincing and convicting.
Christianity is often seen as prohibitive and joylessly demanding. That’s not the Christianity you encountered when you encountered Bishop Dave. He showed you, by the way he loved you, that God changes lives for the better. That, in relationship with God, you will be set free from your enslavements, if you are open to seeing there is more to life with Him than without Him.
In that last homily, he said that in the Eucharist “Jesus takes the suffering of the sin of the world unto Himself and gives back His mercy, and His new life, and His salvation.” The invitation to that — to faith — has to be done with love and the selfless witness of people of God.
With Bishop Dave, his Irish brogue and effortless sense of humor didn’t hurt. He was seemingly senselessly murdered — by someone who had to be sick. There doesn’t seem to be another explanation the police have found credible. I suspect the murderer was exactly the kind of person the bishop’s heart would regularly break for. If there’s any way for his murder to make sense, it is for us to learn from Bishop Dave’s example. There are places to meet here, too, for many of us — Mary is a Jewish mother, honored even by Muslims. Let God be real in your life. Show Him to others. And His Mother, who makes life more tender with her love for you and her Son.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.