The Last Word: 60 Years a Priest
By Rev. James F. Quigley, O.P. ’60
“I must be God’s favorite!” I say that to people sometimes, even though I am not serious. The point I hope to make is that I have had an incredibly blessed, happy, expansive, and surprising life as a Catholic Dominican priest. This year, I celebrated 60 years of ordination. For that I am so grateful and humbled. There is nothing that I am or have done to deserve the graces God has given me through priesthood.
Notwithstanding my limits, faults, sins, and failures, God has guided, shaped, healed, and used me as a priest for his purposes. Priesthood has taught me how to love — love God, love saints like Mary, Joseph, and Dominic, and love my family, friends, and the people I have served. Priesthood has organically connected me to the living Lord Jesus Christ. It has empowered me to live in an intimate, affective friendship with him. This especially comes through the Eucharist. As a senior priest, I calculate that I have celebrated holy Eucharist, offered the holy sacrifice of Mass, some 26,000 times in cathedrals, parish churches, hospitals, prisons, mission chapels, college halls, and seminaries.
Priesthood has placed me in the lives of so many people — young, old, sick, healthy, poor, educated, immigrants, successful, friendly or not so. A good number of them have become my close friends. They have showed me how to be human, sacrificing, accepting, generous. As I said, they have taught me how to love.
My learning to be a priest of course began at home. Parents and family showed me by their example that life did not center on the self. The more you gave of yourself the more you became a happy, fulfilled person. The gospel formed who they were and they gave me that gospel.
I started as a priest in a very smelly city, Chimbote, on the Peruvian coast. It was the industrial center for fish meal fertilizer. Latino culture, language, customs, popular religiosity, extreme poverty, and injustice changed my understanding of priesthood. A priest is anointed by the Holy Spirit to give himself as Christ to his people and to address all their needs as much as possible. The Peruvian women and men the Dominican community ministered to often lived in brutal poverty. We worked in schools, hospitals, parishes, and prisons, on streets, and in barriadas or slums. We offered sacrament, preached, cared for youth, families, the sick, and the destitute, and tried to comfort the mourning. I came to see God’s grace in these good people, how precious they were to God. I learned to do whatever they needed a “gringo” pastor to do and thrived on their example, acceptance, support, and friendship. They taught me that a priest serves, cares, and gives his heart to anyone in need. My respect and deep love for my Latino sisters and brothers, migrant farm workers, university professors, students, professionals, abuelas and abuelos, has continued though all my priesthood. En mi corazon me he vuelto parte latino. (In my heart, I have become part Latino.)
As a Dominican priest, I live and see everything through a Thomistic theological vision, then try to share that through preaching. That is what being a Dominican priest has meant to me. I have exercised that call in a variety of ways. I have taught theology at a Catholic teachers college in Peru, at Providence College, at Jesuit and Dominican universities in Rome, and the Maryknoll School of Theology. Thinking about, reflecting on, writing about, and teaching the mysteries of Catholic faith has enlivened my intellectual understanding and deepened my faith. My students were always encouraging and questioning and put up with me patiently. They were great young people to be with and I did not mind being “an easy marker.” Over the years, I have witnessed many of their weddings and baptized their babies. I am now an honorary grandfather to those grown up children. I have also loved preaching the Word of God in English and in Spanish and Italian but try never to use the subjunctive! It can be very intimidating to speak the gospel and I have always been very nervous and depended totally on the Holy Spirit. Who am I to dare offer God’s message?
Over many years, I have shared in the joys and happiness of individuals, couples, families, and communities. I have also been with them when their hearts were broken. At those times I would want to “fix,” to heal, to make things better. But often I could not help and felt so inadequate as a priest. Good people were suffering and I could not take their pain away. Priesthood mediates the divine, so in all my pastoral experiences, it had to be God’s work, not mine. That took time to learn.
In my middle age, I was invited to be the Father Carl J. Peter Chair of Homiletics and a priestly formation advisor at the Pontifical North American College in Rome. I stayed there 10 years and loved it. It is a seminary to train future American priests. I think it has put me into contact as a mentor with more than 600 priests now ministering in the United States. In helping form priests, I grew in my own vocation. A priest lives in the heart of God and serves his Catholic believing community. It is always about them and not about the priest. You do have to learn to empty yourself, your pride, your entitlement. Those seminarians and the faculty at the North American College and so many other holy, pastoral priests showed me the way and still do.
I now near the end of my time as a Dominican priest and happily still assist wonderful parish communities and Providence College alumni. At some point, I will come to the end of a very blessed life and hopefully move into unending, joyful life with the living Lord Jesus Christ. That’s of course why I became a priest to begin with. I have so much to be grateful for. As the Dominican spiritual teacher Meister Eckhart said, “When the only word left is thanks, it is enough.” No wonder I think I might be God’s favorite.
Rev. James Quigley, O.P. ’60 was ordained to the priesthood on June 10, 1965. He continues to serve Providence College as associate alumni chaplain.
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