June 29, 2023
Father Quigley remembers Most Rev. Ernest Bertrand Boland, O.P. ’52, ’84Hon.
By Rev. James F. Quigley, O.P. ’60
Associate Chaplain, National Alumni Association
“I’m ready.” That’s what he told me. Bishop Boland and I often went to lunch to some high-end Rhode Island restaurants, like Gregg’s or Chelo’s or IHOP. He would tell me that he didn’t really have much of an appetite any more and then after lunch would suggest we share blueberry pie for dessert with ice cream. In one of our conversations he said, “Jim, I’m 93 years old and I am ready. I am ready for whenever the Lord takes me.” That was four years ago.
Bert. His Dominican religious name was Bertrand in honor of the Dominican St. Louis Bertrand, the great Latin American missionary. Ernest Bertrand Boland grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. After graduation from high school he joined the United States Army, serving in Europe toward the end of the Second World War. When the war ended Bert returned home, went to Providence College on the GI Bill. Growing in awareness of the prevenient, ministerial grace calling him to continue Christ’s ministry, he entered the Dominican Order and was ordained a priest in 1955. Now a priest, Bert further discerned a more radical invitation from God to leave everything behind, to empty himself of comfort, security, to go to Pakistan, to enter a new culture, language, a world very different from an American Catholic experience. His response to that call was, “I’m ready. I’m ready, Lord, to do whatever you ask.” He told me he came to love the Pakistani people and that his years in Pakistan were some of his happiest years. Eleven years after arriving as a new missionary, at the age of 41, he was named bishop and ordinary of the diocese of Multan. Bishop Boland spent 33 years in Pakistan, 18 years as bishop. When he returned to live in the United States, he served as chaplain to Dominican sisters in their monastery at Guilford, Connecticut, and then came to serve and assist the bishop and people of the Diocese of Providence. Bishop Boland lived with the Dominican community at Providence College for over 20 years. He was an example to all of us, old and young, as a man of prayer, charity, humility, patience, and gentle kindness. He treated all with compassion, tenderness, and honest fraternity.
Imagine a scene. The disciple lay on a cot, tossing and turning all night long. Was it a bad dream? Was it true? Was he really dead? Had they put his body in the tomb? It wasn’t supposed to end this way. Then a knock at the door — a whisper — “Peter, he’s gone, the body is gone — the tomb is empty.” The disciples Peter and John ran to the tomb and saw that it was true and then it slowly dawned on them — the tomb was empty because Jesus had risen from the dead. It was Easter morning.
St. Paul writes: “Death, where is your sting? Death, where is your victory?” (1 COR 15:55-57) The poet John Donne comments, “One short sleep past, we wake eternally and death shall be no more; Death, thou shall die.” (Holy Sonnets: Death, Be Not Proud.)
Easter holds out the promise of reversibility. Not even death is final. In that graveyard in Jerusalem, Mary Magdala with some women, Peter and John, found hope and faith in the risen Lord Jesus Christ. What had happened was shocking, something no one could have expected. Naturally their reaction was mixed — fear, doubt, confusion, but then came belief and joy. Jesus was alive again, he had walked away from the tomb. Nothing like that had ever happened before.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is an object of faith and in a sense a test of faith. What it means is that we believe that Jesus is still living now in time, in history, he is out there somewhere, he is here with us.
Easter offers a new note of hope and faith that what God did once in a graveyard in Jerusalem he will repeat on a grand scale. Against all odds the irreversible will be reversed. We believe in our own resurrection from the dead and the life of the world to come.
Pope Saint John Paul once wrote: “We need heralds of the Gospel who are experts in humanity, who know the depths of the human heart, who can share the joys, the hopes, the agonies, the distress of people today, but who are, at the same time, contemplatives who have fallen in love with God.”
Bishop Boland was this kind of herald of the Gospel, a man whose heart had been broken open to share God’s own compassion for others, especially for the people of Pakistan. With simplicity of heart he touched many people as priest and bishop. Bert embraced the charism of the Dominican Order, to preach the gospel to anyone who would listen. He mirrored the missionary zeal of St. Dominic and his contemplative prayer that fed that zeal.
In the words of Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman, Bishop Boland prayed: “Complete your work , O Lord, and as you have loved me from the beginning, so make me love you to the end.” And Bert did that.
On May 28, the feast of Pentecost, a good, holy, gentle, humble, kindly, apostle, preacher, dedicated priest, missionary, Dominican friar, bishop, heard God whisper, “Bert, it is time.” And as always, Bert answered: “Lord, I am ready.” For Bishop Boland’s family, especially his sister Madeleine, for his nieces and nephews, for his Dominican brother and sister missionaries in the United States and in Pakistan, for women and men who met him, knew him, for the thousands of Pakistanis he ministered to, for the Rhode Islanders he cared for, for the Little Sisters of the Poor who ministered to him, Bishop Boland, in the Irish language of his ancestors, will always be a soggarth aroon — a Gaelic phrase which means “a precious priest.” Bert, Bishop Boland, a precious priest, you were always ready, and now you are home.
Most Rev. Ernest Bertrand Boland, O.P. ’52, ’84Hon., bishop emeritus of Multan, Pakistan, died May 28, 2023. Father Quigley was the homilist at his funeral Mass on June 2 in Our Lady of the Rosary Chapel in the Priory of St. Thomas Aquinas on the Providence College campus.
bishop boland’s obituary
