LIFE AND SUDDEN DEATH IN OUR NATIONAL SHOOTING GALLERY
Wedding Day in Sligo, Ireland, August 12, 1985. A young Father David O’Connell unites the writer and his wife in Holy Matrimony.
As we all know, sudden, violent deaths by gunfire have become commonplace in today’s America. You wince, shake your head, then unwillingly accept it as part of the random absurdity of modern daily life. Unless of course the victim is personally known to you—and the killing becomes front-page news—then the shock and grief of it hits you full force.
That is how our family took the five-shot murder of Auxiliary Bishop David Gerard O’Connell at his home in Hacienda Heights on February 18, 2023. Nearly three months have now passed since the apparently motiveless murder of our family friend, and the shock is slowly subsiding for me, leaving the residual sorrow that feeds on memories.
It was at her sister’s wedding rehearsal in Long Beach, at St. Maria Goretti Church, that my wife-to-be Timarie met Father Dave in 1982. She was a college junior, and he was a 27-year-old Catholic priest still fresh from Ireland; it was a case of friends at first sight, as they immediately joked and laughed. When she subsequently introduced me to the soft-spoken, florid-faced guy blessed with what you would call “persuasive charm,” I quickly became a friend as well.
Timarie and I decided to get married in 1985 in Ireland and go on a self-guided W.B. Yeats pilgrimage, which included checking out the “Yeats Festival.” Timarie wanted Father Dave to marry us in the Catholic Church, and we timed the wedding with his returning to the Emerald Isle for his summer vacation. Great plan!
Our great plan didn’t work out quite as imagined. First off, the “Yeats Festival” turned out to be the “Yeats Summer School”—more a scholarly event than the setting for a joyful wedding celebration; my bad. (And Father Dave had chronic car trouble driving north from his home in Cork and barely made it to the church on time.)
The night before the scheduled Monday-morning ceremony, at our Ballincar House Hotel pub, Timarie charmed an Irish couple (who were in Sligo to attend the Yeats Summer School)—Kieran and Evelyn Byrne—into being our Best Man and Matron of Honor in the morning. The pair also happened to have a daughter made to order for the role of flower girl.
So on the sunny late morning of August 12, 1985, in the little village Church of St. Nathy and St. Brigid, in Achonry, County Sligo (the hometown church of Father Dave’s seminary friend, Father Jarlath Cunnane), Father Dave hitched us up far from any madding crowd. I was amazed at how calm, competent, and unflappable he was as he smiled his way through our memorable clown show.
[You can read the full version of the wedding day, as written in my memoir My Summer with Molly, here. I also want to share that Monsignor Cunnane, aka Father Jay, gave a perfect, heart-wrenching eulogy at Bishop Dave’s Funeral Mass (at 53 minutes on the YouTube recording).]
Exactly nine months and one day after the wedding, Timarie gave birth to our daughter Molly, and Father Dave later baptized her at his church in southern Los Angeles. He administered the same sacrament to our second daughter Madeleine (1989) and son Franz (1992), also at South L.A. parishes. That would strengthen our already well-established family association.
Father Dave and I had our differences on theological matters, but that did not mar our friendship. He didn’t have time for abstract debate on eschatology or how many angels could dance on the head of a pin; his mission was far more concrete, carried out on the mean streets, where his burning passion for Christian action found its outlet. How?
Feeding the hungry poor of his several parishes over 35 some years, tending to their sick, comforting the desperate and the depressed, brokering peace between gangs, even finding shelter for the homeless—including those broken families whose undocumented breadwinner had been deported.
My wife Timarie had been an early recruit to join his crusade on behalf of the city’s underclass. In his soft voice of gentle persuasion, Father Dave asked her to help him fill out holiday food baskets for his parish. She agreed, and that began 30 years of her running a one-woman food drive in northern Orange County to help feed his flock.
She was but one of many persons and groups that Father Dave had enlisted in common cause. Talk about your organization man! Modest as always, he plied his subtle and considerable leadership skills to talk others into forming teams to join him in serving and advocating for the urban poor and powerless.
In 2007, with our daughter Molly finishing a college semester studying abroad in England, we decided to meet her in London and make the three-week trip our family’s “Less-Than-Grand Tour” of Europe. First stop, Ireland. Cork specifically, Father Dave’s hometown and where he met up with us at our B&B. There followed an enlightening whirlwind tour of southern Ireland where, to my astonishment, most everyone knew him. I remember saying to him over a glass of Harp at the Blarney Woolen Mills, “You seem to be on a first-name basis with most of Ireland!” In his self-effacing, quiet way he responded, “Ireland is a very small country.” Vintage Dave.
In October of 2014, I became suddenly ill, was rushed to Hoag Hospital, and lapsed into a coma for five days, the victim of mosquito-borne West Nile virus that had attacked my brain. I was out of it. But Father Dave was not. When Timarie told him of my condition, without her asking, he rushed down from L.A. to administer Last Rites…without my knowledge and unnecessarily, as I happily learned later.
Word of this “saint” in the City of Angels apparently reached Rome and Pope Francis, who as we know has steered the Church more toward service and kindness and away from power and politics. No wonder he found his man in Father David O’Connell, that fearless practitioner of applied Christianity, and saw to his promotion to Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles Diocese on July 15, 2015.
Timarie and I were surprised and flattered to receive an invitation to his September 8, 2015, installation at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. Need I say the ceremony was long and lavish with pomp and circumstance to spare? The music was powerful, uplifting. I thought it was probably a little much for humble street priest Father Dave. When the ceremony ended, now Bishop Dave, with his two fellow auxiliary bishops, slowly led the ecclesiastics—clad in all their finery—from the altar and down the center aisle toward their Cathedral exit.
My wife and I were seated on the west side aisle near the rear when the new bishop spotted me from about ten feet off. He broke from the procession and walked over to me and shook my hand. I was moved, flustered, and embarrassed by the gesture. To be singled out so. But that was Dave…the pageantry could wait when you spotted an old friend you hadn’t seen since administering him Last Rites. What a guy! (The Mass of Ordination and Installation of Auxiliary Bishops for Los Angeles has been memorialized here on YouTube. You can hear one of Bishop Dave’s customary eloquent and inspiring homilies at 2:21, and at 2:34 you can see where he veered over to greet Timarie and me.)
We attended the banquet that followed and shared a table with Bishop Dave’s brother, sister-in-law, and nieces and nephew, freshly flown in from Ireland, and Bishop Dave—when he wasn’t circulating among the celebrants. At one point, he came over to where I was seated and asked me what I thought a strange question: “Larry (it always came out as “Leary” with his accent), what was that Yeats poem about everything being blessed?”
He had never asked anything of me, and I was momentarily puzzled that it should be some words of Ireland’s greatest poet.
“It’s the end of his ‘Dialogue of Self and Soul,’” I said. “It goes:
‘When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast,
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.’”
He was animated as he wrote the words down, as though he was experiencing some mystic’s joyous culmination in seeing the sentiment of his chosen personal motto, “Jesus I Trust in You,” received, reversed, and returned to him by Christ himself. I had never seen him in such high spirits, so fulfilled.
How ironic that a holy man known throughout the greater Los Angeles community as the “Peacemaker” should be senselessly shot dead by a disturbed handyman with no known coherent motive.
Ten years back I experienced a similar attack of shock and grief at the gun death of a good friend. Some of you may remember the murder of Dr. Ron Gilbert, a Newport Beach urologist who was premeditatively shot to death in his office by a stranger. The story made local headlines; turns out he was a victim of mistaken identity by a disgruntled patient. Ron was one of my doctors. Ten years before his killing he diagnosed my stage 2 bladder cancer carcinoma and cut it out. In the recovery room he came over to my gurney and said, “You are a lucky man. You had cancer, you didn’t even know it, and now it’s gone.” (I’m even luckier now, after 20 years of being cancer-free.)
The killings of Bishop Dave and Dr. Gilbert freshen my memory of a summer day in 1968. A travel writer on assignment, I was aboard an Alitalia 707 flying from New York to Rome, chatting with the plane’s head steward.
He was an engaging young man, talkative, with a friendly but slightly combative style. It wasn’t long in our discourse before he steered the talk to the recent assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
“Why such violence?” he asked me. He filled my pause with his own answer. “You are such a young and violent country…the way we were during the Renaissance. We used poison, now you use guns. Why do you love your guns so much? Maybe you will grow up.”
I wanted to protest and defend my country, but I was tongue-tied. We are a violent people and guns are our great enablers. And we show no signs of growing up. Only of growing worse.
Our gun nuts tell us that “guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” Such sophistry. They miss the point. Guns in the hands of shooters endanger everyone—the so-called “equalizer” empowers any loony with a grudge to mortally vent his rage. How many drive-by knifings have you heard of?
Yeats writes in another poem—“Lapis Lazuli”—of “old civilizations put to the sword.” Our young civilization prefers the gun. And when we go, the cause of death will be ruled a suicide.