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Msgr. William O'Donnell Is A Priest For Life

When the Supreme Court issued Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton on January 22, 1973, legalizing abortion on demand for the entire United States, many people were shocked and angry.

Twenty blocks away from the august halls of the Supreme Court, at the offices of the Catholic Standard on 17th Street, Fr. William O’Donnell read the sweeping decisions with mounting anger, then picked up a pen.

“In its decision in two cases handed down Monday, the Supreme Court has taken an unparalleled step backwards,” he wrote:  “Sweeping aside the hard evidence of science and logic, it has repudiated the most fundamental right of all – the right to life itself.”

Singling out Justice Harry Blackmun, who spoke for the Court, O’Donnell, who had been an attorney himself, made mincemeat of his profession that the Court could not ascertain when life begins, concluding, “Whatever confusion Justice Blackmun and his colleagues may profess to sense among the experts, the presumption in favor of human life is so paramount that it cannot be overlooked or denied.”

He did not let the other concurring justices off the hook.

“That Justices Douglas and Brennan would follow the rationale set down in the opinion comes as no great surprise,” he observed drily, adding, “The real shocker is the concurrence of Chief Justice Burger, and to only a slightly lesser degree, Justices Marshall, Powell and Stewart.”

When the Catholic Standard, with O’Donnell’s scathing editorial, came out in print several days later, he hand-carried nine copies to the Supreme Court himself, “one for each justice,” he recalled with a faint smile.

Response was not long in coming.

O’Donnell, in addition to being editor of the Washington archdiocesan newspaper, was in charge of the annual Red Mass, attended by prominent members of the judiciary, including cabinet officers and members of the Supreme Court.

The morning after the editorial, Father O’Donnell got a call from Chief Justice Burger’s secretary.

“The Chief Justice and Mrs. Warren Burger will not be at the Red Mass,” the secretary informed him in frigid tones.

If this pointed snub was meant as a crushing blow, it didn’t stand a chance; William O’Donnell’s mettle had already been tested and proven.

Born and raised in Northwest Washington, William was the oldest of eight children, seven of them boys, in a lively household that was the center of neighborhood activities.

William’s dad, a pediatrician, had his office at home, so the neighborhood children would come to him with their cuts and scrapes.

His busy, kindhearted mom, “a very intelligent lady,” headed up various of her kids’ mothers’ clubs, played the organ and piano at nearby Nativity Church, and, especially during the Depression, “was always ready to help somebody out,” said O’Donnell.

The O’Donnell family was a devout one; their mom made sure of that, said her son.

William’s brother Jimmy became a priest.

Two other brothers became physicians, one was a lawyer, one worked for Bethlehem Steel.  His brother Paul, as a result of an accident at age 15, was a paraplegic; nevertheless, he finished school and became an accountant.

“All the boys were pretty good athletes and students,” Father reflected.

William honed his own competitive skills on the football field and in track and basketball, and sharpened his mind with the help of the Jesuits at Gonzaga High and Georgetown University, graduating with a degree in Social Sciences in 1943.

World War II eclipsed any career plans:  O’Donnell, who was in ROTC at Georgetown, went for further training at Officers Candidate School at Ft. Benning, Ga., and was commissioned a second lieutenant.

In the fall of 1944, he shipped overseas with the 87th Division.  From Alsace-Lorraine, his division plowed northward, and in December, engaged the Germans in the bloody Ardennes Forest offensive, known as the Battle of the Bulge.

During six months on the front lines, the young infantry platoon leader saw soldiers, many of them barely out of high school, cut down by machine gun and artillery fire; others were the victims of land mines that blew off legs or riddled their bodies with steel pellets.

His own actions earned him the Silver Star for gallantry in action, two Bronze Stars and two Purple Hearts.

As his division pushed into Germany in the spring of 1945, the horrors of the battlefield were upstaged by a new horror.

One afternoon, while riding in a military vehicle along a road in Germany, Lieutenant O’Donnell became aware of dead bodies lying in ditches along the road.

It took only minutes for him to realize that they were concentration camp prisoners whom the Nazis had attempted to move from one camp to another.  The prisoners had died on the way from starvation or mistreatment.

“The unbroken line of bodies must have numbered in the hundreds, if not the thousands,” said O’Donnell.

The next day he went with others to visit the Ohrdruf concentration camp, a satellite of Buchenwald.  There he saw dead bodies stacked in rooms like cordwood.

Outside, smoldering fires of burned bodies, with bones poking through the ashes, fouled the air.

“It was so revolting!” he said; “and the living were worse off than the dead.  No pictures could portray the misery there.  I couldn’t understand how these guards could do this to these people.”

After he got out of the Army in October, 1945, O’Donnell went into the foreign service, serving as vice-consul in Hamburg for several years.  Then it was back to Georgetown to get a law degree on the G.I. Bill.

The fledgling attorney worked as a law clerk for a federal judge for a year, then joined the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division.

O’Donnell found his work there fascinating.

“They were trying these cases all over the country; most were for violating the Smith Act – advocating and teaching the overthrow of the government by force and violence.  The Communists had quite a structure throughout the country.”

But that work ended in 1957, when the 35-year-old attorney entered Christ the King Seminary at St. Bonaventure, N.Y.

“I kind of had it in the back of my mind for a long time,” he admitted.

After a year of philosophy and four years of theology, in May, 1962, William O’Donnell was ordained a priest.

Four years later, Father O’Donnell, an assistant pastor in the Washington Archdiocese, was surprised to be summoned to a meeting with Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle.

“What would you think if I told you I was going to make you editor of the Catholic Standard?” asked the formidable prelate.

O’Donnell was nonplussed.  “I don’t know anything about editing!” he protested.

But the archbishop was not to be put off.  “I’ve talked to people, and you’re it,” he insisted.

Though O’Donnell had never met with O’Boyle before, “Washington is a small town; he knew of me,” he surmised, joking, “I was a lawyer – maybe he thought he would be safer from libel.”

Fortunately for the neophyte editor, “I had a good staff, an excellent staff, dedicated to the Church,” he said.

He would need them.  Just as he took charge of the Standard, the dogs of dissent were beginning their attack on the Church.

One of the first signs Father O’Donnell remembers was a 1966 meeting of Catholic religious educators in Texas.  

“They came out against the sacrament of penance; they wanted all these modifications.  They had some radical views, to say the least!”

But with the issuance of the encyclical, Humanae Vitae, in July, 1968, “it really hit the fan – and we were right in the middle of it.”

Pope Paul VI’s reassertion of the Church’s teaching on birth control set off a firestorm of protest.

The Archdiocese of Washington rapidly became a focal point of this dissent, because of the concentration of pro-contraception theologians there, because a substantial number of the archdiocesan priests announced their opposition to Humanae Vitae, and because O’Boyle, by then a cardinal, was a staunch defender of the encyclical.

O’Boyle, a crusty Irish-American with a gruff demeanor and a warm heart, took an uncomplicated view of the situation:  the Pope had solemnly restated the clear teaching of the Church, and it was his duty to uphold that teaching and see that his priests did so too.

O’Donnell’s attitude was the same.  He was amazed and perplexed by the dissenters.

“I didn’t know where all this stuff was coming from, but it wasn’t part of my background.  When I went to high school and college, the Jesuits were right down the line.”

Father O’Donnell could not be charged with having led a sheltered life.  His experience on the battlefield, in foreign service and in law had exposed him to the heights and depths of the human condition.

Viewed through that prism, he said, “I thought that the traditional teaching of the Magisterium made sense – and that it was the truth.”

The day Humanae Vitae came out, a group of archdiocesan priests met at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel.

The following day, some 60 priests announced their opposition to the encyclical in a statement in the Washington Post.

O’Boyle called the dissenting priests in for a private meeting.  Those priests that remained recalcitrant despite his cajoling, he stripped of their priestly faculties.

At St. Matthews Cathedral, noisy dissenters held “teach-ins,” disrupting Mass to deliver pro-birth control lectures.

And at Catholic University, professors signed a letter dissenting from the encyclical and held protest meetings.

Father O’Donnell went to one of the meetings.

“You’ve got your nerve coming here with your collar on,” a professor sneered.

“I wore my collar in Red Square – I was less uncomfortable there than I am here,” O’Donnell shot back.

He wrote almost all the Standard’s editorials, and saw to it that the paper presented the news from a sound Catholic perspective.

When a priest called him a flunkey for the Cardinal to his face, O’Donnell retorted, “What I put in the paper, I believe.”

One day when Father O’Donnell came into the office, his staff was standing around a table with a copy of the Washington Star spread open to the editorial page, and a shot of whiskey sitting on top of it.

“You’d better have a drink before you read this,” they suggested.

Six priests had written letters personally excoriating O’Donnell by name.

Father was unflappable.  “They spelled my name right every time,” he observed with satisfaction.

Almost simultaneously with the uproar over Humanae Vitae, forces were waging a state-by-state campaign to legalize abortion.

“When I became editor, we smelled something coming down the line, so every two or three weeks, we would have an article or an editorial on pro-life issues,” said O’Donnell.

In addition to his editorial responsibilities, Father doubled as assistant pastor at St. Anne’s Church on Wisconsin Avenue.  In 1968 he hosted strategy meetings at the rectory with leading area pro-lifers such as Drs. Bill Hogan and Bill Colliton.

They launched an active pro-life organization called Chance of a Lifetime.  It later became Maryland Right to Life.

Dr. Hogan recalled that during the 1968 Congressional election, Father O’Donnell, together with editors of the Baltimore and Delaware diocesan newspapers, agreed not to take ads from pro-abortion candidates.

O’Donnell (made a monsignor in 1970) stepped down as editor in 1979, but as he continued his priestly duties at various parishes throughout the Washington Archdiocese, he never hesitated to speak out from the pulpit against abortion, even when people walked out in protest.

Today the 82-year-old priest is in residence at St. Thomas the Apostle Church, just off Connecticut Avenue.

“I’m not retired; I’m priest director of the cemeteries.  My congregation doesn’t give me many problems,” he deadpans.

Looking back over his 42 years in the priesthood, he says his first and greatest satisfaction has been being able to say Mass every day – “and the whole thing:  baptisms, weddings, confessions.”

Monsignor clearly enjoys being a priest.

“I always wear my clericals, even to physical therapy!  I like to be identified wherever I go.  I consider it a privilege – I like people coming up to me and wanting to talk.”

He adds, “I think it’s been a great challenge, but also a great blessing to have been a priest during these difficult times.  They call on you to use whatever talents you have to the best of your ability to the service of God and the Church.

“I hope I’ve met that challenge well.”