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father daly reminisces about last 50 years

Story and photo by LIZ QUIRIN
Messenger editor

Sitting between his brother David and sister-in-law Carol Daly, Father Richard Daly reminisced about his 50 years as a diocesan priest.

As he grew up, he knew he wanted to be a priest, and the only drawback he could see was the preaching.
He attended two years at Central Catholic High School in East St. Louis before going to St. Henry’s Seminary in Belleville. Later, he studied theology at St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Ill.

“When I told my parents I wanted to go to the seminary, they seemed surprised but said they would back me, whatever I wanted to do,” he said.

A shy young man, he was ordained May 27, 1958 by the late Bishop Albert R. Zuroweste. “It was Pentecost Tuesday,” Father Daly said.

At his ordination, Father Daly remembers “One of the nicest parts is when I was called from my family to serve the community.”
Sent as an associate to St. Patrick Parish in East St. Louis, Father Daly remembers the time between ordination and assignment as one when priests were waiting for the mail to arrive, “always trying to figure out where we were going.”
Going to St. Patrick’s, Father Daly mused that the pastor, Father Bernard Pender “had a reputation of being hard on associates.”

As soon as he arrived, Father Pender left for a vacation, and the new Father Daly spent his first month in the parish by himself. He spent four years at St. Patrick’s.

In 1962, Bishop Zuroweste asked the young priest if he wanted to teach for awhile and went back to school to study and receive his master’s degree in educational administration.

“He had too many priests” at the time, Father Daly said. Vatican II had begun, but the exodus from the priesthood during the 1960s had not begun.

When he returned to the diocese, Father Daly taught the last year Cathedral High School in Belleville was open and became assistant principal at the new Althoff Catholic High School. He was at Althoff “temporarily” for 28 years, he said, “mostly doing office work.”
With a strong nudge from his sister, Phyllis and brother-in-law, Norm Roewe, he became involved in Worldwide Marriage Encounter, then only in St. Louis.

Why would a priest want to go on a Marriage Encounter Weekend, he asked them? With their insistence, he attended the weekend and “figured I wasn’t going to get much out of it.”
Father Daly changed his mind about Marriage Encounter and the need for priests to take advantage of a weekend.
“I was very impressed with the social nature,” and realized “a priest’s role is more than being a functionary,” he said. “It’s about being involved in relationships with people.”

Father Daly was asked to become a Marriage Encounter “team priest,” he said. Later, he gave the same invitation he received from his sister to his brother, David and Carol. They had not heard about Marriage Encounter.
Marriage Encounter crossed the Mississippi River in 1975 with Father Daly’s help, with the first one held in Edwardsville, Ill., and he brought Marriage Encounter to the Belleville diocese as well.

In his 17 years of involvement, he participated in 100 weekends, watching with joy the changes he saw in couples as they listened to team-member talks and did some soul-searching of their own relationships.

Other team priests included Msgr. Ken Schaefer, Msgr. Don Eichenseer and the late Terry Donovan, OMI. He enjoyed the relationships he formed with these team priests, he said.

“People on the weekends were surprised at the beginning to see a priest on the team, but (life and the weekend) are really about relationships,” he said.

Father Daly credits his experience with Marriage Encounter as a way to see his priesthood in relationship not only to his brother priests but to his students and later his parishioners as well.

After 28 years in his temporary assignment at Althoff, Father Daly was given his first parish in 1992 at Sacred Heart in Du Quoin. “I wasn’t quite sure what it would be like,” he said, but found it “much more rewarding than high school work” because he was directly involved with the people. Office work at the school did not include direct daily contact and exchanges with students as part of his regular routine.

When he arrived at Sacred Heart, a renovation project had already been scheduled for the church. Conflicts and costs delayed the project, but it finally began, and as the renovation proceeded, Father Daly said parishioners would come to him with the same phrase often: “Father, you have to come and see this.”

The “this” turned out to be “extensive termite damage” that turned the renovation into a much larger project than anyone knew at the beginning.

Although he had been a priest for many years, Father Daly had no experience with finances, school budgets or the many meetings he would attend to make plans and resolve issues all involved in the life of a parish.

In 2000, he became pastor of St. Agatha Parish in New Athens during the time the pastor, Father Jim Nall, attended school in Rome to eventually become the diocese’s judicial vicar in the Marriage Tribunal.

In 2002, Father Daly retired and discovered “retirement was much more fun than I imagined.”
Father Daly helps out at weekend liturgies in various parishes in the diocese.

Most rewarding, he said, was his work in parishes and developing relationships with other priests.
Troubling over the years was the “slowness of the church to adapt to Vatican Council II,” and the sexual abuse crisis and the way it was handled, he said.

Father Daly lives at the Hincke-Sense Residence for Priests and has enjoyed traveling around the country with a few trips around the world. For him, life became and continues to be about relationships, those he has established and those he has yet to form.