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Longtime diocesan priest to retire
By Ambria Hammel, ahammel@catholicsun.org
May 15, 2008
One of the diocese’s original priests will soon be offering his last Mass as a pastor.
Fr. Eugene O’Carroll, who has served at three diocesan parishes, spent 10 years ministering to couples during marriage encounter weekends and was a charter member of the priests’ pension board, will retire July 1.
St. Paul parishioners have known Fr. O’Carroll as their pastor since 1981.
“He is a great administrator,” said Mary Ann Ronan, director of faith formation who has worked with Fr. O’Carroll for 17 years. “He has such a forward way of thinking about service, about how you serve people.”
Now, it’s parish leaders and other past and present parishioners who will serve him with nearly a lifetime of memories during a retirement reception following each Mass May 31-June 1.
Ronan said she’ll remember Fr. O’Carroll’s openness and deep spirituality.
Fr. Michael Diskin, assistant chancellor for the diocese who served as Fr. O’Carroll’s first assistant pastor at St. Paul, also knows his spiritual depth.
“He inherited a strong faith community that he led from what might be called an adolescent stage to adulthood,” Fr. Diskin said.
Fr. O’Carroll spent half of his priesthood at the north Phoenix parish and all of it in Arizona.
He served at various parishes in the Tucson Diocese beginning in 1962. Fr. O’Carroll was in his second year of ministry at St. Thomas the Apostle Parish when it became part of the newly established Diocese of Phoenix in 1969.
In 1970, Fr. O’Carroll took on another priestly role: chaplain in the Arizona National Guard. He intended to resign in 1973 when he became pastor of St. Henry Parish in Buckeye, but wartime prevented it.
Fr. O’Carroll continued to find perks serving with the soldiers and finally retired as chaplain colonel in 1997.
In Buckeye, Fr. O’Carroll focused on building the parish, both in numbers and in its physical size. He led the building effort for a new religious education center and a new church that seated 500 for the parish’s 300 families.
It was at the dedication of those buildings in 1981 that Bishop James Rausch asked Fr. O’Carroll to head St. Paul Parish.
At the first meeting with St. Paul’s parish council, Fr. O’Carroll was again challenged to build a new church.
He led the parish in a capital campaign that built a new church and hall by 1987. He later earned a master’s degree in church administration.
Fr. O’Carroll is also a leader within the priest community. He was a charter member of the priests’ pension board, which was the first in the nation to be financed outside of the diocese’s funds.
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