On Saturday, August 23, 2003, I joined many friends from around the nation to bury a good and dear friend, Phil Murnion. He was a priest of the Archdiocese of New York and he was a New Yorker. We met thirty years ago around a common interest, Catholic parishes. The usual rivalry of Boston and New York was nothing but fun. The deeper part of our friendship had to do with our church and, in particular, the parish.

Early in his life, Phil discovered that God’s favorite dwelling place in America is in our parishes. He gave his life to the building up of parish communities.

Most Sacred Heart parish members did not know Fr. Murnion. However, he knew you. Every time we were together, he picked my brain with constant questions about Sacred Heart. In one of the last conversations we had, he was asking about “Heart Beats.” He admired our newspaper. He especially wanted to meet Carole Anne Scott and her staff, for he had seen a number of parish newspapers around the country, but we are different. He thought “Heart Beats” approach of doing a paper for the entire neighborhood was a brilliant one for parish newspapers.

Phil was always fascinated by the mix of nations and people who make up Sacred Heart Parish. "That’s a catholic parish!” he would tell me with a chuckle, and then would add, “It sounds a bit like New York City too!”

Phil’s parish encompassed our nation. He drew together priests and sisters, brothers and laity who served the church in parish ministry and school ministry. He ran conferences, training programs for new pastors, support for social ministry directors, and more recently, in memory of Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago, the Common Ground Initiative. For the past twenty-five years, the National Pastoral Life Center worked to build up the life of faith among Catholics.

In this time of confrontation and polarization, Fr. Phil Murnion was a centrist. Many in our Church wanted him to lead us to the left and to the right. Fr. Murnion held to the center. In his view, the “Catholic Church welcomes everyone. It is easy t be a “conservative” or a “liberal” Catholic. One simply learns how to point the finger at the other and declare them to be them to be wrong, bad, evil or whatever.

Fr. Murnion took the more difficult road to listen, to dialogue, to come into “communion” with the other person, the other group. Wisdom had revealed to him how inclusive, how welcoming, how hospitable is God. The Irish writer, James Joyce, put it well when he said; “The Catholic Church is Here Comes Everybody!”

I remember my friend by continuing to build up the church here in Sacred Heart Parish. We are a small part of a large and diverse church. Still, each Sunday we gather for worship. Our Mass expresses our livers with God through the sacraments of prayer and song and action and ministry. We join our lives with God and with each other on our journey to heaven.

Fr. Phil Murnion lived; this was in the center of Church. I will surely miss him. But as he would remind me other men and women of vision and hope like him are in our midst. They will come after him to lead us.