Faith

''All in the Family" was a TV hit. Anti-war protests filled the Common. Changes in the Church were beginning to roil. Women stopped wearing hats to church.
Boston in the late 1960s and early '70s was a lively hotbed of ferment and experimentation.
Fresh out of seminary, two new priests popped up at our Dorchester parish. Sadly, one, Father Thomas Motherway, was permanently injured in an automobile accident. The other, Father Francis H. Kelley, lived out a lifetime of priestly ministry that made a quiet, but significant, impact in the everyday lives of poor and striving city residents.
Msgr. Kelley was not only a doer -- pushing for neighborhood health care in the very early days of the local health center movement, rescuing a flailing Pine Street Inn, providing solace to members of the LGBTQ community in the throes of the AIDS epidemic -- but also a serious thinker. A person of substantial intellect.
He came by it honestly.
Long before Zoom meetings and podcasts, his mother, Margaret Kelley, ran an influential speakers bureau featuring Catholic academics and celebrities. Nonetheless, Frank -- his preferred title -- had the gift of being able to present and stir those ideas to a very broad range of humankind.
Probably because he was able to see the humanity of every person, he could engage on almost all sides of a question. Father Kelley was able to reach lapsed Catholics, and the most devout of his parishioners.
However, suffer fools, he would not. Frank was impatient with extremes on either end.
To my mind, Msgr. Kelley was a living embodiment of Catholic Social Teaching. He definitely inspired my career shift from book publishing to social services, culminating in leading Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Boston.
Frank had a way of collecting people over his lifetime. My wife Mary and I were among those fortunate families. He baptized our youngest son, and then presided at his wedding years later. He also married our other two sons.
We are grateful for having had Frank Kelley for a friend all these years. And we are proud of the priestly example he has set.

JOSEPH DOOLIN SERVED AS PRESIDENT/CEO OF CATHOLIC CHARITIES OF THE ARCHDIOCESE OF BOSTON FROM 1989-2003.

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