Bishop Reilly enjoys being with the people

By Tanya Connor
The Catholic Free Press

WORCESTER – Crossing into North Korea – and seeing a gun pointed at you.
Meeting important figures in a struggling South Africa.
Trying to make up for a missed Mother’s Day Mass.
It’s all in a day’s – or a lifetime’s – ministry if you’re living the “life of Reilly.”
Bishop Daniel P. Reilly, 92, bishop emeritus of the diocese, talked about his days in active ministry shortly before the Celebrate Priesthood! gala. Celebrate Priesthood! raises money for the care of  retired priests of the diocese. This year the seventh annual event will be virtual because of the coronavirus. A regular participant at the gala, where priests and parishioners would reminisce, Bishop Reilly shared memories with The Catholic Free Press instead. 
“They asked me to give some retreats to the military – to the chaplains in Alaska and Hawaii” he said of one experience. In Hawaii, “I gave a talk there on the beach. We didn’t go in the water; we went back and had Benediction.”
In South Korea, he spoke to the congress, he said.
“Somebody told me that there was a very interesting spot where South Korea and North Korea come together,” he said. “They have a little house there with a table. On the side that we were on, there were American flags … and six chairs. And on the other side were North Korean flags with six chairs. The North Korean flags were … about seven or eight inches taller than the American flags.”
 “Would you like to go into North Korea?” asked the Marine showing him the place. “Just go around the table.”
When Bishop Reilly did so, there was “a banging on the window with a North Korean soldier pointing a gun at me,” from outside. “He just pointed: ‘Get back.’ I wasn’t going to fight him!”
Bishop Reilly also recalled visiting South Africa when the government was “persecuting anyone who wasn’t with them.”
“They were tough on the black people,” he said. “One was a bishop.”
Bishop Reilly met Archbishop Desmond Tutu there, and again years later, when the archbishop spoke at St. John High School in Shrewsbury after helping end apartheid in South Africa.
“A beautiful country like that being so bad in the way they treated the black people,” Bishop Reilly lamented. “But the people had a lot of courage and they kept going at it and finally broke through” to get justice.
“I remember visiting the prison (Nelson Mandela) was in,” which had been made into a museum, he said. He also met Mr. Mandela, who later became president of South Africa.
“You know you’re dealing with very special people who make history,” Bishop Reilly mused. “A lot of the people I was visiting were people who were fighting the government. They introduced me to him. …
Being chairman of the board of Catholic Relief Services enabled Bishop Reilly to travel to several countries.
“CRS is a very important organization … it serves the people in the name of the Church,” he said. “I was very proud to serve with CRS; it’s amazing what it does around the world.”
“I was very fortunate as a bishop … to get to these places and not neglect the diocese (to which he was assigned back in the United States),” Bishop Reilly said. “We had good priests … in the administration, who would carry on the good work that was going on …”
Bishop Reilly also served in a variety of ways his dioceses. He was a priest in the Diocese of Providence from 1953-1975, then became Bishop of Norwich, and, in 1994, Bishop of Worcester. He retired in 2004.
“I really enjoyed my life as a priest,” he said. “I was the bishop’s secretary.” He also filled in at parishes when priests were sick.
When people on Block Island didn’t have Mass one Mother’s Day, they complained, so he asked the bishop if he could celebrate Masses there on weekends, he said.
“Sometimes I would fly over there on Sunday morning, but most of the time I would try to get there on Friday evening,” he said. “I would take the ferry. … I did administration most of my life. I enjoyed parish work.”
Once when he was celebrating a French Mass at a parish, his brother brought his family. Bishop Reilly recalled one of his nieces, who was about 5 years old at the time, piping up during the Mass, “Father Dan, you talk funny.”
As a bishop, he’d celebrate the sacrament of confirmation, sometimes with 65 young people at one parish, he said. Afterwards he’d pose for pictures with the newly confirmed and their parents in the sanctuary, then again downstairs with the whole family.
“Those were the days,” Bishop Reilly mused. “I don’t ever remember feeling tired. I just enjoyed being with the people. … Imagine the numbers we would have in one parish!”
He said he hopes and prays that people will turn to God and the Church in the wake of the coronavirus.
“I’ve got all these people I pray for,” the retired bishop said, looking at pictures of his mother and the popes. “We’re blessed with some great popes, bishops, priests, nuns and great Catholics. … I pray that when this is over … that the Church will grow stronger. … Where would we be without the Church? … All of us are sort of helpless before this virus.”
The virus makes things difficult, but Sister Mary Ann Bartell, a Carmelite Sister of the Eucharist, takes good care of the retired priests, including him, he said.
“As a priest now 67 years, I think of what a marvelous life I have had serving the Lord, serving God’s people,” Bishop Reilly said. “I would do this all over again. I never thought of being anything but a priest.” As a youth, “I was so impressed by the priests and the nuns.”

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