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Resurrection's Patrick Boyle Celebrates 45 Years in the Priesthood

Boyle shared interesting, heartfelt and comical anecdotes about his career during the Sunday celebration at Church of the Resurrection.

It is not every day that a Rye priest gets a standing ovation at the start and end of a Mass and cracks up the audience with one-liners during his homily that parishioners refer to as "Paddyisms."

But Sunday was a vary special day honoring a very special priest, Rev. Msgr. Patrick J. Boyle, pastor of Rye's Church of the Resurrection and Vicar for Central Westchester.

More than 1,000 people attended the Mass of Thanksgiving honoring Boyle's 45th anniversary of his ordination into the priesthood (May 29, 1965, a few days before his father died) and his 70th birthday (March 16, 1940).

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And, while unacknowledged, it was a day when Resurrection celebrated the profile in courage that Msgr. Boyle personifies in his ongoing battle with cancer that has spread from his mouth to his lungs.

It was a Mass that began, appropriately enough, with a hymn ("Shepherd of Souls In Love Come and Feed Us") and ended with a joke about worrying about thunder and lightning "because that's what pastors do." In between, there were lots of applause and tributes for Boyle.

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It began with Msgr. Boyle saying he never thought he would live long enough to be 70, but now he didn't think that was so very old. He then started his homily by saying he was going to keep it short  ("No more than 15 to 20 minutes, because people start tuning out around the eight minute mark").

 But first, he said, he wanted to thank several key people in the parish seated in the reserved front row seats, from Douglas Donohue, long influential in the parish council, who gave the first reading, to Resurrection principal Harold Nielsen who read the responsorial psalm ("You are a priest forever in the line of Melchizedek") to Douglas Virtue, who led the parish fund-raising committee that raised $6.5 million to help restore the century-old Resurrection Church, from repairing the leaking roof and restoring the stained glass windows to fixing the air-conditioning and heating.

Boyle's celebration included a BBQ under what was, in effect, a big top, a huge tent covering most of the Resurrection Middle School playing field, where the Cunningham Brothers band played pop and Powell Caterers served up the hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken, fish, soft drinks and more, a feast fittingly following a gospel about the multiplication of the fishes and loaves to feed the masses.

But before the celebration, Boyle delivered a homily and an early morning talk. 

He stressed "what fun it is to be a priest, what a wonderful opportunity the priesthood is to help people, and what an honor it is to serve God with so many wonderful fellow priests."

He mentioned growing up in the South Bronx off 138th St and Cyprus Avenue in the Mott Haven section where his father, John, from Donegal, Ireland, ran a tavern (the Cyprus Bar & Grill) with Boyle's mother, the former Kate McIngley.

Paddy and his brothers, Jimmy and Michael, grew up at 235 Cyprus Avenue in one of three linked tenements renovated by the  city. The brothers went to St. Luke's and then the future Monsignor and priest went on to Cathedral Preparatory and into Dunwoodie Seminary in Yonkers in 1945, where his fellow seminarians affectionately dubbed him Paddy.

Boyle's family, including his brothers Jimmy and cousin Bridget, were there to help him commemorate his 45 years in the priesthood. Msgr. Boyle introduced his brother, Jimmy, sharing anecdotes about their time together.

"I went to dinner with him, opened my wallet and had nothing inside, next thing I knew Jimmy had paid the bill and stuffed $100 into my wallet," Boyle said.

With his trademark humor and spirit, Boyle quipped about how his brother, Michael, who couldn't attend Sunday's celebration, had given him a gift he couldn't quite use.

"[He] gave me a Kindle for Christmas and maybe is still angry because I dropped it on the floor in frustration when I couldn't figure out how to make it work," Boyle said.

Jimmy Boyle told Patch after the Mass that his brother has always been personable and that is why he had a calling to be a priest.

 "Paddy was always a people person, always wanted to help people, always wanted to be a priest, he made his own makeshift altar at home, and was always saying his own Mass from the time he was seven, eight years old," Jimmy Boyle said.

Since that time, Boyle has had a long and notable career in the priesthood.

His first parish was St. Stephen's Church on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, then the largest Catholic parish on the Eastern Seaboard. He spent five years with Catholic Charities, doing "mostly urban renewal work, getting buildings renovated and repaired, working with the poor." After that, he spent 28 years at St. Brendan's in the Norwood section of the Bronx, before coming to Resurrection as pastor around eight years ago.

He mentioned some of the things that happened along the way. One of his saddest days as priest was offering a funeral Mass in a church filled with five caskets containing the burnt bodies of five children killed in a fire. One of his strangest nights took place when he was taking one of his regular nocturnal walks only to encounter one of his parishioners shimmying down a fire escape in her roller skates.

 "Never could figure out why," he mused.

 His career has been filled with other humorous and puzzling moments, such as the story Boyle told about helping one of his young parishioners get back home after she broke her leg falling out of her apartment window while trying to sneak out for a date. He then wondered how the girl was going to explain to her parents how she went to bed okay, but woke up with a broken leg the next morning.

He told another story about how he was mugged by a gang in the South Bronx.

"[I said] Take my wallet, which suited them just fine until they opened it and saw there was no money inside, which led to an intriguing conversation, which is funny now, but wasn't so funny then. Luckily they seemed to understand about the priestly vows of poverty, chastity and obedience," Boyle joked.

And there was one of his most rewarding moments, which came on Sunday when he was looking out from the pulpit during his celebratory homily and saw several members of the same family that he had known for more than 40 years smiling at him.

He had baptized their children and grandchildren during his time at St. Brendan's. The family included the mother, Diane Parra, and two of her daughters, Monica Parra, his goddaughter, and Anna Ramos, whose daughter he had just baptized. Both Monica and Anna had been regular visitors to him during his hospitalization when he was diagnosed with cancer around two years ago.

"They wouldn't let me get down, from my first days at Sloan-Kettering to my most recent days on the 'West Coast' of Westchester at Phelps Memorial Hospital in Tarrytown," he said, trying not to sound emotional and not quite succeeding. "In fact, I can't thank enough so many people from Resurrection who have been there for me, from recommending the best surgeons and oncologists to driving me to the various hospitals for my chemotherapy," Boyle said.

And now he began clapping for so many of the people who had helped him at Resurrection, from Thomas Egan who read the prayers of the faithful (including a prayer for Msgr. Boyle's recovery) to those who participated in the presentation of the gifts: Richard Burke, Julie Cho, Dennis Deutmeyer, Thomas Roche, Julie Rogers and  Kathleen Shields. He even clapped for the altar boy who gave him a treasured lollipop after the cancer spread to his throat. Boyle has never eaten it because, he said, he always wanted to remember the boy's kind gesture and advice that the lollipop would make swallowing easier. Boyle also thanked the many other children in the church who had prayed he would get better.

Boyle ended the Mass with a bit of Irish humor, even joking about his battle with cancer.

He told the audience about his cousin, who hired someone to worry for him and, when asked how he could afford to pay for a "worrier," said: "Let him worry about it."

And then there was another "Paddyism," which  came when he joked about how much weight he was losing because the cancer made swallowing so difficult.

"I've lost so much weight that when I lift my hands up towards the heavens during Mass and say: 'Lift up your hands to heaven and God' I remind myself to lift up my pants as well," he said.

He also apologized to parishioners, because his voice gets "froggy and gravelly and gruff from the cancer" when he talks "but you gotta do what you gotta do," he said.

Finally, when the Mass was over, he thanked the overflow crowd for caring and got a thunderous round of applause from the jam-packed audience at the cathedral.

"And that reminds me, be careful if the sky begins to fill with thunder and lightning when you are under the tent for the celebration," he said in closing. "I worry about things like that. That's what a pastor does. And I can't afford to hire a worrier."

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