Reverend Monsignor Richard J. Shea (1936-2025)

An excerpt from the homily of Father Marcello at the Funeral Mass of Msgr. Richard J. Shea:

The vocation of Richard Joseph Shea began, as every priestly vocation began, in the heart of the Lord Jesus, in the Upper Room, on the evening of Holy Thursday.  And the grace of that sacred Thursday began to mature in the young Richard Shea, who grew up in the part of Brooklyn called Rego Park.  He had been thinking of a career in the FBI, but the Vincentian priests he met at St. John’s University awakened something in his heart, and the thought of being a priest grew stronger and stronger within him.  So he said to himself – as he once told me – “I’ll enter the seminary for a year.  And if it doesn’t work out, at least I’ll know I gave God the first shot at my life.  And then I’ll move on to whatever’s next.” 

He could have done almost anything in life.  He was a natural leader.  He walked with a powerful stride.  He had a commanding presence.  He knew how to take charge and get things done.  He could see talents and abilities in people that they could not yet see in themselves.  He would have been successful in business, or finance, or law.  But “It was not you who chose me,” Jesus said to his Apostles, and to every priest, “but I who chose you, and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain.”  

Nearly 50 years of his 63-year priesthood were spent living and laboring here in Trumbull, at St. Joseph High School and at St. Catherine’s.  During his 23 years as pastor of this parish, Msgr. baptized over 400 people: mostly babies, but some adults as well.  He received dozens of people into the Catholic Church.  At least once, he received a whole family into the Church: the Lomnitzers, at the Easter Vigil in 2005.  When Colin was ordained to the priesthood, Msgr. said that, when he died, he wanted his chalice to go to Father Lomnitzer, and so Msgr.’s chalice has indeed been passed on to this young priest, whose Catholic life began through the ministry of Msgr. Shea.

When Msgr. was pastor here, he joined in marriage nearly 300 couples, and he buried over 700 people in the hope of eternal life.  Only the Lord knows how many people he absolved from sin, but we can safely take it that the number is well into the thousands, maybe the tens of thousands.  And just in his years as pastor here, he celebrated nearly 10,000 Masses, not counting weddings and funerals.  And even though for many years people called him “Monsignor,” he never forgot what it really meant to be “Father.” 

The fact is that a priest has hundreds of children, thousands.  And the older he gets, he can see in his mind and in his heart the faces of all the children he held at the baptismal font; he sees the faces of young couples coming up the aisle to be married; he sees the faces of young men he has known, now with the hands of a Bishop laid upon their head, and anointing them, and placing a chalice into their hands, as they become new priests.  He sees the faces with eyes slowly closing in death, whom he has prepared for the supreme moment of encounter with Christ the Lord.  And he also hears the voices of people whose faces he cannot see, saying “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”  

The names of all those he has baptized and married and prepared for eternity are recorded in the parish sacramental books, but to the priest they are more than just names, because he is their Father.   

In Msgr. Shea, all of us saw the truth of the words of St. John Vianney, the Curé of Ars, whose statue stands in our sanctuary, and in whose little church in France Msgr. and I prayed on that snowy February morning, all those years ago:  

“The priest is not a priest for himself: he does not give himself absolution, he does not administer the Sacraments to himself. The priest is not a priest for himself; he is a priest for you.”