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In Memoriam

Jesuit Father Paul T. McCarty died on May 28, 2016, at Campion Center, Weston, Massachusetts. Fr. McCarty was born on June 13, 1924, in Waltham, Massachusetts, the fourth of seven children.

He entered Boston College in 1942, on an accelerated wartime program, but was drafted into the Army infantry the following May. He served in Normandy, Belgium and Holland, where a severe case of trench foot disqualified him from further fighting, and he spent the rest of the war in administrative posts in Paris. Discharged in 1946, he returned to Boston College, where the example of his diverse Jesuit teachers first gave him the idea that he might have a Jesuit vocation. After graduating in 1949, he spent eight years in various occupations before the idea of a vocation crystallized when a Jesuit family friend asked him what he was going to do with his life. Fr. McCarty entered the Society of Jesus on August 14, 1957, at the Novitiate of St. Isaac Jogues, Wernersville, Pennsylvania.

After first vows, in 1959, Fr. McCarty went to Weston for philosophy studies. He taught for three years at Fairfield Prep (1961-64), then returned to Weston for theology studies. He was ordained at St. Ignatius Church in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, on June 10, 1967.

For 10 years, Fr. McCarty was primarily involved with high school ministry, as teacher and student chaplain, first in the Christian Brothers Academy in Lincroft, New Jersey, and then at Cheverus High in Portland, Maine, in the course of which he earned a master’s degree in religious education in summers at Fordham University. In 1980, he spent a year doing clinical-pastoral training at a well-regarded program in Methuen, Mass. The rest of his active ministry was spent in more directly pastoral work, first in New Mexico, where he worked in a parish in Gallup (1982-84) and then as pastor and prison chaplain in San Mateo (1984-85). The ministry he liked most though, in part because it was culturally challenging, was the eight years he spent at the Passamaquoddy Indian Reservation at Pleasant Point, Maine (1985-93). He pronounced Final Vows on June 29, 1989, at St. John’s Parish, Bangor, Maine.

In 1993 he moved to Campion Center, where he served as assistant minister, worked in a number of parishes, helped the Marianists in nearby Framingham with their ministry to priests, continued to chaplain the association of his former infantry buddies, and for several years wrote the obituaries of deceased New England Jesuits. He kept active between bouts of illness even as he turned 90, playing the drums and doing stand-up comedy at Jesuit Community entertainments. His gentle, patient personality persisted to the end. As spring arrived in 2016, he weakened noticeably. He died peacefully in the early evening of May 28, 2016.