Fr. Ray McDonough

McDONOUGH, Fr. Ray, C.P.
On December 22, 2008, Fr. Ray McDonough, C.P. was called home to the Lord. Having been born on the feast of St. Nicholas, December 6, 1920 he entered the Passionist Community and was ordained as a Catholic Priest on June 28, 1947. A letter of gratitude which he composed was discovered in his file.

I am most grateful to God:
For wonderful parents of deep faith and for the love and example and the Catholic home they gave me;
For my brother and his family.
For my parish priests and for my teachers - both Religious and lay - who bore with my parents the burdens of my early training and shared their headaches and heartaches;
For the many close friends of those pre-seminary days, many of whom I still know well, and their children and their children's children;
For the grace of entering our seminary at a rather early age, despite what many modern psychologists might think;
For the priests, brothers, and seminarians of those long-ago days, who encouraged me in my vocation, sometimes by word, always by example;
For the strength that came from real community life with the Passionists, long before "community" became an in-word;
For my ordination to the priesthood over 60 years ago - a gift which I still do not fully appreciate and probably never will in this life;
For my long and refreshing association with the young as a teacher, even though the two languages I taught them - Latin and Greek - have long since faded away;
For my assignment as vocation director, which undoubtedly did more for my own vocation than it did for those young man I counseled;
For over 60 happy years as a priest - no real doubts, no second thoughts, no identity crisis, no agonizing attempts to ''find myself'', no musings about a change of status or a second career;
For having good superiors through the years, men whose understanding and appreciation of Religious life anticipated the great ideas of Vatican II and whose principles are still valid;
For the grace of offering daily Mass for so long a time, in hundreds of churches and chapels, on most continents and in dozens of countries, in three languages, united with untold thousands of God's own people;
For my fellow Passionists with whom I have found a deep happiness, those long gone to their eternal reward, those in their twilight years, those still at the beginning of their life work, and the many who are now carrying on our varied apostolates;
For a few, very few, real sufferings, disappointments and failures, all of which really helped me, although not always accepted by me, in the manner recommended by the Saints;
For good health through the years, knowing full well I would have been an obnoxious patient;
For my many years of service in Korea and the challenge of having a part in new beginnings, for the privilege of starting anew with another race in another culture rather late in life;
For getting to know the wonderful people of Korea, who certainly taught me more about the love and mercy and goodness of God than I taught them;
For the privilege of working with our missionaries in India and Tanzania - a chance to serve the poorest of God's poor, a chance to take some less traveled roads and meet some wonderful people;
For the benefactors of our many apostolates here and abroad who helped me by their prayers and in many other ways, some of whom I have never met, others whom I meet only every few years;
Finally for the grace of perseverance, for forgotten graces, for graces that I refused or did not have the sense to recognize, and for all the countless other blessings, I am most grateful to God.

I thank God every time I think of you and every time I pray for you. You are always in my heart for you have all shared with me in this privilege that God has given me. (Phil 1:3-5)

A celebration of Fr.Ray's life will be at Chapel of Christ the King Retreat Center on Thursday, January 8, at 7:00 p.m.