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Healy's parting words read at Mass stir 900 mourners
Tuesday, March 07, 2000 By Ann Rodgers-Melnick, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
When Joseph Healy was a Catholic priest, his liturgies had the power to evoke tears and laughter. Healy did so one last time yesterday at a funeral Mass he had planned and then updated three weeks before he was shot in a rampage that left three dead and two wounded.
The 900 people who filled St. James Church in Wilkinsburg wept, but they also laughed at the gentle humor of a 71-year-old man who had worked as a storyteller for 25 years.
Healy, who lived in Wilkinsburg, called for a "liturgy of gratitude and hope."
"If you insist on making this something of a funeral rite, at least, in deference to my ancestry, let it be like an Irish wake," Healy wrote, in instructions to the Rev. Leonard Tuozzolo of Wheaton, Md.
Tuozzolo, who belonged to the Spiritan order from which Healy resigned in 1975, celebrated the Mass, along with Healy's brother, the Rev. George Healy of Hemet, Calif., and the Rev. Thomas Tunney, a Spiritan from Harlem.
Children to whom Healy had often read made a large purple poster, covered with their handprints, which was prominently displayed. "We love you Mr. Joe. We'll miss you," it said.
As a storyteller, Joseph Healy 'really knew how to talk to people'
Storytelling bus would be named for shooting victim
Clergy from Wilkinsburg's other 32 churches occupied the front right pews. Healy's family filled many more rows on the other side. There were Frankie, his wife of 23 years; the seven stepchildren who considered him their father; his 20 grandchildren; the seven surviving siblings of his original 12; and his many nieces and nephews.
His stepdaughter, Barbara Barry, read Micah 6:8. "And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly, to love tenderly and to walk humbly with your God."
That was Healy, Tuozzolo said.
"His example was so outstanding ... I could just say, 'Go thou and do likewise' and sit down."
Healy was a meticulous planner who loved to write liturgies. It was that, not any expectation of imminent death, that led him to send funeral plans to Tuozzolo. According to a close friend of the family, Ada Ezekoye, he had updated those plans Feb. 9.
The plans included Healy's meditation on the human family.
"God is personal and like a parent; thus we are all related, as sons and daughters, as brothers and sisters, as long-lost kith and kin. Life -- on earth and beyond -- is the process of discovering and responding to each other as related to and, therefore, responsible for, each other. The kingdom of heaven is a family reunion: memories and laughs, apologies and forgivenesses, promises and hopes."
His favorite prayer, Healy wrote, was, "For all that has been, thanks. For all that will be, yes."
But it was the prayer written by his brother, Pat, that stirred the congregation most. It spoke directly to the violence that took Healy's life. Ronald Taylor, a black man, has been charged in the shootings, and investigators believe his rage against white people may have directed his choice of victims. The crime has local talk shows brimming with acrid accusations of racism and reverse racism.
Pat Healy asked that "prejudice and injustice disappear from our dealings with each other before they lead to anger and violence."
He included a prayer for all those touched by mental illness to receive support from the community and he prayed for the recovery of the two surviving victims.
Finally, he asked that Taylor's family "be sustained through these terrible days of anguish." He prayed for Taylor's mother to understand that Healy would have forgiven her son.
When Pat Healy concluded, the church filled with applause.
Darlene Turner, a longtime family friend, spoke of Healy's love for her mentally handicapped adult son, who cannot speak.
"Joe would include him," she said. "He never saw any difference between Davey and the rest of us."
Ezekoye and her family were Healy's neighbors, and her sons spent more time at his house than their own, she said. She is from Nigeria, and when Healy attended Ezekoye weddings and baptisms -- and when he told stories at a recent dinner in honor of her U.S. citizenship -- he reveled in the variety of languages and customs.
"With Joe it was never about race, it was never about color. He didn't see those things. He just loved people," she said.
Although Healy could not have foreseen the circumstances of his death, he would rejoice to know that the words of love and reconciliation he wrote were just what the community needed, George Healy said.
"I could almost hear him say the words of Jesus on the cross: 'Father forgive him, for he didn't know what he was doing.' "
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