An alert reader sent this my way: a heartfelt appreciation in a Boston paper for a man who evidently touched many lives.

I can’t think of a better way to kick off the Year for Priests than with this remembrance of one priest in particular, from columnist Peter Gelzinis:

He was, for the record, a monsignor. But to a legion of saints and sinners inside South Boston and well beyond, he was simply “Father Tom,” or “Father Mac.”

He loved a cold Heineken or two, a good piece of political gossip, cheering the Red Sox, immersing himself in the wisdom of the great theologians and philosophers, saying the rosary, studying scripture, counseling a mayor or a Senate president, feeding the poor, comforting the handicapped, fighting for the elderly and offering absolution to scoundrels.

“You and I lost a great friend,” Ray Flynn said, two days after cancer managed to silence the Rev. Tom McDonnell’s indomitable heart. And we are just two among the multitudes.

He married Ray and Cathy Flynn, buried their parents, baptized their six children and, just a few days before his own death, baptized the 17th Flynn grandchild.

Not only did he baptize my son, he left me a gift that will last forever. In the first hours after my wife’s passing last year, I picked up the phone to hear the endearing croak of his voice. “I am going to be there,” he told me, “I want to say the homily for Karen.” And so he did. Never mind that he was tethered to an oxygen machine and confined to a wheelchair.

Tom McDonnell was the boy from St. Angela’s in Mattapan, the B.C. High grad sent off to Rome. “They saw him as bishop material,” said Sister Peggy Youngclaus, “only that’s not what Tom wanted. The words he asked to be carved into his headstone are those he lived by each day: parish priest.”

And St. Augustine’s was the parish he embodied. Set on the slope of Dorchester Street, between the Old Colony project and the edge of Southie’s lower end, St. Augustine’s was where Father Tom lived the gospel in the face of busing’s roiling turbulence.

“He belonged to everybody,” said Sister Peggy, who taught first grade at St. Agustine’s school, and over a span of 40 years shared a “ministry of God” with the priest she called “my best friend.”

“He taught me to listen deep enough to try and catch the echoes of scripture in life, ” said Jack Forbush, a bank manager who, at 16, first met his “friend and mentor.”

For just about all of his 73 years, Father Tom lived a life of redemption and forgiveness, of wit and humor, of endless charity and deep compassion. I know how prepared he was to go home to the God he made real here in the street.

But that doesn’t make it any easier to lose him. Come Saturday, the neighborhood he graced and the friends whose lives he touched will cram St. Monica’s Church – St. Augustine’s was shuttered – to say Godspeed, Father, but not goodbye. Never goodbye.