Pittsburgh mourns death of a "living saint"

Sad news, from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

The Rev. Patrick Rager, 50, a Catholic priest widely regarded as a living saint for ministering to others as a fatal disease slowly paralyzed him, died Tuesday at home in West Homestead.

“He really is a yet-to-be-canonized saint,” said Bishop David Zubik of Pittsburgh, who has archived papers for a potential cause for his sainthood.

“Every time I visited him, I came away knowing that I had been in the presence of God.”

Father Rager’s seminary rector and former bishop, Archbishop Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., described him with a term that the Vatican requires of candidates for sainthood.

“He really was an example of heroic virtue,” he said.

“He gave such a witness in his priestly ministry to what it means to take up one’s cross and simply, quietly bear it. But he did it in a way that converted it into a ministry. He was a constant source of support, encouragement and spiritual strength for people all over, not only the United States, but different parts of the world.”

He was inspired to priesthood by his childhood pastor at St. Mary Magdalene in Homestead and by an uncle who was a priest in the Harrisburg diocese. At Central Catholic High School, he excelled at athletics and academics. He is in the Alumni Hall of Fame.

“His picture hangs there right next to Danny Marino,” said his mother, Helene Rager.

He entered St. Paul Seminary, studying theology and psychology at Duquesne University.

The earliest sign of illness was when his knee gave out during a softball game. He endured 15 years of misdiagnoses before he was found to have the same slow-killing form of ALS — Lou Gehrig’s Disease — as physicist Stephen Hawking.

He was using a cane in 1981, when he began graduate studies at Christ the King Seminary in East Aurora, N.Y. But he spent two summers as an Air Force chaplain, and bought a Pontiac Fiero to celebrate his 1985 ordination.

St. Sylvester in Brentwood built handrails so “Father Paddy” could reach the altar and say Mass without falling. But he went home on sick leave in 1987.

In 1988, one of Bishop Anthony Bevilacqua’s final acts here was to make Father Rager coordinator of a new office for ministry to people with physical disabilities. At that office and later from home, he took calls and answered mail from people in pain.

In a letter to pastors he wrote, “No problem is too small to enlist my assistance. I am always available to listen, to counsel and give hope to those in need.”