A Pittsburgh priest (who was actually born in Massachusetts) is on the path to sainthood.

From Ann Rodgers in the Post-Gazette:

A Pittsburgh priest who heard the confessions of beggars and of the pope, and who was a voice of reconciliation amid the divisions in the Catholic Church after Vatican II, has cleared the earliest stages in the sainthood process.

Tonight at 7 the Passionists of St. Paul of the Cross Monastery on the South Side Slopes will invite the public to venerate and ask prayers of their former superior, the Rev. Theodore Foley, who died in 1974. The pope declared him a servant of God — the step before beatification — in 2007, but his remains weren’t accessible for veneration. They now rest in a new sarcophagus next to his old confessional.

“He showed a great love of reconciliation, both as an overall human experience and also as a sacramental experience,” said the Rev. Timothy Fitzgerald, a Pittsburgh Passionist who was his secretary in Rome.

“He was able to balance some of the extremes that were occurring at the time. By nature, he had a calm personality, not excitable, very logical and well-balanced.”

He was born Daniel Foley in 1913 in Springfield, Mass. He took the name Theodore with his first vows in 1933. Ordained in 1940, he earned a doctorate in ecclesiology and taught theology.

He was a brilliant and caring teacher, Father Fitzgerald said.

“He tore up his notes every year so that he wouldn’t get into a rut. He wanted to get into the minds of his students,” he said.

In 1956 the Passionists of Pittsburgh elected him their superior.

Father Foley, a jovial man, embraced the city. He went to Pirates games, reviewed parades and became a spiritual adviser to Mayor David L. Lawrence and Steelers owner Art Rooney Sr. Bishop John Dearden came to him for Confession, as did many priests. He heard Confessions at three Catholic hospitals.

“Everybody seemed to want to go to him for Confession,” said the Rev. Jerome Vereb, who lived with him in Rome in the 1970s and researched his life for a history of the Passionists here.

Father Foley learned to drive here. In 1958, at 45, he was unexpectedly elected to a post at Passionist headquarters in Rome. He had never been out of the country, and spoke no Italian. But, he wrote, “If I could drive the snowy hills of a Pittsburgh winter in a stick shift Ford, I can do something else.”

He encouraged expansion of the order into new areas of Latin America, Asia and Africa. In 1964 he was elected Superior General of the worldwide order.

He led by example, with kindness, humility and complete obedience to the Passionist rule of life, Father Vereb said.

His ministry of hearing Confessions grew. Though no one knew it at the time, Father Vereb said, he was confessor to Pope Paul VI.

“He was the confessor to Vatican officials and cardinals, but also to street sweepers and gardeners,” he said. “He heard the Confessions of many [homeless] people who lived in the arches of the Colosseum. He spent time talking to them.”

There’s much more. Read on.