(1929 – 2024)
August 2, 2024
With sadness, we announce that our brother, Rev. James McQuade, C.S.P., entered eternal life in the early hours of Friday, August 2, 2024, at the Mary Manning Walsh Home in New York City. He was 95 years old.
A priest for 68 years, Fr. McQuade was a parish priest, campus minister, Catholic Information Center staff member, and hospital chaplain.
He had a nearly lifelong relationship with the Paulist Fathers. He grew up in a Paulist parish and was a student in our one-time high school and junior college seminary programs.
James Francis McQuade was born on July 17, 1929, in New York City, a son of John and Margaret Kiely McQuade.
He was baptized at the Church of the Ascension in Manhattan. His family lived for four years in Astoria, Queens, before they moved to Inwood, a neighborhood in northern Manhattan. They were parishioners at Inwood’s Good Shepherd Church, a parish served by the Paulists from 1911 to 2006.
Fr. McQuade attended the church’s elementary school where, he later wrote, he was “greatly influenced by the Pauilst Fathers, the Sisters of Mercy, the De La Salle Christian Brothers, and an impressive list of lay teachers.” He was in the school marching band and the school orchestra.
He then entered the one-time Paulist high school seminary program at St. Charles College in Baltimore, MD, and continued into our junior seminary for his first years of college.
On August 29, 1949, he entered the Paulist novitiate in Oak Ridge, NJ.
He wrote that he joined “due to the Paulist Fathers’ commitment to the conversion of America, the example of his family’s integrated faith life, as well as that of the mainly Irish-Italian-Greek neighborhood, and the neighbors and friends (mainly Jewish) of Inwood.”
He made his First Promises on September 8, 1950, and his Final Promises on September 8, 1953.
He earned his undergraduate degree at St. Paul’s College, our former major seminary in Washington, D.C., which was then a degree-granting institution. Fr. McQuade later earned a Master’s degree at the Institute for Religious Studies at St. Joseph’s Seminary (“Dunwoodie”) in Yonkers, NY.
He was ordained a priest on May 3, 1956, by Cardinal Francis Spellman at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in New York City. He was one of 17 men ordained that day, the largest ordination class thus far in our missionary society’s history.
In his first priestly assignment, Fr. McQuade was an associate pastor at St. Paul’s in New York through August, 1958. He later wrote that extraordinary happenings in those years included ministering to the survivors of SS Andrea Doria ocean liner sinking in 1956 and the Paulist Fathers centennial in 1958.
He then served on the staff of the Catholic Information Center in Grand Rapids, MI, through 1962 when he became an associate pastor at Good Shepherd Church in Inwood.
In 1964, he moved to Austin, TX, where he first served for one year as an associate pastor at St. Austin Church.
From 1965 to 1974, Fr. McQuade was a chaplain at the 3,200-bed Austin State Hospital.
While there, he received training in the ecumenical Clinical Pastoral Training program and was certified as a clinically trained chaplain supervisor by the National Catholic Chaplains Association. He would later certify other priests and religious sisters as trained chaplains.
He held leadership roles in the Catholic Chaplains of Texas and in an ecumenical association of chaplains who served in Texas hospitals. He also chaired the building committee for the construction of the All Faiths Chapel at the Austin State Hospital.
From 1975 to 1977, Fr. McQuade assisted with the development of the Catholic parish in the Montbello neighborhood of Denver, CO, before again spending a year as an associate pastor at St. Paul’s in New York City.
In 1978, he moved to Morgantown, WV, where he was an associate pastor and campus minister at St. John’s University Parish at West Virginia University through 1983.
Fr. McQuade then served for two years as administrator and then pastor of St. Peter’s Church in Greeley, CO; one year on the staff of the Catholic Information Center in Grand Rapids, MI; and one year as an associate pastor at St. Peter’s Church and the Catholic Information Center in Toronto, Canada.
He returned to Catholic campus ministry in 1988 for three years as pastor of then-Blessed John XXIII University Parish at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, TN.
In 1991, Fr. McQuade moved to the Paulist Motherhouse in New York City and began a 24-year tenure as a devoted chaplain at Roosevelt Hospital on Manhattan’s West Side (today’s Mt. Sinai West).
At the time of his 60th priestly ordination anniversary in 2016, an interviewer asked Fr. McQuade what advice he would give to incoming hospital chaplains.
“When you go to the hospital, you have to open yourself up to be able to live with pain,” he replied. “And realize that, with everybody you meet who is sick or dying, you are facing your own sickness and your own death in a way – and you better have some good counseling when you do that because it is going to throw you a great deal. But if you have other examples and good advice and good spiritual direction, it will help you get through that a lot easier.”
He entered senior ministry in 2014. In his later years, he engaged in volunteer priestly ministries, including distributing ashes at St. Paul’s on Ash Wednesdays.
He also was dedicated to sharing the history of the Paulists as well as the stories of historic Catholics who rubbed shoulders with the Paulists, including Venerable Rose Hawthorne Lathrop and St. Elisabeth Hesselblad, a one-time nurse at Roosevelt Hospital.
In July, 2023, Fr. McQuade moved to the Mary Manning Walsh Home.
In reflecting on his life, Fr. McQuade wrote, “Much gratitude is due to the laity, other priests, and religious men and women who make the good results possible by their cooperative time, treasure, and talents. Pray for vocations to all walks of life to continue Jesus’ universal call to holiness and to the mission to conversion, evangelization, unity, and reconciliation in North America.”
Fr. McQuade was preceded in death by his parents and his younger brother, Robert.
In addition to his Paulist brothers, he is survived by his nieces, Elizabeth and Nancy; his nephews, John and Terrence; his great-nieces, Nora and Kiely; and his great-nephew, Hugh.
Our prayer for our brother, Jim:
May the angels lead you into paradise,
may the martyrs come to welcome you,
and take you to the holy city,
the new and eternal Jerusalem.
A Mass of Christian Burial for Fr. McQuade will be celebrated at 10 a.m., on Wednesday, August 7, 2024, at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in New York City. The Mass will be broadcast live on the parish’s YouTube channel.
The principal celebrant of the Mass will be Very Rev. René Constanza, C.S.P., president of the Paulist Fathers. The homily will be shared by Rev. John Duffy, C.S.P.
There will be a short in-person wake prior to the Mass.
Burial will follow in the Paulist section of St. Thomas Cemetery in Oak Ridge, NJ.
