LINKS:

A memory of Griff

Readers recall Father Griff

Eulogy by Father Burtchaell, CSC

In 1981, when I first joined the magazine, I was asked by the editor, Ron Parent, to write a profile of the immensely popular Holy Cross priest. I wanted to write about Griff’s life in Greenwich Village where each summer Griff ministered to the street people, the drug addicts and prostitutes, the outcasts, the afflicted, the lonely. Both Ron and Griff said okay, but the night I arrived Griff said there’d be no story. He had changed his mind.

Still, we spent a week together. I stayed at the rectory there and followed him around as we walked all over the city, staying out till 2 or 3 in the morning, talking about everything, comparing our own dark nights of the soul. Despite having a million tales to write, there would be no story. Ron died soon after, and no one else knew to ask what happened to it.

Perhaps there was no need. For three decades Griff was known to virtually everyone — through his writing, his Urchin’s Mass, his hall liturgies, his counseling and advising and walks across campus with Darby. He married countless couples, baptized countless Domer babies, comforted countless students looking for a wise man’s embrace.

Griff was probably most exposed in his writing. He was the kind of writer who opened that vein and poured himself into his work, onto the pages of The Observer, Notre Dame Magazine and, later, Our Sunday Visitor. He was an exceptional writer. At his best he wrote prose poems. His writing had heft and shining insights into the human condition. He was relentlessly honest, unafraid, never settling for pretty answers or easy faith. He wrote about life’s toughest troubles and in the midst of his inner quarrels he offered fortitude and compassion, grace and peace. Griff, like many writers, wrote to fill a hole inside himself. I don’t know that the writing ever brought him the peace his words brought his readers.

I knew Griff to be stubborn, irascible, good for the soul, abundantly supportive, tolerant, loving, forgiving, haunted and curmudgeonly. His heart was both New England and Notre Dame. He had his demons and his beautifully warm soul. At the risk of sounding corny, I learned a lot about the Incarnation from Griff: He was tragically human yet he possessed a meaty holiness for those who came to him, opening himself to those who found the dispensation of grace too stingy elsewhere.

A magazine, I think, is only as good as its writers, and Father Griffin and Ed Fischer have probably been this magazine’s two most popular and affectionately read authors. Griff’s essays have been some of the best writing we’ve offered through the decades. These epistles, his "Letters to a Lonely God," his own attempts to find a truce in the war for salvation are better than any story that could be written about him. And I like to think that Griff’s lonely God is a lot less lonely because of all the people brought into his presence by this Holy Cross priest now gone from Notre Dame.

— Kerry Temple ‘74 .

Return to winter 1999-2000 contents
Notre Dame magazine home page