Earlier this month, the Archdiocese of Vancouver lost Father Joseph Soria, a priest who it was suggested just might become Vancouver’s first canonized saint.
This week we said goodbye to a priest who might have had a hand in the canonization process.
Father John Horgan, known around the world for his engaging TV and speaking presence and his expertise on saints, had fought a brave battle against stomach cancer before passing away this week.
I was blessed to work regularly with him when I had the communications role for the Archdiocese of Vancouver.
Father Horgan could be counted on to bravely step up and comment whenever media were looking for a comment or background on a topic. He didn’t relish it, but when we needed someone to explain the Assumption to a journalist or a TV production needed some guidance on matters Catholic, he would gamely take on the challenge.
It’s hard to describe Father Horgan. His voice has been described as mellifluous, and someone once said he was one of the few priests who could say things that make you say, “I’ve never thought of it that way before.”
As a modern-day media equivalent to Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Father Horgan came close, with his TV appearances on EWTN and other Catholic programs, his online homilies, his public lectures and speaking engagements at conferences, his book on angels that immediately sold out and went into reprint.
His love of books and relics was well known. In a 2018 interview with his North Shore Anglican confrere Rev. Ed Hird, he described his childhood room as “so full of religious pictures and statues that my mother complained that she didn’t know whether to dust or genuflect when she entered.”
But Father Horgan did not exist in an esoteric, spiritual world. He lived in a temporal world where he brought practical application of his knowledge of moral theology to bear on matters, no matter how difficult, receiving a baptism by fire when he was assigned as a hospital chaplain to St. Paul’s Hospital during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and ‘90s.
Through the years Father Horgan consistently waded into controversy with a pastoral heart. He addressed with sadness the growing trend away from funerals, including among Catholics. “Nothing can replace what a funeral Mass offers the dead, or the living,” he commented.
He served as chaplain to two Catholic organizations that were practically lightning rods for public controversy, the Catholic Physicians’ Guild of the Archdiocese of Vancouver and the St. Thomas More Catholic Lawyers Guild.
Father Horgan called for conscience rights for physicians as pressure for legalized euthanasia was growing. He echoed Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s warning of the “dictatorship of relativism” in the Western world, saying, “Religious freedom is being reduced, in many ways, to freedom of worship, which both denies the public character of religion and privatizes religious freedom.”
“We may have the freedom to pray in our homes, but not to bring the moral convictions of faith into action, into the public sphere,” he said.
His devotion to St. Pius X, his favourite saint from childhood, was rewarded when he was made pastor of the North Shore parish in 2013. His hope was to build up the same sense of home and community that he’d experienced in the parishes of his childhood “when the church was a living part of family and neighbourhood life in joy and in sorrows.”
He creatively integrated his faith with popular culture, and in 2014, during the World Cup, he displayed an image of Blessed Alberto Marvelli, an Italian layman, wearing a shirt and tie with a soccer ball at his feet. “I put him in the window because he represents a tremendous commitment to human rights,” he said.
He helped form the Daughters of the Church, a group of women who consecrate themselves to Christ without taking religious vows.
He helped found the popular Man of the Shroud Exhibition on the history, science, and significance of the Shroud of Turin.
At Sts. Peter and Paul in Vancouver he oversaw the creation of new stained-glass windows that are admired to this day.
During the pandemic he moved his talks and lectures online, for instance offering a presentation to the Corpus Christi Altar Servers in a virtual camp on Zoom.
His devotion to the holy angels led to his suggesting the name for the new Mausoleum at Gardens of Gethsemani.
In 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, his concern over the lockdown of churches prompted him to write to Archbishop Miller and helped spark the Blue Christmas campaign.
“I have a great love for my Church’s faith and teachings,” he told Rev. Hird, “and I love to share those gifts in the form of beautiful liturgies and worship, thought-provoking adult education classes, and consistent witness for people exploring the Catholic Church or who are reverting to Catholic practice after time away.”
Both Archbishop Miller and Michael Warsaw at EWTN remarked on Father Horgan’s ability to combine his learnedness with his pastoral nature.
It might not be too presumptuous to suggest that Vancouver could have two saints one day.
Twitter: @paulschratz