Angelus News | March 22, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 6

Staff from the
archdiocese’s San
Gabriel regional office
processed in with a
portrait of Auxiliary
Bishop David G.
O’Connell at the start
of a Feb. 24 memorial
Mass marking a year
since his death.
LA’s ‘man of the heavens’
One year after his death, friends say the spiritual legacy of
Auxiliary Bishop David O’Connell is becoming more apparent.
BY PABLO KAY / PHOTOGRAPHY BY VICTOR ALEMÁN
One year since the death of Auxiliary Bishop David G.
O’Connell, the shock over his murder has largely
worn off, the tributes have died down, and the
billboards that briefly lit up Los Angeles freeways flashing his
smiling face are gone.
While a grieving city may have begun moving on, a portrait
of “Bishop Dave,” as a priest and a man, has come more
sharply into focus.
“He was a mystic in the sense of his love affair with Christ,”
his friend Msgr. Timothy Dyer, pastor of St. Patrick Church
and St. Stephen Church in South LA, said in his homily at
a Feb. 24 memorial Mass marking a year since O’Connell’s
death. “All that he did in the streets and people’s homes, all
the places he went to when he was bishop, he was conscious
of this love in Christ in his own life.”
His purpose in life, Dyer said, was “to bring that love to
others.”
But rather than memorialize the bishop, the Saturday
morning Mass at Mission San Gabriel Árcangel’s Chapel
of the Annunciation was mostly a chance to reflect on what
O’Connell left behind, and what he was still doing.
“He’s still looking out for us,” said his longtime friend,
former LA County Sheriff Jim McDonnell, who attended
the Mass with his wife, Kathy. “We continue to move forward
with his guidance and more so, his inspiration.”
McDonnell first met the future bishop when he was a
young LAPD officer and O’Connell was a young priest working
the same tough streets of South LA. Their friendship was
forged from a common concern for the people they served —
and their shared Irish heritage.
“He was kind of a man of the heavens, but a man of the
streets,” said McDonnell, whose friendship with O’Connell
continued from those early days.
At the service, both Dyer and Msgr. Jarlath Cunnane,
O’Connell’s closest friend and compatriot, highlighted a
little-known episode of O’Connell’s life: the interior crisis he
experienced after being named a bishop.
“It was terribly traumatic for him, and he went into this
darkness,” said Dyer of O’Connell’s struggle to accept leaving
South LA. “He knew he was going to have to leave the life
he’d been living for nearly 40 years.”
Later, Cunnane said that in overcoming that crisis, O’Con-
18 • ANGELUS • March 22, 2024