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Savannah priest took life as he found it from Irish farm to gunman’s Cathedral attack
By Jan Skutch
By his own admission, Monsignor William Oliver O’Neill is “a person who likes mischief and excitement.” So when the retired rector at the Cathedral Basilica of St. John the Baptist in downtown Savannah sat down to pen his life’s stories beginning in Ireland and continuing for the past 53 years in the Catholic Diocese of Savannah, that showed through. “Some of the stories in this collection may seem to be outlandish or hard to believe!,” he wrote in his introduction. “They are all actually true stories.” In the recently published “Stories from Ireland and America,” available from Amazon.com, O’Neill writes 124 stories from his childhood on a farm near Tipperary in Ireland to his confrontation with an armed arsonist who tried to burn the Cathedral to the ground. The reader is presented with an entertaining saga — at times challenging to take at face value. In fact, a reader is left wondering how in the world O’Neill ever made it to ordination to the priesthood. He recounts that while in seminary at St. Peter’s on Wexford studying for the priesthood for the Diocese of Savannah, O’Neill helped himself to the bathtub in the apartment of the school dean, who was out of town. When the dean returned unexpectedly and found O’Neill in the tub, “He got a terrible fright when he saw me in the bathtub and I was speechless,” O’Neill wrote. That led to an appearance before a panel of five priest professors where the school president “spoke about the seriousness of my crime and indicated that I was not a suitable candidate for Holy Orders,” O’Neill wrote. “I sat there like a puppy dog being scolded.” When polled on whether to expel O’Neill or place him on probation, a 3-to-2 vote favored probation. “That was a relief,” O’Neill wrote, adding that after a stern warning from the seminary president, “I was then dismissed. At that moment I was determined to be a priest. I spent my final year being an exemplary student.” He was ordained on June 4, 1967. But for those who have celebrated Mass with O’Neill at the pulpit, they find a priest who sees humor in daily lives, as well as one who was dedicated to his chosen path of leading his flock to God’s message. And as a fierce critic of the church’s handling of those guilty of cleric sexual abuse. All the while couched in his native brogue he has retained during his 53 years stateside. When O’Neill came to America with a priest classmate in August 1967 bound for New York, then to Savannah with nine other new priests, he was still wearing his heavy serge suit from his homeland to the city’s humid summers. Among the first orders of business in Savannah was to buy a lightweight suit for $60, leaving him with “only $90 to my name in a foreign country. I was a poor immigrant,” he wrote. After church assignments in Augusta and Columbus, he arrived at Blessed Sacrament Church in Savannah on Aug. 25, 1988 — 21 years to the day after he arrived in America. He became rector at the Cathedral on Aug. 28, 1996, and remained there until June 2013 when he “reluctantly” retired because of health reasons. “I continue to live in retirement at the Cathedral and plan to do so until the end of my time on this Earth,” he wrote. While rector there, O’Neill was assigned by then-Bishop J. Kevin Boland to oversee an almost $12 million Cathedral restoration project in 1999-2000. Typically, he took a hands-on approach to the project, including daily expeditions to the tops of the Cathedral’s 207-foot high twin spires. On one such trip, “because I had to examine this myself,” he dashed from his office to check on a serious structural problem near the top of one of the spires. In his haste, he forgot to put a belt on his pants. About three quarters of the way up he lost his trousers, then one shoe. “The foreman who was with me was not a Catholic and in fact he had never met a Catholic priest until he met me. “I could not resist the urge to tell him way up there so high that not only had he met a Catholic priest, but he also got to see a priest’s exposed rear-end, and that mine was no different from his, except that shamrocks appear on mine on St. Patrick’s Day.” People person “Because I am a ‘people person’ I never met a stranger,” O’Neill wrote. “I like to meet people and chat with them.” That includes his finding the somewhat lowly among us. He recounts a trip to Rome to study at the North American College in 2002 and finding a “woman who looked elderly carrying a tray loaded with dishes” in a restaurant. As he watched, a younger-looking woman was stacking dishes on the tray, making it too heavy for the older woman to handle. “Suddenly, there was a loud crash of dishes falling to the floor and breaking,” he wrote. As the older woman “looked so embarrassed and got down on her knees to collect the broken pieces and put them back on the tray, my heart ached for her and I went over to her and got down on my knees to help her. I was dressed as a priest.” The woman, Maria Pisano, was “flustered and crying. She indicated that she was very grateful for my help. ... Right away I had found a new friend.” O’Neill became a regular at that restaurant. On a subsequent visit to Rome in 2005, O’Neill traveled to Rome with Bishop Boland to visit Pope John Paul II. “I was far more excited about seeing Maria Pisano that I was about meeting the Pope!” O’Neill got a special VIP ticket for her to attend a Papal Mass on Palm Sunday. He wrote that Pisano “in her simple black dress (was) sitting there in the middle of others who considered themselves very important and were dressed in tuxedos and fur costs. “This day was different. She began the day by meeting the Pope and receiving Holy Communion from his hand.” When he returned to Rome in 2014, “Maria had died and gone to God. May she rest in peace.” Rage But perhaps O’Neill’s defining moment in Savannah was the morning of Oct. 7, 2003, shortly after the Cathedral restoration was completed, when a man armed with a pistol set fire to the Bishop’s chair at the altar there. “To say that I was extremely angry was to put it very mildly,” he wrote. “I was raging and had lost my sense of fear, when the man approached me with the gun, I used a litany of vulgar words, telling him to drop the **** gun or I would strangle him and knock his *** head off.” That response from a man dressed as a priest seemed to paralyze the gunman, who was still pointing the gun at O’Neill. “I admit that it was not very priestly of me to use such vulgar language, but I believe it saved my life,” he wrote. “At this point I had to restrain myself from taking the gun from him and blowing his brains out!” When firefighters and police arrived, O’Neill recounts telling the officer near him to shoot the gunman. “I asked him to give me his gun and that I would shoot him myself,” O’Neill wrote. When officers finally handcuffed the gunman, O’Neill wrote, “I made an attempt to punch him in the face. To prevent me from doing this, the police then placed handcuffs on me!” The gunman, 32-year-old Stuart Vincent Smith of Marietta, was later sentenced to 20 years in prison for what the judge called “an offense to everyone who lives in this community.” The cost of fixing the damage to the Cathedral was almost a half million dollars, O’Neill said.
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