As the People\'s Priest, He Fought for the Forgotten of the Bronx

By WINNIE HU

The Rev. John C. Flynn could have been a monsignor, but as he told the story in later years, he refused the elevation because he already held a title more to his liking: the people's priest.

Father Flynn, 83, who spent a half-century championing the poor, the disadvantaged and the forgotten of the Bronx, died on Monday at the Schervier Nursing Care Center in Riverdale after a long debilitating illness, according to his family.

“He did not need any title, he did not need any accolades, he just wanted to be a parish priest,” said Heidi Hynes, the executive director of the Mary Mitchell Family and Youth Center, who used to receive regular visits from Father Flynn asking what could be done to help the needy.

Tall and lanky with bright blue eyes, Father Flynn reached into the seediest corners of the Bronx and offered a helping hand, relatives and friends said. He started a campaign called Save a Generation to give education and job training to high school dropouts; walked the streets trading crucifixes for guns in an optimistic but futile effort to make neighborhoods safer; and attended hundreds of meetings to lobby for a better life for families, by building more low-cost housing or saving community gardens.

In the late 1970s, when the South Bronx was awash in crime and despair, he joined with local activists to help tenants who were living without heat or hot water for weeks at a time. He showed them how to stand up for themselves and reclaim their neighborhoods.

“These were human beings and not pieces of furniture to be thrown out,” said the Rev. Neil Connolly, who worked alongside Father Flynn in the Bronx and is now pastor of St. Mary's Church in the Lower East Side. “All of us knew we would not be forever in the South Bronx, so there had to be not only development of buildings and property but also the development of people. Our way w as not to do things for people but to help them do things for themselves.”

Father Flynn was the second oldest of four children of a civil engineer and a homemaker, both devout Catholics, and he grew up in Crestwood, a middle-class enclave in Yonkers. Even as a youngster, he had the makings of a future priest, recalled his sister, Mary Ellen Loveless, who still lives in Crestwood. “As children, he would give me sermons and we would sit there like we were in church,” Ms. Loveless, 77, said. “He would give communion.”

He had severe asthma and spent some of his childhood living with family friends in Saranac Lake, N.Y., where the air was easier on his lungs, his sister said. After returning home to Yonkers, he graduated from Roosevelt High School, and later attended Saint Joseph's Seminary.

Father Flynn, who was ordained in 1955, was dispatched as a new priest to Pocantico Hills, in Westchester County, where one of his duties was visiting patients at a nearby hospital, Ms. Loveless said. He later went to the Bronx and worked at the Church of Saint Raymond in Parkchester in the 1960s and ‘70s.

In a 2010 interview, Father Flynn recalled that his efforts to integrate the church in what was then a largely Irish neighborhood with black and Hispanic parishioners met resistance. He recalled being told, “If you love them so much, why don't you go live with them?”

That was when he moved to Venezuela and spent several years ministering to poor families and learning Spanish before returning to the Bronx.

At his last parish, St. Martin of Tours in Crotona, his daily rounds included ministering to drug dealers, drug addicts and working-class families who had fallen on hard times. Just about the only time that Father Flynn was not walking the neighborhood, former parishioners said, was on Mondays, when he played golf.

“Greatness takes many forms,” said Mark Naison, a professor at Fordham University w ho worked with Father Flynn at Save a Generation. “It is not always associated with wealth and power and fame. In the Bronx, it may have reached its highest point in the person of a parish priest who walked the street with the lost boys of the community while bullets were flying. And who those boys learned to love as much as everyone else who knew him.”

In 2010, Father Flynn retired to a residence for priests in Riverdale and later moved to the Schervier nursing home. Even then, he continued visiting his old neighborhoods to check on the poor; he was particularly concerned that they not be displaced by rising rents.

Ms. Hynes recalled that Father Flynn would tell her, “I can't remember my name and address but I can remember we are supposed to be helping poor people.”

At the nursing home, Father Flynn would minister to other patients and bless them. In his room was a handwritten note that he had scrawled, with much difficulty, sometime in the last ye ar, Ms. Loveless said.

It read: “Priest of the people - To bring my relatives to be lovers of Jesus Christ who prepares us to follow Him into Heaven filled with united love for each other like a family - Become united and loving God and each other.”

Father Flynn had written July 28, 1929 - his birth date - both at the top and bottom of the note.

“I guess,'' his sister said, “that is what he figured his life was supposed to be.”