Dyer, Father Edward

1925, November 3

Date of Birth: 1854, April 4

Paris
February 15, 1926

Fathers and Very Dear in Our Lord:

We have expressed some deep-felt and fitting regret on the death of Father Dyer, Provincial Superior of our houses in the United States. This regret was well deserved. This confrere, by his office, represented the highest authority after ours. He did better. By his long service, by his dedication – both courageous and patient – he made our work prosper. It was a consolation to him, especially in his last years, to see it come out of its hard testing stronger than ever by reason of increasing numbers more than sufficient for all its ongoing tasks. We must number him among those who “get the job done.” and we firmly believe that our predecessors, especially Father Emery who established our American foundation, have made him welcome in Paradise as a good worker when nothing discouraged him from effort, even when human hopes seemed to desert him. He had a great soul, devout, deeply religious, artless and childlike in his faith, sincere and practical in his piety. It was permeated with this idea: that those for whom he was working have – rather than some bent for getting along in the everyday world – a feeling of being at home in the supernatural life; and that what needed to be drilled into his seminarians was that they must be total priests, meditating priests, deeply spiritual minded, constant in prayer, disciplined in their private lives. What was good in their nature he accepted, and nothing pleased him more than the enthusiasm, the zeal, the ingenuity of doers.

But in his upbringing – in his family, in the seminary, in the Sulpicians – he had received the impression that mere busy-ness is a disease, that it wears one out, causes trouble and dissipation; and that, on the contrary, for the lasting effect of action, there must be an underpinning of silence, reflection, and unending crying out to God. Those who knew him best, who lived under him and in close contact with him, could from time to time run up against what they were tempted to call deviousness, egocentricity, stubbornness. But all acknowledged his good will and the efficacy of his administration. He was not violent nor capricious, but he was headstrong in the manner of a good number of workers in the Church and in the clergy, who have some fixed ideas to which they cling, even at the cost of some run-ins with those who disagree with them.

This critique takes nothing away from the esteem we have for him. On the contrary, they are at the root of it, and they make it possible for us to state once more that in God’s plan for the souls of the just, some defects are inevitable and perhaps even contribute to their benefit. The foregoing is only a preface to what is left for me to tell you about the various assignments of our confrere.

Father Edward Dyer was born on April 4, 1854, in Washington of one of the old and good Catholic families of Southern Maryland, families very strongly marked with the imprint of religion. Through distant lineage he went back to England. His father was a doctor, first in Washington, then later – in 1868 – he opted for a practice in the country. It was in the country that our confrere lived out the first years of his life that he could remember, that he made his First Communion, that he received Confirmation from Archbishop Kenrick of Baltimore.

From those years in the country he always retained a lively taste for rural living and a particular empathy for priests who were assigned to country parishes. How often were those who felt this to be encouraged, advised, and helped!  To lift their spirits he recited for them this line of poetry brimming with nostalgia and regret: O fortunatos nimium, sua si bona agricolas!  [O too blessed, if their own good things nourish farmers!]

After five or six years the Dyer family returned to Washington. Our confrere, who was fifteen years old and who had to face up to some financial distress in his family (distress which interrupted his going on in school), took a job in a novelty store.

Along with his religious practices, however, he kept up a huge appetite for reading and knowledge. He was worried that this was somewhat foolish because it was all so haphazard. It was now that he needed guidance. He found it in a zealous priest who later became Bishop of Richmond, first rector of the Catholic University in Washington, Archbishop of Dubuque. It was Archbishop Keane, the choice of Providence for young Edward Dyer. From the closeness of the relationship there was on the part of the Master moral authority on the part of the disciple, filial confidence. Out of their relationship there was a priestly vocation which grew and took its impetus under the inspiration of one who was only a simple assistant at St. Patrick’s in Washington. Along with many other reasons for our gratitude, Archbishop Keane had that of giving us our confrere. At the age of seventeen he entered this minor seminary of St. Charles. There he showed himself what he was always thereafter: a man of duty, serious minded, an intense worker – as one of his teachers said – a philosopher before his time. His favorite teachers were the ones who were the hardest workers and the most exemplary, and it was like them that he intended to lead his own life.

From St. Charles he advanced to Philosophy at St. Mary’s Seminary. There he exhibited a passion which became lifelong; a rare passion for ideal order; a persistent passion which, even in his last months at Royat, nourished his spirit and caused him to attract some allies and also some opponents. It was a passion for logic – something which brings sense to everything provided that it is carried out as it should be with an understanding of its consequences and an awareness of the real world. He made it his guiding star.

Already the call to St. Sulpice had made itself heard in his soul’s depths. It meant for him an ideal and a desire for an apostolate particularly useful for the benefit of his country for which he always strove to send out better and more idealistic priests.

He came to Paris to study Theology. There he underwent the trial of separation from his native land in a place whose language he did not speak and where he was involved in various studies which baffled his precise but somewhat slow mind. He overcame all the difficulties. His seminary courses over, he resolutely entered the Solitude to give himself to St. Sulpice. He was ordained priest on December 18, 1880 by Bishop Richard, then Coadjutor to Archbishop Guibert.