Farrell, Father Melvin Lloyd

1986, November 14

Date of Birth: 1930, September 4

December 18, 1986

Dear Confrere:

A more credible example of priestly faith, dedication, and loyalty to Sulpician ideals will be hard to find than that given us by Melvin Lloyd Farrell. His very productive life was cut short on November 14, 1986, after a fifteen-month battle with cancer. Ordained a priest at a time when everything in that calling seemed so full of promise, with seminaries expanding, and the Society of St. Sulpice in the United States growing to meet the need for seminary role-models and teachers, he would exercise a ministry that challenged and stimulated the Province to adapt to conditions undergoing radical change. He served in a variety of key positions, and, despite the tumult and the inevitable frustrations for such a forward-looking thinker, he never lost his sense of direction, his love for the priesthood of Christ, and his commitment to St. Sulpice.

Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 4, 1930, one of four sons and one daughter of James Lloyd and Barbara (nee Weber) Farrell, Melvin moved with his family to Seattle in 1942, soon after Pearl Harbor, when his father went to work for the Boeing Company. Two years later, Mel entered the high school of St. Edward’s Seminary in response to his strong attraction to the priesthood. His seminary years demonstrated the mature balance so characteristic of his whole life, his fine mind, and his special love for literature and writing. Active in every aspect of seminary life and drawn toward teaching, he was accepted as an aspirant for St. Sulpice through the generosity of his bishop, Thomas A. Connolly of Seattle, and was sent to Washington, D.C., as a Basselin scholar to complete his college major in philosophy and his theological studies at The Catholic University of America.

During summer vacations Mel would work in a cemetery, until he saw a chance to start preparing himself for teaching. While still working on the east coast for his master’s degree in philosophy, he was accepted by the University of Washington’s graduate school for summer work on a master’s in English literature. He earned his philosophy degree in 1954, completed his English degree in 1956, and received his license in sacred theology in 1957. Equipped with that strong academic foundation, Mel returned to Seattle to be ordained a priest of the Seattle Archdiocese on June 1, 1957, for service with St. Sulpice.

In his first year’s appointment as a seminary director of young candidates for priesthood, Father Farrell taught literature, composition, and religion at St. Edward’s Seminary in both the college and high school, and he spent the following year in Baltimore for the Sulpician year of formation. Another characteristic of Mel’s life emerged in this early period of his priesthood. Always gracious and sociable, Mel also valued privacy, and he found writing a wonderful and satisfying diversion from the steady demands of his public ministry. While in Baltimore, for example, he drafted the manuscript of directives to young seminarians for their spiritual growth. As a seminarian himself at Theological College, he had worked with a fellow student in preparing a hymnal that was eventually published as The People’s Hymnal. For some years, Mel continued to revise and compose texts for its later editions. Approached then by the publisher of a highly popular monthly for high school students, he started to write a series of articles on Christian doctrine, and these appeared regularly for many years beginning in 1962.

On returning to St. Edward’s from Baltimore, Mel found his teaching career taking an unexpected turn when he had to take over the course in physics for two years, a draining experience so foreign to his main intellectual interests. Release from that chore came through his appointment as principal of the high school at St. Edward’s. He also used that position to bring together the administrators of other Catholic high schools in Seattle for mutual help in raising standards. As early as 1958, Mel had begun to take summer school courses at Seattle University to earn State certification as a teacher and then principal. He frequently participated in the annual meetings of the seminary department of the National Catholic Educational Association for which he presented several papers.

Never happy with the demands of an administrator’s duties and passionately fond of teaching, Father Farrell had to deal constantly with role conflict, aggravated further by the appearance of growing trouble in the seminary high school scene. Reading widely in the area of adolescent psychology while strongly defending the role of minor seminaries in the Catholic tradition of preparing priests, he also argued the value of making major changes in their typically strict and confining discipline. Closely following the developments of the Second Vatican Council and taking summer courses in theology at the University of San Francisco, he was able to formulate and express cogent arguments for much more comprehensive changes in the methods of priestly formation in the United States.

Although meeting strong and sometimes hostile resistance to any modification in minor seminary formation, he was being heard in other places, not least of all in the first assembly ever held by the U.S. Sulpicians in 1967, when through elected delegates they first chose their provincial superior. One of the younger participants and secretary of that assembly, Mel was a rallying point for other colleagues troubled about the future of seminaries. He would also play key roles in many later assemblies and usually wrote the final report to the membership of the Province.

Nevertheless, the controversies about high school seminaries wearied Mel and he concluded he might be better off moving into seminary work. The provincial council permitted him to enter a doctoral program at The Catholic University in 1968. Although he had become increasingly attracted to the field of religious education, the S.T.D. seemed to his superiors a more apt specialty for the theological seminary. Mel received the doctorate in 1970, but, as he ruefully noted more than once, he never had a chance as a teacher to build on his research in the theology of the priesthood.

Instead Father Farrell returned to Seattle as president of the seminary college and vice rector of St. Thomas Seminary. He taught the course in catechetics, which kept him active in that field. He also did more work in continuing education of the clergy after directing a pilot program for an eastern diocese that grew out of priests’ retreats, he had directed. Two new areas of administration opened up in the following year, when he was appointed the rector of St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park and elected to the provincial council.