Friday, February 20, 2015

A00014 -Jack Curran, Legendary Archbishop Molloy Basketball Coach


Jack Curran, a Mentor in Two Sports, Dies at 82



Robert Caplin for The New York Times
Curran in 2008. He coached basketball and baseball over 55 years at Archbishop Molloy High School in Queens.

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Published: March 14, 2013
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Jack Curran, who coached generations of baseball and basketball players for 55 years at Archbishop Molloy High School in Queens, winning more than 2,600 games, certainly among the most victories that any scholastic coach anywhere has compiled, died late Wednesday or early Thursday at his home in Rye, N.Y. He was 82.

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Vic DeLucia/The New York Times
Curran with Kenny Anderson in 1986. Anderson was among a handful of Curran’s players who went on to play in the N.B.A.
His death was confirmed by Richard Karsten, president of Molloy. Curran had lung and kidney problems, and had broken a kneecap in a fall in February.
“But we were expecting him back in a few weeks, in time to coach the baseball season,” Karsten said.
In 1958, Curran was living in West Springfield, Mass., and working as a building supplies salesman when one morning, over coffee in a diner, he read in a newspaper that St. John’s University, his alma mater, had hired Lou Carnesecca as an assistant basketball coach. Carnesecca had been the baseball and basketball coach at Molloy; Curran applied for the newly vacant jobs, was hired and held onto the positions for 55 years.
Molloy was a powerhouse under his leadership. His teams won 22 Catholic school New York City championships, 5 in basketball and 17 in baseball. Four times — in 1969, 1973, 1974 and 1987 — Molloy won both in the same year.
Curran coached Brian Winters, Kenny Smith, Kenny Anderson and Kevin Joyce, all of whom played in the N.B.A. The current Mets outfielder Mike Baxter played baseball at Molloy for Curran.
Over all, Curran’s record was 972-437 as a basketball coach and 1,708-523 as a baseball coach, the school said.
“He won everything except World War III,” Carnesecca, who spent 24 seasons as the head coach at St. John’s, said about Curran in a 2008 interview in The New York Times. “No one in the country has Jack’s record in both sports, no one.”
Curran, who never married, leaves no immediate survivors. His place of birth could not be confirmed. The school said he was born on Sept. 6, 1930, the son of a New York City police officer, Thomas Curran, and his wife, Helen, who worked for a time in the police commissioner’s office. They lived in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, the school said, but moved to the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, where Jack grew up.
He graduated from All Hallows High School in the Bronx and went on to St. John’s, where he studied English and pitched for the baseball team. For three years he played minor league baseball, pitching for teams in the Brooklyn Dodgers and Philadelphia Phillies organizations.
As a coach, Curran was known for emphasizing fundamentals, for maintaining discipline and for setting the performance bar at an extraordinarily high level for both his players and the officials — he could be tough on the referees and the umpires.
“Yes, but he was rarely profane or abusive,” said Tom Konchalski, a friend and a widely acknowledged expert on scholastic basketball in New York City. “In 55 years he only had four or five technicals. But yeah, all the top coaches, you try to win the game, so you ride the refs.”
In baseball, Curran was true to his playing roots, stressing pitching, defense and smart play. In basketball, he was more adaptive to the skills of his players.
“When he had his best teams, in the late ’60s, early ’70s, they were running, pressing teams,” Konchalski said. “He liked to pressure, push the ball up the floor. Later on he went to more set plays, and played more zone, because he didn’t think he had the players.”
He was also known for his strong Roman Catholic faith and for generous deeds away from the playing field. In 1969, he turned down an opportunity to take the basketball head coaching job at Boston College because his mother was dying and he was caring for her.
“He was the most selfless man I knew,” the Mets’ Baxter, who played for Curran from 2000 to 2002, told The Associated Press on Thursday. “He was so faithful and he just cared so much about the kids on his team, both on and off the court and the field. It really separated him; whether you were playing for him as a junior or senior or whether you were in college or looking for jobs, he would make sure to help you anyway he could. That never stopped to the last day.”


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Tuesday, February 10, 2015

A00013 - Richard McBrien, Dissenting Catholic Theologian

Rev. Richard McBrien, Dissenting Catholic Theologian, Dies at 78

By 
The Rev. Richard McBrien in his office at Notre Dame in 2006. Father McBrien wrote 25 books and a long-running column. Peter Thompson for The New York Times
The Rev. Richard P. McBrien, a theologian and professor at Notre Dame who unflinchingly challenged orthodoxy in the Roman Catholic Church for five decades and popularized and perpetuated the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, died on Sunday at his home in Farmington, Conn. He was 78.
The University of Notre Dame, which announced his death, said he had a rare brain disorder. He retired in 2013 and had recently returned to Connecticut, where he was born and raised.
“No Catholic theologian in the United States has made a larger contribution to the reception of Vatican II than Richard McBrien did,” the Rev. Charles E. Curran, a professor of human values at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said in an interview on Tuesday.
After he was ordained in 1962, Father McBrien, the son of an Irish-American police officer and an Italian-American nurse, wrote 25 books and a nationally syndicated weekly column. He became the chairman of the theology department at Notre Dame, president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and a consultant during the making of the 2006 movie “The Da Vinci Code.”
“At his peak in the 1980s and ’90s,” The National Catholic Reporter said in its obituary, “it is arguable that McBrien had a higher media profile than anyone in the Catholic Church other than Pope John Paul II. He was the ideal interview: knowledgeable, able to express complex ideas in digestible sound bites, and utterly unafraid of controversy.”
That fearlessness manifested itself in his outspoken support for the ordination of women as priests, the repeal of obligatory celibacy and the acceptance of birth control; his defiance of the papal doctrine of infallibility; and his willingness to publicly confront the crisis of pedophilia in the priesthood. (He called for the resignation of Cardinal Bernard F. Law of Boston shortly after it was revealed in 2001 that he had kept abusive priests working in parishes. Cardinal Law stepped down in December 2002.)
In 1984, in collaboration with the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, Notre Dame’s president, Father McBrien invited Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York to speak at Notre Dame to reconcile his personal convictions as a Roman Catholic with what he saw as his public responsibility in a pluralistic society to uphold access to abortion.
That extraordinary address by Mr. Cuomo, who died this month, came after his public debate with the new archbishop of New York, John J. O’Connor, who said he did not see “how a Catholic in good conscience can vote for a candidate who explicitly supports abortion” — a circle that included Mr. Cuomo and Geraldine A. Ferraro, that year’s Democratic nominee for vice president.
Father McBrien told The National Catholic Reporter in 2012: “If there are any reasons for the bad patch the church is now going through, it is the appointments to the hierarchy and the promotions within made by John Paul and Benedict. By and large, they have all been conservative. That’s why so many Catholics have left the church, are on extended vacations, or are demoralized or discouraged.”
Richard Peter McBrien was born on Aug. 19, 1936, and grew up in West Hartford, Conn. He earned a bachelor’s degree from St. Thomas Seminary in Bloomfield, Conn., and a master’s from St. John Seminary in Brighton, Mass.
His first assignment as a priest was at Our Lady of Victory Church in New Haven. He obtained a doctorate at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, where he was captivated by the work of the French Dominican theologian Yves Congar.
Father McBrien taught at the Pope John XXIII National Seminary in Weston, Mass., and Boston College, and in 1975 was named the first visiting fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. In 1980, he was recruited by Father Hesburgh to serve as chairman of Notre Dame’s theology department, ostensibly to fortify its Catholic character. Father McBrien had no illusions about the symbolism of his new position.
“At other universities, if they are less Catholic than they should be, it doesn’t have the same effect,” he said. “If Notre Dame went secular, it would be like turning St. Patrick’s Cathedral into a restaurant.”
But he differed with doctrinarians over the definition of a theologian, contrasting it with the catechist, whose role is to present the unalloyed fundamentals of Catholic belief.
“The theologian’s job,” he said, “is one of critically reflecting on that tradition or raising questions about it, even challenging it, and that’s how doctrines evolve and move forward.”
He was chairman until 1991, then president of the faculty senate, and remained a professor until his retirement. He is survived by his brother, Harry, and his sister, Dorothy Heffernan.
Father McBrien was never formally rebuked for his forthrightness, but since the 1990s, a number of diocesan newspapers had dropped his column. The Committee on Doctrine of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops,reviewing his book “Catholicism” in 1996, complained that it made “inaccurate or at least misleading” statements that allowed or stimulated readers “to make a choice” about the virgin birth of Jesus, homosexuality, women’s ordination and other doctrines.
Father McBrien had anticipated that criticism. “There is only one Christian faith,” he wrote, “but there have been literally thousands of beliefs held and transmitted at one time or another” — some of which endured, while others “have receded beyond the range of vision or even of collective memory.”
He also wrote “The Church and Politics,” “Lives of the Popes” and “Lives of the Saints,” among other books, and was general editor of The Encyclopedia of Catholicism.
Father McBrien maintained that the church, grounded as it was in egalitarianism, would do better to beatify regular holy folk with whom most Catholics could identify.
“Saints are examples rather than miracle workers or intercessors,” he said. “They are signs of what it means to be human in the fullest and best sense of the word. Which is also why the church has been wrong to have canonized so many priests and nuns rather than married lay people who lived ordinary lives in extraordinary ways, rejoicing in their children and grandchildren and doing good for so many others.”

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