“It was something I knew,” he once told this writer. “I was called to this.”
But the boy who became leader of the state’s largest religious denomination continued to encounter life-shaking challenges. He lost his brother in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. His diocese faced a decade of headlines about a clergy child-abuse scandal and a church consolidation plan spurred by a drop in priests and parishioners. And most recently, the retired bishop suffered a stroke, bringing his death Tuesday at age 86.
“He served long and well,” Bishop Thomas Tobin, of Providence, Rhode Island, said in a statement from Angell’s native home. “His personal goodness, warmth and wit will be missed by all who knew him, admired him and loved him.”
Born Aug. 3, 1930, Angell found his way to the church through his school principal, who directed him to deliver notes to a nearby Catholic pastor. Soon he was setting his own course, entering the seminary in Warwick, Rhode Island, as a teenager before moving on to complete his theological studies in Baltimore.
Ordained as a priest in 1956, Angell served in the Diocese of Providence until his appointment in 1992 as the eighth bishop of Burlington to preside over Vermont’s Roman Catholic Diocese.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Angell learned of the attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and led a noon Mass for the victims, not realizing that his younger brother, David, and sister-in-law, Lynn, had died in the first hijacked plane to hit the twin towers.
Few at the time knew much about Angell’s family, let alone the fact his sibling had won more than two dozen Emmy awards writing and producing such television comedies as “Cheers” and “Frasier.” The bishop declined repeated interview requests from Larry King and Barbara Walters, opting instead to limit his comments to local reporters.
“I have to forgive, so I do,” the bishop told this writer shortly before Christmas that year. “Yes, the terrorists should be brought to justice, but we must respond in a Christ-like manner by striving to forgive even our persecutors.”
Months later, Angell confirmed that the Boston priest misconduct scandal dramatized in the recent film “Spotlight” extended to the state. By the time 40 resulting child sexual abuse lawsuits were settled after an 11-year court saga, Vermont’s diocese would pay more than $30 million in a near-bankrupting ordeal that forced it to sell its 32-acre Burlington headquarters on Lake Champlain.
At the same time, the diocese saw its priest numbers drop from 100 to a current 47 and parishioner figures decline from nearly 150,000 to a current 118,000, requiring a reduction in Vermont parishes from 130 to a current 73.
Undeterred, Angell spoke out publicly against abortion, the death penalty, landmines, physician-assisted suicide and same-sex marriage until his retirement in 2005.
Current Bishop Christopher Coyne is set to lead a Mass of Christian burial Tuesday at 1 p.m. at Burlington’s St. Joseph Co-Cathedral. An obituary on the diocese’s website notes Angell will be remembered as “a good-humored man of faith with a heart for the dignity of all humanity.”
Back in 2001, Angell showed a reporter more than 1,000 cards and letters he received after 9/11, including many crayoned condolences from children.
“Some of them are funny,” he said. “Not intentionally — they’re just beautiful, but …”
His favorite: “I’m sorry your brother went to heaven.”
Angell laughed heartily.
“I’m sure you can appreciate the depth of the sorrow I experienced,” he concluded. “But I also have — thanks be to God — a deep faith. That’s what kept me going.”
