Essays and Articles by Mgsr. O'Reilly

During his fairly brief lifetime, Msgr. O’Reilly published very few articles. Here are those he did see through publication.

Article/Essay File
As a physicist and a theologian, Msgr. O’Reilly was interested in the connections between the temporal world of eating and work and technology and the transtemporal world of the Eucharist. In this brief essay (just a little over 2000 words), “The Christian in a Technological World,” a transcription of a talk he gave at St. John’s Seminary and later published in The Evangelist, the journal of St. John’s Seminary College (1963–2003), he tries to tie the temporal and the transtemporal together. Here is a summary: “The Mass is a mystery of death, of the body and of eating. The Eucharist is often spoken of as the Bread of Life. Let us not forget that it is also the Bread of Death. We communicate in the Body that died and rose. It would be foolish to forget the negative in our hurry to recognize the positive, to exalt life at the expense of death. In the Mass, above all, we give assent to the fact that eating lowers us into a tomb from which God, not ourselves, will lift us. Might we not include in the meaning of the Mass a reference to the whole effort of technology which man expends on the world’s body, and of which eating is but a paradigm? The transubstantiation of the terrestrial bread and wine would then be a foreshadowing of the new day that will dawn for the world of matter which we can only lower gently and lovingly into the grave. The Mass in this view would express a dedication of man, not to a triumphalistic technology, but to an integral Christian humanism in which the incarnational and eschatological are kept together, in which a ‘Yes’ to life is not turned into a ‘No’ to death, in which the negative is not damned in favor or the positive.”
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Msgr. O’Reilly distilled a spirituality of the ministerial priesthood into this sermon he preached at a first Mass in 1973. See his famous definition of ministry / ministerial priesthood (below).
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At the time of the publication of Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical of Pope Paul VI on human birth, Msgr. O’Reilly labored to understand and explain the teaching to the many lay people and priests who asked him for help. Here is his abridged version of his explanation, “The Moral Problem of Contraception.”
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At the time of the publication of Humanae Vitae, the 1968 encyclical of Pope Paul VI on human birth, Msgr. O’Reilly labored to understand and explain the teaching to the many lay people and priests who asked him for help. Here is his expanded version of his explanation, “The Moral Problem of Contraception,” considered by many theologians the finest essay ever written on the subject.
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During the upheaval in the archdiocese of Los Angeles over the conflict between Cardinal McIntyre and the Immaculate Heart Sisters, Msgr. O’Reilly wrote the essay, “Lay and Religious Life: Their Distinction and Complementarity” in the journal Review for Religious. In some ways this essay is a synthesis of all of O’Reilly’s theology. He attempts to connect all of lay life—the world of business [money], marriage [sex], and government [power], taken in their largest meanings— with the worlds of word, sacrament, and community and of poverty, chastity, and obedience. He doesn’t waste a syllable, so you might want to use the three following charts to guide your reading.

To help you understand “Lay and Religious Life: Their Distinction and Complementarity” I have prepared a chart, of which this is the first page.
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To help you understand “Lay and Religious Life: Their Distinction and Complementarity” I have prepared a chart, of which this is the second page.
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To help you understand “Lay and Religious Life: Their Distinction and Complementarity” I have prepared a chart, of which this is the third page. It is also a summary of his synthesis of theology and life.
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The essay, “Lay and Religious Life: Their Distinction and Complementarity” was written especially for religious women and men. “Renewal and Reconciliation” takes the same themes and applies them especially to lay people. These are reflections Msgr. O’Reilly wrote for the Holy Year 1975 for The Tidings, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. You might recall that this was the era of old shortages and government scandal (the Watergate scandal) and turmoil in the church.
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Leaders at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena asked Msgr. O’Reilly to help them plan their spiritual formation program. Here is his essay. It contains his famous definition of ministry / ministerial priesthood: “THE PRIEST is one to whom his/her people come at those junctions of life when they come face to face with the unsolvable, those moments when they meet with the limits of creaturely power, when they experience darkness or have intimations of mortality. AT SUCH MOMENTS people have need to draw near to one who, while able like other men and women to swim in the waters of life and stay afloat in them, is not averse to drowning graciously in them, able to be overcome. PEOPLE need one who has entered deeply into the paschal mystery of Jesus, REJOICING IN LIFE BUT AT EASE WITH DEATH.”
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