The Anchoress

After training at Fort Meade, he and his fellow 29ers shipped out for Europe. Within a year and a half, he was with the 115th Infantry as it hit Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944.

“Here he was, almost fresh out of seminary, and this was his first duty station?” said an incredulous Rev. Monsignor John FitzGerald of the Archdiocese Of Baltimore, addressing yesterday’s gathering. “That’s the deep end of the pool. Boys were dying on his left, being maimed for life on his right.

“He survived, but not all of them did. He had to write a lot of letters home. No seminary teaches how to do that.”

The Rev. Joseph Estabrook, an auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of the Military, recalled that, on that windswept morning, Father O’Grady came upon a young soldier desperately digging a slit trench in the sand amid the shelling.

“Father let him have his gloves,” Estabrook said.
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“Danger meant nothing to this chaplain,” wrote his battalion commander, Lt. Col. Arthur Sheppe, upon awarding him the Bronze Star for valor in July 1944. “It may be said without exaggeration that the greatest single contribution to the morale of the personnel of this battalion has been the work of Chaplain O’Grady. He epitomizes the militant man of God.”

Though spiritual contribution can be difficult to quantify, yesterday saw no lack of anecdotes. O’Grady routinely “appeared out of nowhere in his jeep, gathered everybody around him and had a chat,” remembers Bob Griffin, 89, a Silver Spring resident who was a friend and a lieutenant in the 115th in 1944. “It didn’t matter to him if you were Catholic, Baptist or Jewish. He reached out.”

He repeatedly risked his life to take food and other provisions to 29ers at aid stations near the front lines, others remembered. The Rev. Estabrook said O’Grady volunteered for every mission he could, no matter the circumstances, seeking out “his boys” so he could “look in their eyes and let them know he felt what they were feeling.”

“Look at the attendance here today,” he said, “61 years after his death. Such men stand outside of time.”

Yesterday, his nephew Eugene, now a Los Angeles teacher and filmmaker, stood with his 13-year-old daughter, Hanna, just outside the newly christened O’Grady Chapel and spoke of the man he has come to know and revere over the years.