 Fr. Thomas Aquinas Bernard Feucht, OP
Fr. Thomas Aquinas Feucht was born in Culdesac, Idaho near St. Joseph’s Indian
Mission on July 9, 1914. He received his early education in Cottonwood, Idaho and
later attended St. Martin’s College in Lacey, Washington. In September, 1933 he entered the Dominican
novitiate at Kentfield and was ordained to the priesthood at St. Mary’s Cathedral in
San Francisco on June 3,1939.
Fr.
Feucht was first assigned to St. Dominic’s in San Francisco and then briefly to St.
Thomas Aquinas parish in Logan, Utah. In 1944
he was sent to Holy Rosary in Portland and remained there—the last nine years as
pastor—until 1958. After leaving Portland
he served as assistant pastor of St. Dominic’s in San Francisco, instructor at St.
John Vianney High School in Los Angeles, pastor of St. Peter’s in Pittsburg, chaplain
to the Dominican Sisters in Kettle Falls, Washington, prior of the Novitiate of clerical
novices in Thousand Oaks, assistant pastor of Blessed Sacrament in Seattle, master of
cooperator brother novices in Kentfield, and master of clerical and cooperator brothers at
St. Albert’s Priory in Oakland.
In 1974 he returned to Portland
as pastor and director of the Rosary Center which he had transferred from San Francisco. Shortly afterward, however, he underwent heart
surgery and had to give up the office of pastor. Yet
he continued working in the parish and directing the Rosary Center, including editing and
publishing Light and Life, until his death.
Fr. Feucht will be remembered
by all those whose lives he touched in the many places and during the many years of his
ministry and by his communications from the Rosary Center.
Those in the Province who knew him as their novice master will remember him
as a priest who lived the truth that he preached and as a Dominican who deeply loved the
Order and who sought by his own example to encourage others to follow Christ in the way of
St. Dominic.
-- Fr. Luke
Buckles, O.P. |
