 Fr. Peter Patrick Hagen Miles, OP
When Peter Miles was suddenly felled by a heart attack on August 15, 1984, his classmates,
the novitiate class of 1952, were stunned and filled with a certain dread. For Peter was the third of their number to
succumb at a relatively early age, the others being Frs. Louis Robinson and Antoninus
Hall. And the fact that Peter died in
Kentucky, the land of his forebears, was to add a touch of classical poignancy to his
passing. Beloved of his classmates and
confreres, his former student charges, the Sisters of Mission San Jose, the parishioners
of Portland and the lay community at New Hope, indeed of all who made his acquaintance,
Peter’s life was not an easy one. He bore
his heavy cross in the guise of the alcoholism that we now know to be a humiliating,
unfortunate disease as real as cancer or diabetes, sometimes with courage, sometimes with
defiance, sometimes with despair, but always with a deep and winning humility.
Patrick
Hagen Miles was born in Seattle’s Swedish Hospital on June 22, 1931, the only child
of Harold Miles and Naomi Hagen. After the
death of his father in Patrick’s early childhood, Naomi resettled in Los Angeles,
which Peter always looked upon as his home town. He
inherited his mother’s warmth of personality and love of literature. Blessed with a brilliant mind, Peter’s
acquaintance with the great works of English and American literature was almost
formidable. While still in grammar school, he
entered the Church at St. Dominic’s in Eagle Rock.
Naomi’s consequent devotion to the Order blossomed into her son’s
vocation. After graduating from Loyola High,
young Patrick was sent by the then-Provincial, Fr. Benedict Blank, to Mt. Angel Abbey in
Oregon as a Dominican postulant, and the subsequent year was spent with the other
postulants at St. Mary’s College in Moraga. The
entire class that entered the novitiate at Kentfield in August of 1951, under the tutelage
of Fr. Paul Aquinas Duffner, was honored with the names of the Dominican saints. Young Patrick was rechristened after the
Order’s great protomartyr. His brilliance
and wit and gentleness quickly endeared him to his confreres.
After five years of study at St. Albert’s,
where he fittingly served as student infirmarian. Peter
was ordained by Archbishop Finbar Ryan, O.P., at St. Dominic’s in San Francisco on
September 21, 1957, together with Frs. Finbarr Hayes, Vincent Foerstler, Samuel Parsons,
Louis Robinson and Pius Rummel. Immediately
afterward Peter, Sam and Louie were sent to Rome, where they joined Chrys Raftery and
their classmates Tony Hall and Albert Buckley at The Angelicum. Here Peter earned his Lectorate and Licentiate in
Theology, and, in 1961, his Doctorate in Canon Law. It
was here that he befriended another young Dominican Canon Law student, Fr. Cajetan Kelly,
with whom he toured Europe and who would remain devoted to him throughout the years; Fr.
Kelly became Archbishop of Louisville, and it was in his Archdiocese in which Peter last
labored and died. The new Provincial, Fr.
Joseph Agius, recognizing Peter’s abilities, called him home to be his secretary and
the Province Procurator.
A couple of years later Peter was named Master of Students, an office that he carried
out with meticulous devotion and intensity. These
were difficult years, the sixties, in the life of anyone holding authority, and for a
gentle, sensitive nature like Peter’s, they proved to be a crushing burden that
brought on his sickness. He was to struggle
and suffer incredibly throughout the years that remained to him, and yet he was never to
lose those beautiful qualities of loving kindness and brilliance that so marked his
character. Indeed, they were enhanced by the
deep humility and dignity that only suffering can forge.
The Sisters of Mission San Jose and later the parishioners of Holy Rosary in Portland
will long remember his homilies based so incessantly on the single theme (and truly the
only meaningful one in their lives): “God
loves you! God loves you!” In 1982, the brothers and sisters of the Third
Order Ashram Community of Coarsegold, California, invited Peter to live with and teach
them. Always fond of children, he was in his
glory among the little ones. He used to say
that he particularly delighted in the rattlesnake hunts with the kids.
When the Coarsegold Community move to New Hope, Kentucky, the following year, Peter
accompanied them. It was there, in the
chapel, on Our Lady’s greatest feast day, August 15, 1984, that Peter found his new
hope fulfilled. Having just finished
celebrating Mass, with the Viaticum still within him, he was stricken and died. Following obsequies conducted by the local
Dominicans in Louisville, Peter was returned to California.
A well-attended funeral liturgy was conducted in the chapel of St. Albert’s
Priory in Oakland, and then Peter was laid to rest with his brethren at St. Dominic’s
Cemetery in Benicia. A merciful God gave us
Fr. Peter Miles as an example of suffering and an inspiration of humility. May God have mercy on his soul. And may Peter pray for us, his brothers and sisters
whom he loved so well.
--Fr. Gerald
Albert Buckley, O.P. |
