For more than 50 years, Fr. Dan Riley has inspired countless students and alumni
By Tom Missel
Tim Shaffer had narrowed his college decision to two: big-city Marquette and small-town St. Bonaventure. Hailing from Portsmouth, Ohio, a small city on the Kentucky border the size of Olean, Shaffer’s parents had a clear preference.
“Going to a big city like Milwaukee scared the bejesus out of my parents,” said Shaffer, Class of ’04. “But I was still torn.” Until he attended Spring Into Bonaventure, the university’s capstone recruiting event for admitted students.
“The thing that really sold me,” Shaffer said, “was being in the Reilly Center when Fr. Dan (Riley) told us, ‘We want you because the world needs you.’ That really resonated with me.” Today, Dr. Shaffer is the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Chair of Civil Discourse at the University of Delaware and director of Civic Engagement and Deliberative Democracy with the National Institute for Civil Discourse at the University of Arizona.
For more than 50 years, Fr. Dan Riley’s words, actions and legendary laugh have left an indelible mark on the lives of thousands of Bonaventure students. His profound impact was formally recognized in May when Fr. Dan — Bill Riley, as his 1964 classmates know him — received an honorary doctorate from his alma mater at the 2023 Commencement ceremony.
In 1959, when Bill Riley was considering which college to attend, such an honor would have been impossible to foresee. Bonaventure wasn’t on his short list. He had endured what so many legacy students do.
“I was up to here with it, with my uncles and all their stories about Bonaventure,” said Fr. Dan, whose uncles were alumni. Thomas, ’30, was a state assemblyman from Monroe County in the ’40s and ’50s and John “Rip” Riley, ’30, played baseball at Bona’s, was scouted by Giants Hall of Famer John McGraw and made it to spring training with the Baltimore Orioles. But his father, James “Jake” Riley, convinced him to visit Bonaventure one summer day before his senior year at Charlotte High School in suburban Rochester.
“I was this grumpy teenager in the back seat of the car on the trip down,” Fr. Dan recalled. “And then we go to the library, meet Fr. Irenaeus (Herscher), meet at least three other friars including Jerome Kelly … and I just knew almost right away. This was the place.”
Fr. Dan didn’t come to Bonaventure with any plans to be a friar, however. Dr. Ray Sommers, a Bonaventure grad of 1932, helped Fr. Dan survive a serious case of nephritis (kidney inflammation) when he was 3 years old and his sister, Ellen, survive spinal meningitis when she was just 6 months old.
“Kids, especially boys, were dying from nephritis at that time because there was really no treatment for it, but Ray was one of the best diagnosticians in Rochester so I had a great love for doctors and the healing profession and wanted to be one,” Fr. Dan said.
His desire to heal shifted from the body to soul not long into his academic career. “Fr. Gervase White opened my eyes to theologians like Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Merton and it began to feel like a world that was coming alive for me,” Fr. Dan said. “I read a couple of biographies on Saint Francis and was just entranced by his life. It was beginning to romance me.”
Fr. Dan wasn’t as entranced by the rigidity of the Catholic Church and its devotion to ritual over service and engagement, a perspective that diverged from his childhood experience.
“What I experienced (as a kid) was a wholesomeness of faith, not an obligation for it,” he said. “I remember wanting to go to church because I wanted to be with my family, but I didn’t have to go. I learned the rosary for my family, not because some nun was telling me I had to. Too often, religion back then was confined to rules and regulations. It was a moralized way of looking at the world rather than engaging God. The Franciscan world is about engagement and that’s what I wanted to do.”
By his sophomore year, he switched his major to philosophy, often visited the chapel in Devereux Hall to “learn prayer by praying,” and became an advocate for civil rights and social justice. Upon graduation from Bona’s, he joined the Franciscan Order in 1965 and professed his first vows in 1966.
Fr. Dan Riley, ofm, has been a fixture in the student section at Bonnies basketball games.
WHILE FURTHERING HIS EDUCATION in Washington, D.C., at The Catholic University of America and Washington Theological Union, Fr. Dan was deeply moved by Martin Luther King Jr.’s social ministry, serving as co-chair of the task force of religious for Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
“The summer before Dr. King was killed, I lived with a group of guys in downtown D.C. in a mixed-race community, taking classes, not trying to minister but just living there. It was a wonderful experience,” Fr. Dan said. “We were taken into the headquarters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and they asked if we could come down and be with them because King had been shot; this is before we knew he was killed. Even before he was killed, I was committed to working with the Black population and was received well among them as a white guy.”
Before he was ordained in 1971, Fr. Dan’s hope was to be assigned to minister at a historically Black college or university, but the province said, “Bonaventure is basically falling apart with spiritual direction” and he was the only one at Holy Name Province who had a master’s degree in campus ministry.
“Fr. Reginald (Redlon, university president) and Fr. Joe Doino, a wonderful friar and mentor of mine, basically said, ‘We need you up here,’” Fr. Dan said. “I really didn’t want to go, but if that’s where I was needed … When you aren’t able to clearly say no, then maybe it’s a yes.”
In his first stint at Bonaventure (1971-1974), Fr. Dan collaborated with friars Dan Hurley, Hugh Eller, Gervase White and Robert White to invigorate Campus Ministries. They began taking students on retreats to an old farmhouse that once served as a rectory. The retreats were the seedling that would grow into Mt. Irenaeus a decade later.
“I was the hippie friar so the kids seemed to gravitate toward me,” said Fr. Dan, who was a minister-in-residence in Devereux Hall for 30 years. “The bonding and reflection that took place on those retreats was amazing.”
Fr. Dan oversaw the conversion of the old maintenance building into the Thomas Merton Ministry Center, and the opening of Olean’s first Warming House in 1974, which started as a drop-in center for lonely adults before offering in the early 1980s a meal to hungry, homeless and disadvantaged people.
By then, however, Fr. Dan became “burnt out,” disenchanted with the resistance to change at a time that demanded it. He left in 1974 to co-found, with other friars, an urban house of prayer in east Boston, doing street ministry, dealing with interracial issues and concerns for the poor. He then added to his résumé director of Vocation Ministry for Holy Name Province from 1975-1978.
Greeting guests at the Mountain’s 30th anniversary celebration.
“I learned from so many great friars here, but too many of them were resistant to the changes of the times and having a hard time dealing with it all,” he said. But like Michael Corleone in the “The Godfather III,” the province pulled him back in four years after he left Bonaventure.
Fr. Charlie Finnegan, O.F.M., provincial minister of Holy Name Province, told Fr. Dan he’d like him to return to St. Bonaventure, but “to take with him this time his dreams for doing regional vocation ministry.” He agreed.
“It was different this time,” he said. “Fr. John O’Connor (Class of ’75) had done a lot of excellent ground work to establish what we’re still doing today, and we had a full team of friars and sisters and lay people, maybe eight people, doing this work. We were the only college in the state doing service work to this extent.”
In a life committed to building community, and armed with a promise from his province to grow his regional ministry, Fr. Dan revitalized the dream of a retreat center for contemplation and reflection. A Mountain advisory board made up of campus and civic leaders was formed in 1981. “
We had a wonderful combination of people who were vigorous about the idea,” he said, his voice cracking. “This wasn’t just me. We can’t do these things alone.”
Fr. Dan with Bob McCarthy, ’76.
In 1984, the Mountain’s board of directors purchased 204 acres in rural Allegany County, 20 miles from campus, to establish Mt. Irenaeus. The project culminated with the dedications of Holy Peace Chapel in 1990 and the Mountain’s signature House of Peace in 1995.
Dedicated to contemplation and simple living for people of diverse backgrounds and all faiths, Mt. Irenaeus has added a significant dimension to the Bonaventure experience for students who’ve embraced its mission. “The Mountain is simply an invitation for us to come alive,” Fr. Dan said.
INTRIGUED BY WHAT HE LEARNED in Fr. Allen Weber’s Intellectual Journey class, Tim Shaffer, the Delaware professor, switched his major from journalism to theology over Christmas break his freshman year. He quickly became involved in University Ministries and traveled with Fr. Dan to Merton’s Hermitage near the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky and to California for a series of Mountain on the Road conversations.
“It was fascinating and a chance to get more deeply involved in talking about the things that we care about, the factors that are important in people’s lives, and how we are connected to each other,” said Shaffer, who won the Doino Award for Community Service as a sophomore. “Dan gave me a good sense of how you think about something, how you hear other people and you hear the world around you.”
After completing his master’s in theology at Dayton, Shaffer reconnected with Fr. Dan, who named him the vice president of Ministry and coordinator of Mt. Irenaeus Ministries, Programs, and Activities. “That basically meant I lived at the Mountain (for a year) and I drove the van to bring student groups up to the Mountain,” Shaffer said with a laugh. “But I did lead and organize the programming. It was during this time that I really committed to not only the contemplative dimension, but the social action piece.”
What Shaffer admires most about Fr. Dan is that he “values perspectives that aren’t his.” “He is always about including and not excluding,” said Shaffer, who is working with Fr. Dan on the idea of adding a Center for Civil Discourse at the Mountain. “How do we listen deeply to one another and to the wisdom that others have? He’s always been deeply committed to that.”
Fr. Dan talks with Hamaad Khan, ’20.
HAMAAD KHAN, ’20, SHARES Shaffer’s admiration. He visited the Mountain periodically as a Franciscan Health Care Professions student and a member of Asian Students in Action. His Muslim faith was never a barrier.
“On his first visit to the Mountain, Hamaad looks over at me, and here’s this vibrant, good-looking guy, relates well with people, and I tell him, ‘I think you’re going to be a leader,’” Fr. Dan said. “And he says to me, ‘Father Dan, I want you to be my mentor.’”
Khan quickly came to embrace Fr. Dan’s spirit of inclusion and the ecumenical nature of his trips to the Mountain. “They weren’t religious events, but spiritual ones, human events where we were all just connecting as people from different faiths and cultures,” said Khan, who’s in his third of four years at Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine’s campus in Bradenton, Florida, pursuing a career in physiatry.
Khan’s parents had such respect for Fr. Dan’s desire to learn more about their son’s faith that on Family Weekend of his sophomore year, Khan’s father handed Fr. Dan a paper bag. Inside was a copy of the Quran. “His father said to me, ‘Fr. Dan, I’m so glad my son chose you to be his mentor.’” Fr. Dan choked back tears recounting the moment. He chokes up pretty easily these days, but Shaffer loves that about him.
Tim Shaffer
“Fr. Dan brought God to life for me, and helped my faith move from something I ‘did’ on Sundays to a way of walking through the world. “I have always appreciated Dan’s emotional vulnerability,” Shaffer said. “He’s helped me, and I’m sure a lot of people, be more transparent in expressing myself, in allowing people to be expressive in a way that ‘society’ might diminish. He has such an ability to connect with people in such a disarming way. “Fr. Dan is authentically Fr. Dan.”
Fr. Dan has been part of Karen Pulaski’s life since freshman orientation in the summer of 1980.
“He has a way of really seeing a person and finding a way to authentically invite someone in — all within the first few minutes of meeting them,” said Pulaski, ’84, whose husband died at a young age. “He impacted my faith immediately and over the years I’ve known him, Fr. Dan brought God to life for me, and helped my faith move from something I ‘did’ on Sundays to a way of walking through the world.”
Because of the impact Fr. Dan has had on her life, Pulaski decided to live at Mt. Irenaeus the past year. “He is my mentor and my spiritual adviser,” she said, “but most important, he is my companion, my friend and my brother — in every sense of the word — through the good days and the bad.”
Despite the reservations he harbored about first coming to Bonaventure as a student, and returning to work in Campus Ministries in 1971 and 1978, Fr. Dan, now 80, feels blessed by the relationships he’s developed and nurtured with countless people since 1960.
“It blows me away when they call or text me because I never thought I could make that kind of difference,” he said. “The students have given me so much that I’m barely aware of what I’ve given them. It’s been a gift to be involved in their lives and to see their sincere desire to come alive and experience God in their own way.”
(Tom Missel is chief communications officer at St. Bonaventure.)