Father Angelo Iacovone was born February 2, 1919, in Woodside, NY on 57th Street, in the house that his father Vito built. Angelo’s mother, Rose DeStefano, a very loving and spiritual woman, served as a catechist to Mother Cabrini, the American saint.
Besides his brothers, Joseph, Saverio, Fred, Francis and Rocco–Angelica was not yet born–Angelo’s aunt, lived with them. Angelo went to St. Sebastian’s Grammar School and then to the Salesian High School in New Rochelle.
During that time, his mother and father would often go across the Hudson River to attend the Passionist Novena in Union City and Angelo would go with them. One day he told his father he wanted to be a Passionist and asked if they could visit their Seminary. So his father took Angelo at the end of his junior year to Dunkirk, NY. They thought he wouldn’t be accepted till after he graduated from high school. Surprisingly, he was accepted right away.
In 1938, Angelo began his Novitiate in Pittsburgh. Afterwards, he went to Boston then Scranton for studies as a Passionist. As a result of an operation, he was unable to play sports, and so instead he would watch his classmates play and consoled himself with long discussions with his professors, like Fr. Simon Jungfleish. Angelo loved learning and became an avid reader.
He was ordained in St. Michael’s Church in Union City, April 29, 1946, and spent the next year studying Sacred Eloquence in Baltimore, Maryland.
As a a priest at St. Paul’s Monastery, Pittsburgh, PA, Angelo worked with Fr. Gregory Flynn, building the novitiate Chapel and redoing the Church. Showing some of the talents he inherited from his father, he worked with architects and builders and enlisted volunteers to create that monastery’s beautiful stained glass windows, brick walls and stations and pews.
In 1954, Angelo was sent to the Passionist missions in Jamaica West Indies, where he served for 25 years. He served in Porous, Williamsfield and Bull Savanna. “He was a good man.” Fr. Richard Leary, a companion from those days, said of him.
In these places, Angelo lived a very poor life. Each month he received $100 from the province to handle his expenses and on this support, along with Mass stipends he received, he built schools and supported teachers, while living simply himself. He told others he wanted to give his full attention to the poor.
Jamaica could be a dangerous place. Once, driving down a windy mountain road, his car hit a truck carrying steel beams. Severely injured, Fr. Angelo and a young companion were taken to the hospital ship, Hope, then visiting Jamaica, where they were treated. The head injury he suffered was probably responsible for a health condition that eventually caused him to be return to the United States from Africa years later.
Sadness came when Fathers Angelo, David Roberts and Howard Chirdon were called back to the province in the late 1970s. Though hurt by the move, Angelo dealt with it the way he thought God wanted him to deal with it. On his return, he went to the Passionist House of Solitude in Bedford to live a quiet life of prayer and remained there more than the usual forty days.
Fortunately, Father Angelo got his second chance to be a missionary in 1979 when we went to Botswana in Africa. Its government then was contemplating a law to allow for abortions. Angelo, along with others, compiled important literature for the legislators and somehow got enough funds to send the video, The Silent Scream by Barnhard Nathanson to every Member of Parliament. The majority in Parliament voted against the pro-abortion law.
After 12 years in Botswana, illness forced Angelo to return to the United States and in 1997 he came to the Passionist Monastery in Jamaica, NY, where for the remainder of his life he cared for the Blessed Sacrament Chapel and found ways to help the overseas missions he always loved.
He was a master recruiter, who knew how to draw others to help the missions. He lived the beatitudes. “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall possess the land.” On the card from the day of his ordination he placed words from the French Novelist Leon Bloy, “One does not enter into paradise, today, tomorrow, or in ten years time, but this day if one is poor and crucified. “
That was Angelo—he was poor and he wanted to serve the poor. We know well, that even though his religious name was Angelo, he was no angel. He was a man, a human being like the rest of us, with greatness along with all the little things that make us small. But as the Letter to the Romans reminds us: “We know that our old self was crucified with him, so that our sinful body might be done away with, that we might no longer be in slavery to sin.” Angelo experienced this mystery in mind and body.
As our reading from the Letter to the Romans says: “Chastised a little, they shall be greatly blessed, because God tried them and found them worthy of himself. As gold in the furnace, he proved them, and as sacrificial offerings he took them to himself.” His crucifixion changed Angelo into pure gold.
Angelo was Angelo, from beginning to end. To take care of the poor, he took up the cross, and got us to do it too, however reluctantly or joyfully. In this Eucharist, we celebrate his life in union with Jesus Christ.
- Fr. Jerome Bracken, C.P.
Donations can be made in Fr. Angelo Iacovone’s memory to the Passionist Retirement Fund.
Passionist Missionaries Inc.
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