Father Fred Barr, C.S.C.

The gentle Father Fred Barr, C.S.C., passed away at Holy Cross House in Notre Dame, Ind., on October 10 at age 85. Educated in a one-room school in Iowa, he served in both the Third Infantry and the Army Air Corps during the Second World War. Ordained in 1954, he arrived on The Bluff ten years later to teach theology, direct the campus ministry office, and serve as pastoral resident in Kenna and Shipstad Halls. Gifts in memory of Father Barr may be directed to the University’s Rev. Fred Barr, C.S.C., Scholarship Fund or directed to scholarships benefitting the University programs he served with such grace and cheer: the theology department, the campus ministry office, and the residence life office. The sweet-natured Fred Barr is remembered here by his Holy Cross confrere Fr. David Sherrer, C.S.C.

Behind Fred Barr’s mildly naïve appearance there was both compassion and common sense. His eyes seemed to open in a wide gaze that a stranger might take for amazement but which friends were inclined to interpret as attentive and discerning interest. Fred’s instinctively polite deference to a companion’s confident assertions masked his own rich reservoir of information and ideas. He hungrily devoured not only all the news The New York Times deemed fit to print every day but a veritable daily library of papers, journals, and magazines. Once, on a three-day visit to the Oregon coast, after he had finished two sizable volumes he had brought with him I noticed him searching the shelves of the beach house for additional reading material. He selected a slender volume entitled The World’s Best Loved Poems, which he also completed before the afternoon was over. “I think I read all of these in high school,” he said, pausing to reach back in his memory nearly seventy years.

He was a man of unfailingly positive concern and courageous hope, even for his beloved Chicago Cubs, who never did win the title he so wished to see. He was a man of remarkably broad travels, responding cheerfully to invitations not only to visit Tacoma and Palos Verdes, or an old army buddy in Denver, but a rancher in the upper reaches of the Canadian Province of Alberta, or connections in Florida. His attendance was commanded by alumni on their cruises along the Alaskan inland waterway, through the Caribbean, and across the Mediterranean. His friends in Austria insisted that he come back to see them, and he was often the cause of others’ travel: many of the alumni who return annually to the University for reunions found that taking Fred’s hand was the most reassuring contact in their efforts to touch again the experience of their own youth, and were radiant when Fred remembered them, as he nearly always did.

The beginnings of his own travels, back in Peoria, took on almost mythic characteristics even for Fred himself. All his friends know the keywords if not the actual experiences: a managing career in the F. W. Woolworth Company interrupted by the military draft in the months just before Pearl Harbor; nights in the woods outside Fort Lewis as the troops hid from a possible Japanese invasion or bombardment; long months training gunners in Arizona; his mysterious but transforming duties as a chaplain’s assistant; finally demobilization and what must have seemed like a final journey, as a twenty-six-year-old veteran, to enter the seminary and a religious community at Notre Dame, where he was surrounded by boys still in their teens.

It seems impossible to account adequately Fred’s years at the University as teacher and campus minister. He served formally in those roles only from 1964 to 1977, yet from those years, along with the two terms he served as director of the Salzburg Program, came the many friendships and connections between the University and its alumni. And Fred served many other roles: as Catholic chaplain at Oregon College of Education, as priest at St. Elizabeth’s Parish in Portland and at St. Victor’s in Hollywood, and then again, for many years, as counselor-at-large on The Bluff, smiling as he delivered the Willamette Week to friends.

Now his spirit travels to the Light; and traveling too are sweet memories of this kind man in the thoughts and affections of thousands of people who knew Fred. May he rest in peace. -- Rev. David Sherrer, C.S.C.

Make a gift to the Rev. Fred Barr, C.S.C. Scholarship Fund and help students savor an education on The Bluff graced by the Holy Cross priests who are Fr. Barr’s successors as teachers, counselors, and confidants.

—Photo by Laszlo Bencze