Father Michael Joseph O'Sullivan · 1996 Honoree

Father Michael Joseph O’Sullivan came to Capitol Hill on a mission. In fact, he first volunteered to leave his native Ireland to be “a missionary any place in the English-speaking world.” Later, when he volunteered specifically for Washington, D.C., his assignments led him from just outside the Beltway ever closer to the city’s center. In 1970 he came to St. Peter’s, the Hill’s oldest Roman Catholic parish.

St. Peter’s was literally a problem that needed fixing! Its school, rectory, and the church all were in disrepair, with no available funds. To help anchor parish families, Father O'Sullivan first called together a committee to tackle the school. An inventory of church-owned real estate identified surplus properties whose sale helped put the school in tip-top condition.

The wisdom of making the school the highest priority continues to be borne out 26 years later. The families stayed and the babies they asked Father O’Sullivan to baptize are now coming to him as young adults, asking that he perform their marriages.

Success begets success. Both the rectory and the church have been repaired and restored so that today, all of St. Peter’s buildings stand, in Father O'Sullivan’s words, “as visual symbols of the spiritual health of the parish.” He feels that one of his principal roles is to provide the young people who come to the Hill with a “real sense of family within the faith, a place they can call home.” Many of them choose to remain and thus, Capitol Hill gets new vitality, a source or regeneration for the future.

Father O’Sullivan himself derives great pleasure in being at home here. Except on Friday, when he’s on the links, he likes to spend time out and about the Hill, in the “quiet stable community of people who know and care about each other, a walking community in a setting with beautiful parks and lots of sky all around.”