PORTLAND, Ore. — Mary Jo Tully, the first laywoman to become chancellor of a U.S. Catholic diocese, has stepped down from the post she held for 27 years at the Archdiocese of Portland.
Tully — known for wit, candor and a pebbly Midwestern voice— taught, wrote and administered her way to unsought renown in Oregon. Daughter of a Chicago policeman, she charmed thousands of listeners and readers, but often accepted the role of tough cop on behalf of the four Portland archbishops she served.
“What I have done, I have always done out of love for the church,” Tully told friends at a farewell dinner in Portland July 29.
She has moved to be near family north of Austin, Texas, and said she hopes to be of service to the church there.
“The church is my family,” Tully said during an Aug. 2 retirement luncheon. “People always ask me why I didn’t become a nun. Well, it’s because they wouldn’t let me be superior,” she joked, getting a big laugh from colleagues.
She was not looking to become a chancellor. Invited and hired by then-Archbishop William J. Levada to take the job in Portland, Tully had previously served as director of religious education in the Archdiocese of Chicago. In the 1960s, she had gone to march with civil rights activists in the South, over the spirited objections of her father.
She wrote books on catechesis, Scripture and the Stations of the Cross and wrote a pithy regular column on Sunday Scriptures in the Catholic Sentinel, Portland’s archdiocesan newspaper, and donated her journalism pay to other causes.
At Portland’s pastoral center, Tully for decades took the toughest crank calls. Colleagues say she was firm, but always loving and clear.
“As one of the four archbishops who have had the privilege of working with Mary Jo, I can only express my extreme gratitude for her service to the church here in western Oregon,” said Archbishop Alexander K. Sample, who has headed the archdiocese since 2013. “She has been a good and faithful servant of the Lord.”
Retired Portland Archbishop John G. Vlazny, who headed the archdiocese from 1997 to 2013, said she was like a godmother for international religious communities who sent members from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Vietnamese Catholics treated her almost like royalty. Archbishop Vlazny once referred to Tully as “the ombudsperson, to be sure, in the life of the archdiocese.”
— By Ed Langlois and Kristen Hannum Langlois is managing editor and Hannum is a staff writer at the Catholic Sentinel, newspaper of the Archdiocese of Portland.
