New biography explores life and LGBTQ+ activism of former University of Portland president

Father Tom Oddo served as president of the University of Portland from 1982 until his death in a car crash in 1989. During his presidency, he helped UP transition to coed housing, oversaw construction of the Chiles Center and reversed the university’s declining enrollment.

Before coming to Portland, Oddo was a key member of the gay rights movement in Boston, advocating for the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ Catholics in the church. From 1973 to 1977, Oddo served as the first secretary of DignityUSA, a nationwide organization that supports LGBTQ+ Catholics.

Portland author Tyler Bieber explores Oddo’s life in the new biography “Against the Current: Father Tom Oddo and the New American Catholic.” Bieber joins us to talk about Oddo’s activism, his time at UP and the legacy he left.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Geoff Norcross: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Geoff Norcross. In 1982, the University of Portland was looking for a new president. There were five finalists, and one stood out – a handsome and intense 37-year-old priest named Thomas Oddo. A search committee member told an author at the time, “Tom came with those piercing dark eyes, that charisma, had something special that we all sensed, that kind of love that loves unconditionally.”

Father Tom got the job and became the 17th president of the Catholic University in North Portland. He was the youngest person to hold that job. He was also a gay man who became a leader of the gay rights movement and a fierce advocate for acceptance in the church.

Father Tom’s story is told in a new biography called “Against the Current: Father Tom Oddo and the New American Catholic.” Tyler Bieber is the author, and he joins us now. Tyler, welcome to Think Out Loud.

Tyler Bieber: Thank you so much for having me.

Norcross: I’m surprised I hadn’t heard his story before. What drew you to it?

Bieber: So, it was that same feeling of, this is a great story and I’ve never heard it before. I was researching for another project and it was a book that ended up not being published about other university presidents in the Pacific Northwest, looking at their leadership styles, looking at university history. And one of the universities that I researched as part of this project was the University of Portland, where I got my graduate degree in higher education and student affairs. And I was reading a chapter of university history about the 1980s at UP and the chapter is largely about Father Tom’s tenure in that role, because he was president from 1982 to 1989.

It talked largely about his contributions to keeping the university Catholic, as well as the developments that he did physically on the campus with a lot of building projects, really ingratiating himself with students. And then there was a minor part that talked about his ministry from prior to his presidency to LGBTQ people and impoverished people on the East Coast. And that was very intriguing to me, coming from a person that would eventually become a Catholic university president, that had this background.

The more I tried to look into it, the more I tried to research, I was not getting very far in trying to find some established resources. And I decided, after a very short period of time, this is a story worth writing about and worth telling in a more formal setting, but I didn’t want to wait for anyone to write the book. [Laughter] It was a question of, do I wait for someone to write the book or is the book never gonna get written? And I waffled over about a weekend of whether or not to take this on as a new project, and here we are three years later.

Norcross: Had you heard about Father Tom when you were in graduate school at UP?

Bieber: That’s the thing. I was taking classes in the building next to his Memorial Plaza and I had never seen his name before. It did not have any resonance with me at all prior to researching this book.

Norcross: You refer to him as Tom throughout the book.

Bieber: That’s right.

Norcross: Rather than Father Oddo or just Oddo like a journalist might. Why do you do that?

Bieber: That would have been how he would have wanted it to be. Every time I talked to somebody about Tom, it was never Father Tom or Father Oddo. It was always just Tom.

Norcross: You obviously haven’t met him.

Bieber: No, I have not. I’ve actually been to his grave at Holy Cross Cemetery at the University of Notre Dame, but unfortunately was never able to meet him. No.

Norcross: Who did you try to talk to, to get a sense of who he is?

Bieber: A variety of people: several people at the University of Portland, several priests that worked with him in administrative capacities or were just co-workers at that time, as well as his cousin Ed, who was sort of a surrogate brother in New York. I talked with Father Monk Malloy, president of Notre Dame, who was also a seminary friend of Tom’s.

And then, as a result of this book, I’ve talked with several people who have come out to different events saying, “I have a Tom Oddo story.” And it’s a lot of people that I probably would not have found on the first round of researching, but it’s created this great piece of conversation with people learning all of these different things I would have never expected to learn about this subject.

Norcross: What records or what archives did you look at while researching the book?

Bieber: The primary archive that I used was the University of Portland’s Clark Library Digital Archive. It’s a fantastic archive because it’s completely free. They have fully imaged editions of The Beacon from several years…

Norcross: The student newspaper?

Bieber: That’s right. And one of the most frequently cited single sources in the book was “The Beacon,” the student newspaper. They had some excellent student journalists at that time, really award-winning student journalists, working for The Beacon. So really excellent reporting to kind of pull from. But there were also archives that I pulled from the University of Portland’s own archive of documents. They had boxes of documents that were Tom Oddo’s presidential papers that I got some access to. Other newspaper archives as well, but those were the two primary sources in terms of archival material.

Norcross: You had heard the name, but you didn’t really know the man. I’m wondering what kind of pictures started emerging as you were looking through those documents and talking to those people?

Bieber: The image that kind of came about from my research was a very capable leader, a very accomplished communicator, a really solid person, and I think somebody that was a very genuinely caring priest, somebody that really brought his fullness and his full character into his work, both as a priest and as a university leader. And somebody that I really wanted to know more about. I mean, he really made people interested in learning more about him, meeting him and getting to know him in life. Even in death, in researching him, I wanted to know more.

Norcross: Yeah, his charisma just kind of jumped off the page, didn’t it?

Bieber: It really does, yeah.

Norcross: What did you learn about his early years? What was he like growing up?

Bieber: So growing up, he was a very social kid. He was raised Catholic from a very young age. He wanted to be a priest from a very young age, too. It was never really a question of, is Tom going to do anything else other than the priesthood? He always wanted to be a priest. But in that way, he’s kind of unique because when he was in school, he wanted to, as his cousin Ed said, live the life of a non-priest. So that way, when he became ordained, he could understand and empathize with people that he ministered to, as opposed to just feeling like he’s completely separated from the traditional American teenage life.

When he’s in New York, in primary and secondary school, he is in just about as many clubs or as many outlets in school as he can possibly be. He’s an announcer, he’s a swimmer, he is an actor, he is a photographer for the yearbook. He’s doing everything he possibly can to experience the American high school life at that time. And it’s all in service of the future parishioners that he would work with.

Norcross: He grew up Catholic, as you mentioned, but what actually drew him to the priesthood?

Bieber: I think it was growing up in the Holy Cross Congregation in Holy Cross educational institutions.

Norcross: What is that Holy Cross Institution?

Bieber: It’s an institution of the Congregation of Holy Cross, which is a congregation within the Catholic Church. A primary focus of the congregation is the education of the world – essentially educating people and bringing them closer to the Catholic Church. And as he was growing up, I feel like Tom was really inspired by the Catholic brothers that he worked around or that he learned around. And it was seeing how they operated, seeing the kind of work that they were doing that really inspired him to think, I could also be one of these men.

Norcross: What did Tom’s early writings tell us about his religious philosophy as it was coming into the world?

Bieber: As he is growing up, he eventually goes to University of Notre Dame for his undergraduate years. And in 1965, he writes notes for a speech at Sacred Heart Church. This is right when he’s about to graduate from his undergraduate program. And he’s writing about the importance of Mother Mary to the church, how she is a human figure in the church, how she is a director of the church and how she preaches love of all people. And these are real solid tenets of Tom’s theology early on in a very formative time in his life that I think stretched to the end of his life, where he believes there’s a human element to the church. There is a central focus on love or there needs to be a central focus on love, and that there also needs to be this kind of highlighting of Mother Mary’s importance to the Catholic story.

Those things largely remain unchanged throughout his time as a priest and he’s writing this at the end of his undergraduate year.

Norcross: It’s interesting, at Notre Dame, he formed this philosophy and it stayed with him, pretty much unchanged, all his life?

Bieber: The large parts of it did not change. I would say the only thing that was added to it was, the year after he graduates from Notre Dame, he is in what’s called a novitiate, which is a year of very kind of focused, contemplative study. And it’s right around this time when he is forced to kind of leave the social world that he is so accustomed to and really drill down on his faith. In that year, I think that’s when he starts to realize there’s not only this importance of being active as a priest, but you also have to be contemplative as a priest as well.

And later in life, he writes very fondly about both Fathers Daniel Berrigan and Thomas Merton. Daniel Berrigan’s a very activist priest who was, at one point, wanted by the FBI for burning draft cards. [Laughter] But Father Thomas Merton is this very monastic, kind of inward-looking, contemplative figure that writes a ton of books in the 1960s about Catholic life. So very different styles of priests, but it’s around this time when I think he starts to appreciate how those styles can complement one another.

Norcross: And it sounds like he’s somewhere in between the two of them.

Bieber: I think he represents something between the two, absolutely.

Norcross: Yeah. What was the Catholic Church going through as an institution when Tom was entering the priesthood?

Bieber: So from 1962 to 1965, the Second Vatican Council was happening in Rome. This is the second, obviously, type of council of its kind in the Vatican. And it’s at a time when priests from all over the world are starting to question whether or not the traditional Catholic liturgy – how the Catholic Church represents itself – can continue, basically into the next century. And the decisions that are made at the Second Vatican Council essentially mean that the church is going to be less mystical. There are going to be more services, resources, things that are done that more reflect the communities that they’re done in. So priests will now face their congregants. They will recite the mass in dialect that is recognizable to the parishioners, not just in Latin, a variety of different changes that are mostly liberalizing, overall in the church. That created an intense liberalizing effect, I think, in the American church that also spawned a bit of a backlash.

Norcross: There was a schism for sure. I mean, how did Tom receive those changes? Did he embrace them?

Bieber: I think he embraced them quite a bit. He was raised very much in the Second Vatican tradition of we need to open the doors of the church and let new life into the church. He believed that the Second Vatican Council was the start of this great push towards a more accepting church, specifically for gay Catholics, eventually becomes the message. But I think that it’s kind of also a double-edged sword because eventually the backlash against the Second Vatican Council, I think, kind of also dashed that momentum that started to build in the 1970s.

Norcross: It’s interesting, whenever we are faced with this question of a changing Catholic Church, there’s a debate that always crops up. And there are some who will say that the church needs to change with the times. But conservative members will say, does it? Does it really? A lot of people are drawn to this church because it does not ride social waves. It does not ride social currents and it is like a bulwark for people. And I’m wondering how Tom navigated that tension?

Bieber: He, I think, saw the changes of Vatican II not as something that changed the church in any sort of way, but rather renewed the church in a very specific kind of way. He never saw the idea of gay rights in a Catholic context being something new or revolutionary. In fact, I think in contrast, he thought that the church was ready to kind of open its doors, was ready for this change and that the Second Vatican Council was not fundamentally changing the theology of the church. He believed that being more accepting towards gay Catholics, as he eventually was preaching in the 1970s, was very much in line with the traditional church and the traditional theology. It’s just that we were taking a new look and a new approach through the Second Vatican Council.

Norcross: Tyler, when did he know he was gay?

Bieber: I actually don’t know when he specifically knew that he was gay. There is at least one instance where he is asked by a journalist, “are you an active homosexual?” And he says, “no,” and this is around the late ‘70s. But he starts talking about gay rights from the pulpit and as a major issue, as a priest in the early 1970s. So I have to assume that he must have known as he’s starting this activism work, because it feels as though he’s doing this work, there is a special kind of passion that I think comes from having a personal connection to the fight. So while I don’t know exactly when he knew, I can kind of guess that it came into focus in those early 1970s.

Norcross: When did he come out?

Bieber: He never was out, actually, during his life. This is something that I’ve asked people who knew him at the time and it’s something that I hear, something to the effect of, “we knew that Tom was gay, but we never asked.” This was something that was kind of known among those who needed to know, but it was never questioned. And that, I think, reflects a trend that we really don’t see much of anymore, but that was very common at that time, especially among the priest class.

Norcross: Well then, how do we know?

Bieber: We know because multiple people have attested both to his sexuality from how he presented – comments that he would make offhand – but also to a relationship that he had with another man for several years, both in the 1970s and into the early 1980s.

Norcross: Was he partnered in Portland?

Bieber: He was partnered originally in Boston and then, as I understand it, he and his partner did move to Portland for at least a few years. And this would have been at the start of his presidency at UP.

Norcross: OK. Do you know when his focus for activism specifically turned to the LGBTQ+ community?

Bieber: It was right around 1972 and 1973, and this was right around the inception of Dignity Boston, which he co-founded with Paul Diederich, who was a lay Catholic, who was also gay. And as I understand it, Tom and Paul were in this romantic relationship for several years. So these two co-founders of Dignity Boston were not only professional partners, they were also romantic partners for a time. They also were eventually the president and national secretary of the first national board of Dignity USA. So I think their relationship is incredibly important to highlight.

Norcross: He was the first secretary of Dignity USA, and that’s important. What was his role in growing that organization into a national one?

Bieber: So in 1973, when the organization was founded, there are these disparate chapters that are spread out across the country. It’s a handful of delegates that get together and elect this board. Within the first couple of years, Tom is the primary communicator for the group, so he’s responsible for membership drives, for communications through newsletters, through organizing – a lot of different pieces with that early organization. By the mid ‘70s, you’re seeing chapters open in over 20 states of the country. You’re seeing an international partnership with a group of similar nature in Australia and you’re seeing membership rise over 15,000 dues-paying members. So it’s a very quick trajectory that this small group is on, and it’s largely thanks to Tom’s organizing efforts and the efforts of that first board.

Norcross: How is Tom’s work with Dignity received by the church?

Bieber: Largely supportive in a lot of places, although I have to imagine that there was also some tepid support in other places. Some bishops were very excited by the prospect that there was this group pushing acceptance, pushing a more liberalizing church, and there were some that were very not interested in that approach. And there were instances where Tom was corrected by, for example, the Archdiocese of Boston for effectively out of turn and saying something that the cardinal at that time did not agree with. So it was not without some opposition and some pushback from the bishops and from the people in charge of the American church.

But I have to say, around that time, when Tom is building this partnership with the group in Australia, there’s a paper in Sydney that talks about how priests in Australia have to basically be cloaked through all of their operations, through all of their activities. They cannot be open about working with gay people. And it says something along the lines of, that’s not the case in the United States and mentions Tom by name in newsprint. So it shows, even on an international scale, how unique his work was that he was being singled out in a place that said, we don’t talk about this.

Norcross: In fact, in his communications, he made the statement, “God makes gay people as they are and they are fully welcome in the church.” Can you give me a sense of how controversial a statement it was at that time?

Bieber: It’s very controversial. We take it for granted now the idea that God could make someone gay intentionally or that you’re born that way, as people say. But at this time, people believed not only are gay people disordered, but that it is an affront to say that they are created that way by God; that there is no possible way that a creator could create them to be that way; that people would be socially ostracized; that it would be professional suicide effectively, to be open about your sexuality. So I think it’s really important to highlight just how openly he was talking about these issues, maybe not as an open gay person himself, but as a priest at that time.

Norcross: As we mentioned, he took the job as the president of the University of Portland in 1982. Why did he want that job?

Bieber: I think he wanted the job because he was asked by Father Richard Warner at that time, please apply. We need someone new and I think you’re ready for it.

Norcross: This is an influential person.

Bieber: This is a very influential…

Norcross: As a way of making people do what he wants them to do?

Bieber: Right. So this is a person very influential in the Holy Cross circles at this time. Basically, you get a call from Father Warner and he changes your life. So Tom, I feel, was obligated to say, sure, I’ll apply for it. And I think as a result of him wanting to serve the church, wanting to serve students as best he could in wherever he was located, he eventually did take the job on those premises, not because he wanted to be a president, but because he felt he was doing something important and he was the right person to do it.

Norcross: And what was going on at the university at the time? What were they looking for in a new president?

Bieber: They were looking for something very different from what the university was used to, and it was because of declining enrollment, rising tuition, questions about the Catholicity and the Catholic character of the university, whether or not that was still something that could be sustainable through the 1980s. They wanted somebody that was new, that was young, that could relate to students, but that would not give up effectively that Catholic character. And I think Tom fit all of those things perfectly.

Norcross: You mentioned at the beginning that he was committed to keeping the University of Portland Catholic. Do you mean that literally, like not giving up its affiliation, or just making sure the culture is a certain way?

Bieber: More the former rather than the latter. He was interested in things that were new to a Catholic university as he was never opposed, for example, to coed housing. And that was something that originated during his tenure, something that had never happened at UP before. But there were conversations about whether or not UP could become a more ecumenical university where there would be multiple denominations represented. And whether or not the university should select a lay president. And both of those conversations at that time, for some people, were unthinkable.

So the selection of Tom, I think, felt like a natural choice to both keep the university on that track, but then also to kind of reflect the changing of the times. Because again, this is at a time of great change, both in the church as well as in the country.

Norcross: He was there for seven years. What kind of lasting impact did he have?

Bieber: Several. A building impact for sure – Chiles Center, the Chapel of Christ the Teacher, multiple campus renovations, the Tennis and Racket Center – and several other kinds of more social innovations that still exist at the university today. Those are all thanks to Tom’s leadership.

At the same time, as I mentioned, things were changing at the university that had never happened before. The coed housing issue was solved during his presidency, where for over a decade, students have wanted coed housing established on campus. The university wouldn’t allow it. Finally, in 1987, Tom says, OK, we can do this, and within 18 months, there’s a second dorm being designated coed.

At the same time, in 1988, the AFROTC unit is under threat essentially from budget cuts by the Department of Defense. Tom was a huge cheerleader in getting that funding continued and effectively keeping that ROTC unit open – and it’s still open today. So there are a lot of things that Tom left behind after his presidency that are still there on the campus.

One final thing I would say is just the kind of personality he brought, the kind of leadership that he brought. It was a student-first, people-centric kind of leadership that was new to the campus. I think that every president since has learned from his example and how to effectively work with students, engage with different campus constituencies, and deliver results for everyone and not just a specific set of people that are part of the university community. I think Tom also contributed to that, too.

Norcross: He died tragically in 1989 in a car crash. He was only 45. How did his sudden death affect the community?

Bieber: Incredibly so. There were over 900 people that met his hearse at the curb when his body was returned to campus. Over 3,000 people attended his memorial service, at a time when the university enrollment was only 2,400. So it gives you some sense of the outsized impact that this death had, not only for people that were in the campus community, but also the local community within the city itself. Tom was a really well-known person, really well-liked person, on a lot of boards, that really met a lot of people during his tenure, such that there were remembrances for months, even years after his death – both in print and in person – just trying to memorialize him and trying to really capture his legacy.

So, I think that it was an incredibly impactful moment in the university history and it was something that the university dealt with for the entire academic year, through 1989 and 1990.

Norcross: And how has researching him and telling his story affected you?

Bieber: I’ve gotten a sense of this history of someone that was a public figure that was never known before and a bigger appreciation for the written history that we can find. So much of this stuff that I found in my research was stuff that I had to find deep in an archive that had not been found previously. And some of it was based off of conversations with people that, if I had not had them during this research, they would have never happened. So I think it was also an appreciation for doing this work while we still can, because it was such an important story to people then. It’s still an important story now. It’s a really timeless story that I think people need to know about.

Norcross: Tyler Bieber, it was a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for the book and thanks for coming on Think Out Loud.

Bieber: Thank you so much.

Norcross: Tyler Bieber is the author of the new book about Father Thomas Oddo. It’s called “Against the Current: Father Tom Oddo and the New American Catholic.”

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