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An auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles was fatally shot at his residence on Saturday afternoon, the police stated.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Division deputies responding to an emergency medical name discovered the Roman Catholic bishop, David O’Connell, at his residence with a gunshot wound round 1 p.m., the division stated.
He was pronounced useless on the scene, the authorities stated. The circumstances resulting in the capturing and the exact nature of the medical name weren’t instantly clear.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Workplace stated that it was investigating Bishop O’Connell’s dying as a homicide. Bishop O’Connell, 69, lived in Hacienda Heights, a suburban group within the San Gabriel Valley.
The Los Angeles County Coroner’s Workplace couldn’t instantly be reached for touch upon Sunday.
In an announcement, José H. Gomez, the archbishop of Los Angeles, described Bishop O’Connell as a “peacemaker with a coronary heart for the poor and the immigrant.”
Bishop O’Connell, who had served Los Angeles for 45 years, “had a ardour for constructing a group the place the sanctity and dignity of each human life was honored and guarded,” Archbishop Gomez stated.
Bishop O’Connell, who was born in County Cork, Eire, on July 16, 1953, was appointed an auxiliary bishop in 2015. He was one in every of 5 auxiliary bishops supporting Archbishop Gomez, in response to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
The bishop studied for the priesthood at All Hallows Faculty in Dublin and was ordained in 1979, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles stated. He had beforehand served as a pastor at a number of parishes in Los Angeles, together with St. Michael’s and St. Frances X. Cabrini.
Bishop Robert Barron, a former auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles who now serves in Minnesota, stated he first met Bishop O’Connell in September 2015, once they have been each appointed on the identical day as bishops.
Bishop O’Connell cared deeply for victims of social and racial injustice and spent most of his priesthood in South Central Los Angeles, Bishop Barron stated.
He had a present for telling tales and in addition had a “pleasant, playful humorousness,” Bishop Barron stated, including that Bishop O’Connell had even as soon as carried out at a comedy membership’s open mic evening.
He was “the form of person who when he walked within the room, everybody felt higher,” Bishop Barron stated. “He simply lifted everyone up.”
The US Convention of Catholic Bishops stated in a statement that “Bishop O’Connell was an energetic member of our Convention and a champion for the poor” who had beforehand led its anti-poverty initiative.
A month after changing into a bishop, Bishop O’Connell stated in a July 2015 interview with The Angelus, the publication of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, that being a pastor in South Central Los Angeles had been “the good pleasure of my life.”
“It’s been an incredible privilege, an incredible blessing to be given these parishes all these years, to be pastor all these years,” he stated. “The individuals have touched my coronary heart the best way they’re honest.”
Ruth Graham contributed reporting.
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