By Timothy J. Killeen
Father Thomas Killeen, O.M.I., 94, a Missionary Oblate of Mary Immaculate for 73 years, an Arctic missionary, a decorated Army chaplain, and for 16 years the parish priest of a remote Alaskan fishing community, died on Sept. 5, 2026, at the Dammert Care Center at the National Shrine of Our Lady of the Snows in Belleville, Illinois.
He was born on July 27, 1932, in Kansas City, Missouri, the last child of Richard E. and Lena (Yates) Killeen, and grew up in nearby Independence. His mother had lost many pregnancies before and between her three children, and when Tommy once asked her what would have happened had they all lived, she looked at him with great love and said, “Tommy, you wouldn’t be here.” Boyhood summers were spent on the farm of his uncle, Albert Yates, at hard physical labor: baling hay, cleaning stables, and whatever else the season demanded.
His calling arrived in the eighth grade, when a visiting Missionary Oblate spoke to his class about serving in the Arctic. As he recalled throughout his life, “Just like that I forgot the girl and told my mom I was going to be a priest.” At 18 he entered the Oblate seminary in Carthage, Missouri; he made his first vows in 1953 and was ordained to the priesthood on Aug. 9, 1958.
The Greenland years and the mission at Itilleq
Shortly after his ordination, Father Tom was granted his lifelong dream: establishing a Catholic mission in the frozen wilds of Greenland. The island was overwhelmingly Lutheran, had no roads linking its settlements, and was home to a tiny, widely scattered Catholic population. To prepare, he lived in Denmark for a year and became fluent in Danish before setting foot in the Far North.
During his first tour (1961–1966), Father Tom lived in Itilleq, a small island settlement two kilometers north of the Arctic Circle on the Davis Strait. Immersion in the Arctic meant learning Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) and ministering to a scattered congregation of just eight Catholic families scattered along a vast coastline. Three or four times a year he set out into open Arctic waters in a small fishing boat, threading rough seas, freezing fog, and drifting ice to bring the sacraments to his isolated flock. His rounds also took him far to the north to serve the personnel of the U.S. Air Force base at Thule (now Pituffik Space Base).
In that first sojourn he learned to follow the lead of the Greenlanders: he lived as they lived and ate what they ate. He would tell of the village bathroom arrangements, which were also the beach, and of the prudent custom of first gathering a pile of rocks to keep the dogs, of which there were dozens, at bay while one attended to business. He ate like the Natives too, including a trial of whale blubber. After a few bites he mentioned to his guide and hunting partner that he was beginning to feel sick. “Yep,” the man said. “That’s when I stop eating it too.”
In the field, Father Tom joined geological expeditions that were mapping the island’s mineral resources and drilling core samples through the ice sheet to read Greenland’s deep past. He respected scientists for their work and relished the company of their camps, where he traded lively theological arguments with researchers who leaned agnostic. Armed with humor, intellect, and warmth, he debated the mysteries of faith and reason without ever losing the respect of his sparring partners.
Frustrated by how long it took to work the coast by water, Father Tom earned his pilot’s license and took delivery of a single-engine, two-seat Piper Cub fresh from the factory in Wichita, Kansas. He flew the light aircraft all the way to Greenland, including a harrowing 500-mile leg across the open water of the Labrador Sea. As a bush pilot he accumulated a legendary store of tales. In one favorite, he flew nose-first into katabatic winds rushing off the ice cap so fiercely that the plane hung motionless over an ice-covered fjord; the ground crew simply walked out onto the strip, tied the Piper Cub down, and signaled him to shut off the engine.
Volatile weather and the complete absence of radar made Arctic flying hazardous, and he survived two crash landings during that first tour. “Unfortunately, I crashed that plane,” he liked to say. “Twice.” He concluded that he was a much better Missionary Oblate than he was a pilot. The second crash also ended his first Greenland tour; as he told it, he cracked up the plane, lost his job, and was informed by his provincial that he would make a good Army chaplain.
Father Tom returned to Greenland for a second tour (1973–1980) because the Oblates needed him. He spoke the language, he understood the people. He was based in Godthåb (now Nuuk), where he ran a residence for teenagers and young adults, offering shelter, guidance, and pastoral care to Indigenous Greenlanders caught in the strains of rapid modernization. Across his two tours he devoted fourteen years of his life to ministry in Greenland.
Military service and support for young families
Commissioned a chaplain in 1966, Father Tom spent a year at Fort Gordon, Georgia, with draftees arriving for basic training; he was 34, they were 19, and they were, he said, all scared they were going to die. His first tour of duty was in Vietnam, which he considered to be the high point of his life. He spent six months at a surgical hospital at the edge of the fighting, where the wounded arrived within 20 minutes of being hit and where the nurses and corpsmen saved lives. Father Tom admired the medical personnel and always said they never got the recognition they deserved. He then joined an armored cavalry squadron, a noisy outfit of tanks and tracked vehicles that was always moving and always being ambushed. He rode the tracks from unit to unit, said Mass wherever they stopped, and slept on the ground in the open. Tents were a luxury. He came through two or three firefights unwounded and a rocket-propelled grenade that woke him by landing five yards away.
At the fire support bases the bunker Masses became a routine. On one visit the captain, under bombardment, offered his own bunker, and Father Tom said Mass for eight men squatting knee to knee around an altar on the dirt floor, then for eight more, then eight more. The caution was warranted: at another base, minutes after Mass in the open had ended and the men dispersed, someone shouted “Incoming!” and he dove into a bunker with the enemy zeroed in on the spot where they had all been standing. For his bravery and pastoral care under fire, he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal with two oak leaf clusters.
After Vietnam, Chaplain Killeen served the first of two tours in Korea, the first on the Demilitarized Zone, saying Mass in each of the twelve guard posts inside the zone and driven between them at high speed with a gun jeep ahead and a gun jeep behind.
After his second Greenland assignment, he rejoined the Army in 1980 for a second military career. He claimed to be the oldest captain in the United States Army, but he never took rank very seriously: “I was never a captain or a major. I was a simple priest. That’s all they wanted and that’s all they got.” His ministry in those years often centered on young service members and their families, and, recognizing the particular pressures on young military couples raising children far from home, he became a dedicated pastor, counselor, and steady support for military households at Fort Rucker, Alabama; Fort Greely, Alaska; Fort Carson, Colorado, with the 4th Infantry Division; the 3rd and 8th Infantry Divisions in Germany, including Baumholder; a second tour in Korea; Arkansas; Washington; and a six-month course at the Army chaplain school in New Jersey that, as he put it, taught him what he had been doing all along.
Someone in Army personnel clearly had a sense of humor: his final posting placed Chaplain Killeen at Fort Hood, next door to the city of Killeen, Texas, a coincidence that brought his family no end of chuckles. He retired there in 1993 with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, after 20 years in uniform.
Family, travel, and life on the road
Father Tom almost never celebrated Christmas or Easter with his extended family. Early in his career it was a matter of distance; he was thousands of miles away in Greenland, Vietnam, or Korea. Later, even when stationed in the States, he treated the major holidays as working days, bound by duty to celebrate Mass for his parishioners or his troops. Family visits happened instead on his own clock, whenever he was free, or relatives traveled to wherever his assignments took him: Germany, Colorado, or Alaska, where he lived twice, first in uniform and decades later as a parish priest. Germany was the favorite venue of his sister Shirley and his brother John and John’s wife Jane, who were not inclined to camp out or hike across a mountain pass. They were fond of skiing, however, which became a family tradition thanks in part to Uncle Tom’s habit of leading by example.
Most people know him as Father Tom, but within the extended Killeen family he was Uncle Tom, an adventurer who introduced the younger generations to the great outdoors. In the summer of 1966, on his way into active military service, he picked up his fourteen year old nephew, Tim, drove to the Maroon Bells outside Aspen, led him over a high pass in the rain, fed him peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and had him sleep under the open stars, a tent being, in Uncle Tom’s view, a luxury. In 1982, while transferring from Germany to a posting in Alaska, he invited Tim and Susan Davis, the mother of Tim’s children, to join him on an epic road trip from Kansas to Alaska over the ALCAN Highway. During his posting in Colorado, he climbed every one of the state’s fifty-odd peaks above 14,000 feet, the “Fourteeners.”
Military retirement brought new opportunities to reconnect with the Killeen family. From 1994 to 2002 he served as pastor of two parishes in and around Leadville, Colorado, the highest incorporated city in the nation. Uncle Tom opened the rectory to a steady stream of visitors. An avid downhill and cross-country skier as well as a hiker, he was joined most often by his niece Janet and her daughters, Kisa and Jane. His brother John and sister-in-law Jane drove up from Dodge City, and Sara Jane, Patty, and Tim all took advantage of the chance to ski on an economy budget. They stayed at the rectory and made good use of Father Tom’s stock of lift passes, given to the “skiing priest” by parishioners who worked at the surrounding resorts.
Those game enough to join him on a hike or a cross-country ski trek soon learned that Uncle Tom was prone to outrageous risk. He pushed himself, and his erstwhile acolytes, to the brink of catastrophe with alarming regularity, whether by underestimating the distance, overestimating their ability to keep up with him, or simply getting lost. Food was a secondary concern. He regarded it as weight and he preferred to travel light. He was tough, and he assumed his nieces and nephews would keep up – and they did. The same casual attitude toward food prevailed at the rectory, where visitors quickly learned to commandeer “the pot,” which shuttled between the stove and the refrigerator, replenished by daily additions of whatever was on hand. Father Tom was a devout believer in miracles, a faith reinforced by the fact that he survived his own cooking.
Leadville, Cordova, and a respect for immigrant communities
Leadville also added a new dimension to his ministry. The town was a bedroom community for blue-collar workers commuting to the ski resorts of central Colorado, many of them immigrants from Mexico. Serving them moved Father Tom to learn Spanish; he never really succeeded, but his interactions with his parishioners led him to a deep appreciation for Hispanic culture and traditions.
Around his 70th birthday, Archbishop Roger Schwietz, O.M.I., asked for help in Alaska, and Father Tom moved north to St. Joseph Church in Cordova, a fishing town of 2,000 on Prince William Sound with no road to the outside world. He called Cordova “paradise” and stayed 16 years. His parish there reflected Alaska’s century-old maritime workforce, including seasonal Filipino workers whose families had originally migrated to Prince William Sound.
Hoping to revisit his younger days as a Greenlandic fisher-priest, Father Tom bought a small fishing boat in Cordova; however, operating it proved more than his 75-year-old body cared to sustain. Instead, he walked the town daily, met weekly with the local ecumenical clergy, gave the high school baccalaureate addresses, and kept an open door for anyone in need. In 2017 Cordova named him its Citizen of the Year. The nomination praised him as “an anchor” and “a constant source of love” who lived by his personal motto, “I don’t have to like everyone, but I have to love them.” Father Tom dismissed the honor as “nonsense.”
Throughout his priesthood, Father Tom held a profound respect for immigrant families: the Indigenous Greenlanders who left their villages to attend high school in the capital city, the Mexican laboring families of Colorado, and the Filipino workers of the fish processing industry of Alaska. He honored the sacrifices of those who left home to build better lives, recognized the dignity of their labor, and attended to their spiritual and human needs.
Belleville years
In 2020, at 88, he moved to St. Henry’s Oblate Residence in Belleville, Illinois. The return to the Midwest opened a new chapter of reconnection with his extended family, especially his grand-nephew Ben Conrardy. When Tim moved to St. Louis in 2023, Uncle Tom gained a travel partner who was soon hauling him across the country to family reunions in Arkansas and Pennsylvania.
A tough old goat to the very end, Father Tom kept an extraordinary physical discipline into his 90s. He remained sharp, fully in charge of his life, and unyielding in his independence: he flatly refused to surrender his car keys and served proudly as designated driver for his fellow Oblates at St. Henry’s until the spring of 2026. Well into his 90s he drove out on weekends to celebrate Mass for the rural parishes of Marydale and Beaver Prairie, Illinois. “If I didn’t have that,” he said, “I’d be bored stiff.” Asked about death, he answered directly: “I’m curious about what God looks like. The way I look at it, you just drop off your body and keep right on going.”
Family and services
Father Thomas Killeen was preceded in death by his parents; his brother, John R. Killeen, and sister-in-law, Jane Anne (Hughes) Killeen; his sister, Shirley Killeen; his niece, Kathleen (Killeen) Conrardy; and his grand-niece, Bella Posovich.
He is survived by his nieces and nephews, Timothy Killeen, Janet Killeen, Patricia (Killeen) Vasquez, and Sara Jane Killeen, and by Father Michael Stechmann, O.F.M., a Franciscan priest and the son of Rosie Stechmann, an orphan welcomed into the Killeen household in the 1940s who became an enduring part of the family.
He is also survived by his grand-nieces and grand-nephews, Kisa (Wheaton) Davison, John Mathew Conrardy, Benjamin Conrardy, Jane Killeen Endacott, Erin Gertrude Killeen, Peter Davis Killeen, Jesus Ruy Vasquez, Roland Vasquez, and Liam Posovich; his great-grand-nieces and great-grand-nephews, Ted, Stella, Ricky, and Joe Davison, Abbey and Claire Conrardy, and Leon del Paz and Luciano Sylvestre Hanley; three great-great-grand-nieces and nephews; and more than 3,000 Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate serving around the world.
In keeping with his spirit of service, Father Killeen donated his body to the Saint Louis University School of Medicine. A Memorial Mass with military honors will be celebrated at the Shrine Church of Our Lady of the Snows in Belleville, Illinois. Memorial contributions may be made to the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, 9480 N. De Mazenod Drive, Belleville, IL 62223.
