There was no supernatural vision, no compelling word of God that led Father Daniel (Dan) McLellan, OFM, to the priesthood, but rather simple interactions with faith-filled Franciscan friars. “I didn’t really know much about St. Francis when I entered the seminary, but I got to know him through the men in the community, which had all kinds of people. Each was unique, and Franciscan qualities shone through them in small ways,” says Father Dan. “I think I came to know St. Francis by the good examples his followers set.”
Father Dan, 75, grew up in a Catholic family in Walpole, Massachusetts, about 20 miles outside of Boston. “My family wasn’t overly involved in the parish, and we never had a priest or nun ever come to our home,” he says. “However, we were religious in daily prayer and never missed Sunday Mass. And my mom always made sure my dad had his rosary with him going to work; he was a cop. My dad belonged to the Knights of Columbus, but it was mostly for the social aspect.”
Father Dan, the oldest of six children, attended public school, where a vocation was not emphasized. Nevertheless, God was at work in his family as he and his younger brother, Michael, who is now deceased, both became priests, with his brother becoming a diocesan priest.
The family lived in a rural area with no Catholic schools in the vicinity, but Father Dan was able to tag along with a friend to attend altar boy classes.
Father Dan decided to enter the Franciscans’ minor seminary when he was 13. “My mother thought I was crazy,” he says, “but my dad said: ‘See if you like it. If you don’t, you can always come home.’”
A Good Mix
While attending St. Joseph’s Seraphic Seminary in Callicoon, New York, he noticed that the more academic friars who taught the seminarians would easily mix with the ones who did manual labor. “The seminary had a German background and valued work. So, the friars who worked the farm and the ones who were caretakers of the local cemetery mixed with the teachers, and I liked that about them,” Father Dan recalls.
“Although I don’t think I ever read a book on St. Francis until much later, the friars that I met at the seminary made an impression on me. They worked in parishes, went on missions, worked on experimental farms, and taught in universities. I thought, These guys are great,” says Father Dan. After five years at the minor seminary, he moved on to Siena College in Albany, New York. “I then spent my novitiate in Brookline, Massachusetts, studied theology in Washington, DC, and was ordained on May 8, 1976, at the age of 27,” says Father Dan, who requested his first assignment be the St. Anthony Shrine in Boston.
“My dad had Alzheimer’s disease, and I asked to be assigned close to my home,” says Father Dan. Within a year, he accepted an offer by the archdiocese to serve its campus ministry. “The ministry was located in the Back Bay area of Boston and served a wide range of students from the universities there, such as the Boston Conservatory, Berklee School of Jazz, [and] MIT,” he says.
“After I was there for a while, I was walking with another friar one day, who stunned me by saying that I was wasting my time and that I should go back to school. I was ticked, to be honest,” says Father Dan, “but I completed a master’s at Boston College in 1981, and then I went to Notre Dame and earned a doctorate in history in 1985.”
Father Dan went on to teach at Christ the King Seminary in Buffalo, direct friars in the post-novitiate in Washington, DC, and eventually serve as the president of the Washington Theological Union until 2005. “A friar-member of the union’s board of trustees and also pastor of a parish in Durham, North Carolina, told me he was retiring and that I should look into succeeding him,” says Father Dan. “They needed a pastor, and I took the assignment.
“It was a wonderful parish with a large Latino population with a parish school. I served there for nine years, but while I could celebrate sacraments in Spanish, I couldn’t converse with the parishioners very well, so I thought it best that they have a priest who was fluent in Spanish, and I moved over to St. Andrew [Parish] in Clemson, South Carolina.”
Switching Gears
Father Dan’s decision to seek retirement was reached after accompanying students on a mission trip to Lima, Peru. “They were so enthusiastic, but I discovered how out of touch I was with their jargon and music!” he says. “And at the end of the day, they were still raring to go, but I was fatigued. It was then that I realized that they deserved more. So, I retired in the fall of 2024, which, after 48 years, was the first fall that I was not teaching or running a school.”
But Father Dan is not idle. “As this area is strapped for priests, I’m still staying in Pendleton, South Carolina, at a farmhouse that a parishioner offered for me to live in. I’m only 20 minutes from the church and have told the parish and the campus ministry that I’ll help out wherever needed,” he said. “In my old age, I’ve come to learn that the Gospel is not what we are required to do for Jesus, but more about the wonderful things God has done for us.
“It isn’t rules and rituals that attract others to God; it’s love in action. And not ‘love the emotion,’ but ‘love in action,’ which, as Dostoevsky said, ‘is a harsh and dreadful thing,’ requiring sacrifice for one another. It was the love in action of the friars in the seminary that attracted me. Love rolls up its sleeves and goes to work for people, and I think by focusing on flesh and blood, meeting people and letting them know that they matter is when they encounter Christ. Everyone wants to matter, and I’ve tried to express that throughout my vocation.”
