Fr. William Aquinas Norton, OP

Fr. William Norton was born at the beginning of the century, January 4, 1900.  While both of his parents came from Irish stock of the Boston area, they met and married only after coming west.  They were blessed with five daughters in a row, followed by four sons. William was the final child to arrive.  His father died suddenly of a stroke at fifty-four years of age, leaving his wife, Julia, with the task of holding the family together.  William, the youngest, thus grew up without the presence of a father in his adolescent years. However, this absence was compensated for by the extraordinary love of an unusually loving family.

William was educated in San Francisco.  At the outset of World War I he interrupted his high school education in order to roam the country a bit and then the world with a lengthy stint in the Merchant Marines.  After seven years of such activity he resumed high school in 1922.  The inspiration to pursue a religious vocation came suddenly in 1923 at 23 years of age.   He entered the Apostolic School of the Province (located in Kentfield) in 1924 and successfully pursued his education for the priesthood until 1936.  His ordination took place in St. Dominic's, San Francisco, on August 18, 1934.

William's first assignment was to San Francisco where he gave himself to an extraordinary five years of ministry.  During this time he concentrated in a special manner on the grammar and high school students of the parish.  He established ties with this group, which lasted until his death.  The number of these once 'young' disciples at his funeral Mass forty years later gave touching evidence of these bonds.  From 1941 until 1946 William served in the U.S. Navy, being involved in several of the major island battles in the Pacific.  He endeavored to initiate a Provincial Missionary undertaking in Japan at the conclusion of the War.  When his well advanced project was turned down by the Provincial for practical reasons, William returned to years of intensive and successful parochial ministry in the houses of the Province.  His record reads as follows: 1946 to 1949 - Assistant Pastor at St. Mary Magdalen's, Berkeley; 1949 to 1952 - Assistant Pastor at Blessed Sacrament, Seattle; 1952 to 1958 - Pastor at St. Mary Magdalen's; 1958 to 1964 - Pastor at Holy Rosary, Portland; 1965 to 1967 - Pastor at Blessed Sacrament.

While serving as Pastor in Seattle, William suffered a stroke, which initiated twelve years of partial and finally almost complete inactivity.  From 1969 to 1972, however, he managed to carry on a fruitful ministry from a wheelchair while serving as the hospital chaplain in Hanford, California.  During the years from 1972 until his death the combination of his ferocious zeal to accomplish good things for the Church and his relative immobility following upon the stroke and subsequent minor ones lead to a period of intense frustration.  Death came as a blessing to him just before he would have been moved away from the loving care of his Dominican Sisters to a non-Dominican setting better suited to his special medical needs.

If I were requested by the Holy See to nominate for possible canonization one Dominican of my personal acquaintance during fifty years of contact with the Order, I would without hesitation propose the name of Fr. William Norton.  If he is not a saint, then God help the rest of us.

-- Fr. Antoninus Wall, O.P.

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