The Rev. James B. Callan, a renegade priest who was excommunicated in 1999 after he offered holy communion to non-Catholics, allowed women to celebrate Mass and blessed same-sex unions — and who then helped establish an independent Catholic church that is thriving a quarter-century later — died on Friday in Rochester, N.Y. He was 77.
His death, in a hospice affiliated with the University of Rochester Medical Center, was announced by the Rev. Myra Brown, the lead pastor of that church, Spiritus Christi, where Father Callan had been assistant pastor. She said the cause was complications of tongue cancer.
In 1999, Father Callan had been the pastor of Corpus Christi Roman Catholic Church, on the east side of Rochester, for 22 years. In his time there he transformed it from a poor parish, sapped by white flight and doomed to be shuttered, into a flourishing one with a multiracial, ecumenical and progressive congregation that grew from fewer than 200 people to nearly 3,000.
“He was one of the first local religious leaders to welcome people with AIDS as parishioners and helped destigmatize H.I.V.,” Dr. William Valenti, a founder and staff physician of Trillium Health in Rochester, said in a phone interview. “He was a man of faith, a man of action and a man of humanity.”
The break between the Rochester diocese and Father Callan, which he said was initiated by the Vatican, was regarded as less about doctrine than about disciplining unruly priests who were not showing proper obeisance to their bishops.
The bishop of the Rochester diocese at the time, Matthew H. Clark, was a moderate in the American Catholic hierarchy who didn’t necessarily disagree with some Father Callan’s positions. He himself had taken flak for holding a Mass for gay people.
Father Callan was removed from the Corpus Christi parish in 1998 and reassigned to one in Elmira, N.Y., about 70 miles away. He said his removal was instigated by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, who in 2005 would become Pope Benedict XVI.
The next year, Father Callan joined former acolytes from Corpus Christi who had founded a church called New Faith. They described the church, which was later renamed Spiritus Christi, as Catholic in spirit but independent of the Vatican.
“Whenever someone begins his own church and disavows any union with Rome and the local bishop, he is in schism,” the Rev. Kevin McKenna, chancellor of the Rochester diocese, said at the time. “Father Callan has effectively excommunicated himself.”
Ms. Brown, the Spiritus Christi pastor, said in a phone interview that Father Callan’s “legacy was to envision an inclusive church for everyone that focused on everybody and that focused on a message of unconditional love — that there are no disposables in the family of God.”
James Brady Callan was born on Oct. 1, 1947, in Rochester to Phillip Callan Jr. and Lucille (Brady) Callan. His father was a mechanical engineer.
He is survived by three brothers, Edward, Daniel and Jerry Callan; and a sister, Marian Aman.
One of Jim’s brothers was a priest, as were a cousin, three great-uncles and a great-great-uncle; he had aspired to become one since he was 5 years old. He attended St. Andrew’s Seminary, St. John Fisher University, Becket Hall Seminary and St. Bernard’s School of Theology and Ministry, all in Rochester, before being ordained in 1974.
Since childhood, Ms. Brown said, Father Callan “came to believe that priests were largely out of touch with the real world and lived too high.”
“He and his family were coming out of church, and his father, as they passed the open rectory garage with all nice cars, remarked, ‘It’s too bad the priests have to drive such expensive cars. It would be better if they lived more like the rest of us,’” she recalled in an email. “As a child, he complained about how long the Christmas sermon was by the priest, and his mom said, ‘It was so long because he didn’t have a wife to tell him it was too long.’”
In 1976, Father Callan was suspended from priestly duties at St. Ambrose Church in Rochester for two months after refusing to move into a church rectory because, he said, its amenities were “above the normal style of the people whom I am serving.” He also served in New York State parishes in Canandaigua and Binghamton.
At Corpus Christi, he underscored the church’s mission by abolishing regular bingo games; persuaded the membership to donate up to 12 percent of weekly collections to the poor; and created a free medical clinic, a homeless shelter, a residence for former prisoners and a health clinic in Haiti.
In 1999, after being transferred to Elmira, Father Callan joined the breakaway church established that year by Mary Ramerman, his pastoral assistant at Corpus Christi. Married with three children, she had been allowed by him to perform rituals that were supposed to be reserved for priests. She had also been dismissed from Corpus Christi.
Father Callan was assistant pastor of the 1,100-member Spiritus Christi Church until he took a medical leave in May. He died the day after he watched a service, streamed from the church by video, that celebrated his life.
When he was removed from Corpus Christi in 1998, Father Callan expressed hope that the controversies that caused the schism would someday seem anachronistic.
“My removal will look silly 10 years from now,” he said. Invoking a well-known former television news commentator, Father Callan added, “Like Eric Sevareid used to say, ‘I’m a pessimist about tomorrow, but I’m an optimist about the day after tomorrow.’”
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