A Mass of Christian burial for Father Dale F. Barron was celebrated Sept. 15 in the Queen of Apostles Chapel at the Maryknoll Society Center in Maryknoll, New York. Father Barron died on Sept. 10 in the Skilled Nursing Unit at the Maryknoll Society Center. He was 88 years old and a Maryknoll priest for 61 years.
Dale Francis Barron was born on May 8, 1938, in St. Louis, the only child of Francis and Lorraine Barron. He attended St. Philip Neri School in St. Louis and Sacred Heart School in Florissant. He entered Maryknoll Junior Seminary in St. Louis in September 1952. He graduated from Maryknoll College in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, in June 1960 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. He received his bachelor’s in divinity and master’s in theology degrees at Maryknoll Seminary in New York. When he was a deacon, he took courses in psychology at the University of California-Los Angeles and in clinical pastoral education at Los Angeles County Hospital. Father Barron was ordained a priest at Maryknoll on June 12, 1965.
His first mission assignment was to the Maryknoll Mission Region in Chile. After language study in Cochabamba, Bolivia, he arrived in Chile on April 12, 1966. He worked for 18 months in the rural parish of Nuestra Señora del Carmen in southern Chile. From 1967-76, he was in Santiago, Chile, at the Maryknoll Parish of San Alberto, which grew to have a population of 150,000.
After the military takeover of Chile in September 1973, Father Barron and a group of lay people started “comedores infantiles” to feed children whose fathers had disappeared or were out of work. In November 1976, he was assigned to the Maryknoll parish in Talcahuano, Chile, which had a parish school of 1,500 students. There he served as pastor, school administrator and teacher until January 1986, when the parish was turned over to the Chilean bishop to be administered by the diocesan clergy. At that time, the parish school population had reached 3,400 children from kindergarten through grade 12.
In March 1987, after a sabbatical year of study in Israel and Italy, Father Barron was assigned to the United States and the development department working out of the Houston House in Texas. He was reassigned to Chile in 1990 to the Maryknoll parish San Bernardo, then with the Stigmatine Fathers’ parish in Santiago. In January 1991, this became Santa Margarita de Escocia Parish, and Father Barron continued to serve as its pastor. He served as dean of the deanery and also worked with Cursillos de Cristiandad. In addition, he served as second regional assistant for the Chile region from 1991-95, when he was appointed district coordinator for the Santiago, Chile District.
Father Barron continued to live and work in Santiago and was assigned to senior missioner status in January 2014.
In 2018, Father Barron returned to the United States and was assigned to the senior missioner community. He resided at the Society Center in Maryknoll.
Burial was in the Maryknoll Society Cemetery.
