McELENEY, Neil Joseph 1927-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born August 8, 1927, in Charlestown, MA; died of acute anemia, August 19, 2004, in Washington, DC. Priest, educator, and author. McEleney was a Catholic priest in the Paulist order who was a respected scholar of scriptural studies and former professor at St. Paul's College and the Catholic University of America. Ordained a priest in 1953, the same year he earned his master's degree from St. Paul's College, he continued on to receive an S.T.L. from the Catholic University of America in 1954, and an S.S.B. and S.S.L. from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome in 1955 and 1956 respectively. McEleney then taught sacred scripture from 1956 to 1973 at St. Paul's before spending a year in Jerusalem as a research associate at the William Foxwell Albright Institute for Archaeological Research. During the mid-1970s, he taught New Testament studies and Greek at St. Patrick's Seminary in Menlo Park, California; he then joined the Catholic University of America faculty in 1979, where he remained until 1994. McEleney, an authority on the Apocrypha books, Maccabees, and the Sermon on the Mount, helped found the Washington Theological Consortium in 1968, an interdenominational religious organization. He was also the author of The Growth of the Gospels: An Introduction to Their Formation and Theology (1979).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

New York Times, August 24, 2004, p. B7.

Washington Post, August 29, 2004, p. C8.