Author Tyler Bieber on “Meeting Tom Oddo”

Visiting the Gravesite of Father Tom Oddo

The cicadas can be heard all around as you enter Holy Cross Community Cemetery in South Bend, Indiana. Their endless chirping, a buzzing whirl that is almost completely unrecognizable in the Pacific Northwest, reminds me just how far I am from home. But then, so are many who reside here. This place became a new home for each of them, an eternal one upon their deaths, sometimes thousands of miles from their birthplace. 

An unassuming, wrought-iron gate sits on a back road of the Notre Dame campus that splits a field in half: on one side, open pasture and grassland; on the other, rows upon rows of stone crosses, each one signifying the life and legacy of a Holy Cross brother. Within this hallowed space lie greats of American Catholicism, like Congregation of Holy Cross’s founder Fr. Edward Sorin, and longtime president of the university Fr. Ted Hesburgh. Walking through the grounds to Row G, on the edge of the path near the far end of headstones, you can find Fr. Thomas C. Oddo, CSC, born 1944, died 1989. Standing without epitaph beyond the customary inscription R.I.P., Father Tom’s headstone—like many of the brothers—buries the lead of his legacy, standing silent against the cars, the cicadas, and the ambient noises of a campus at work.

We brought red and yellow mums to his gravesite on the morning of September 11, 2025, a date also wrapped in the weighted silence of past years and lost lives. We left some change originally saved for a pressed penny on top of the cross—payment, I suppose, in case ferrymen still cross the River Styx. Standing there, coming face to face with the subject of a book that’s taken me nearly one-tenth of my life to write, I broke down in tears. I didn’t expect to be emotional, some wishful thinking on my part (since I’m terrible at funerals), but the emotion presented less as sadness and more as a longing: longing for a friend I never knew in life, maybe only to meet in death, and for the things he believed in. 

Lessons from Father Tom Oddo for Today’s World

The world is a different place from the one Tom Oddo lived in, but not that much different: life in today’s society is a rat race fueled by greed and the pursuit of power, satiated only by lust and bluster, that demands everything from everyone living in it who can’t afford to avoid it, including sacrifice, injury, and abuse at the hands of ourselves and others. Political violence is the release valve for a generation of groomed soldiers who pray for the deaths of their enemies, and who think of dissent as weakness. Retribution against our neighbors, let alone our enemies, is the order of the moment, lest we cede the moral high ground or dare look inward to our own motivations. Taking a vow, or saying a prayer, says much less about the person and more about their status in polite and familiar circles. Truth is subjective, and facts are ridiculed in favor of gut instinct. All of these things existed when Tom was alive; unchecked, they’ve become deeply ingrained in our shared American experience, one that still suggests anyone can succeed and claims every man can be made a king. 

The cultural dissonance of the late 1980s and the 1990s, a more recent entry into the history books of nostalgia masking reality, has made my generation, and generations after mine, reconsider whether the “good times” will ever come again, whether any of us were alive to see them when they happened, and whether any of them were actually good. In a world we’ve largely constructed for ourselves, it feels like we’ve drifted quite far from home. And throughout it all, many have lived their lives in the closet, hidden away from what opportunities life offers, ashamed at the few things they can control, like the presentation of their true identity. Tom had something to say for the suffering of mankind, in the closet and out. 

For Tom, the good times—indeed the good news—came from the teachings of Jesus, and the idea of living a “resurrected life.” He had a surprisingly radical theory that God did not create human beings to suffer for things they could not control, and that their embrace of self should engender as much external recognition as internal renewal. He knew many queer people believed their identities were divinely-ordained, “God-given” gifts unmoveable by reform. He believed in peace and peaceful relationships between people, envisioning a church that extended loving arms and a safe environment to parishioners of all types, declaring that “Such love made flesh through the community casts out fear.” He also knew the notion of the community must mean more than just the things white society and Catholic culture demand of the world; that it extends to all of God’s children; and that the lack of justice and respect given by white society and Catholic culture have caused harm to far too many people. He believed in a God of “love and healing,” although he still believed in the human capacity to sin. In that imperfection, Tom saw a reason for being, not a reason to destroy. And he saw a reason to keep up the fight: the irrefutable, inescapable melting of time meant any progress today could be lost tomorrow. One day here, the next day gone, much like life itself.

Speaking with Tom

I am not much of a praying man, though I’ve tried to be countless times. I’m a writer, and it’s lucky that my writing mirrors how I talk. I have to assume it means I write like how I would pray. I didn’t pray to Tom when we visited; I just spoke to him, like how I’ve tried to speak to him through my writing. And when I spoke to him, the few words I could muster were: “Thank you,” “It was good to meet you,” and “A lot of people say hi. A lot of people.”

An Epitaph for Tom Oddo

If I could write an epitaph for Tom Oddo, though he’d disapprove of one, it would go something like this:

He was a man of God and a man of people—
A lover of humanity for all its flaws and all its folks,
And a fighter for joy, love, and peace on Earth. 

Father Tom’s story continues in my forthcoming biography, Against the Current: Father Tom Oddo and the New American Catholic, which will be released on October 28, 2025, from Unencumbered Press. Pre-orders are now open.