From College Presidents to a Mosaic of Father Tom Oddo

The post below was originally published January 29, 2025 on this site. 

Writing the Mosaic

The Book I Set Out to Write

I was writing the book I’d thought about for years—a deep dive into infamous college presidents in the Pacific Northwest. Since my time at University of Portland, acting as a guinea pig for its new M.A. in Higher Education and Student Affairs program, I had imagined a book that would one day live on the shelf next to slim volumes on leadership styles and the biographies released every year by CEOs and politicians, but with a twist: It would outline the failures, and the common denominators of failure, among a highly-misunderstood class of corporate officer, the University President. 

The idea came from my personal interactions with more than one eccentric character playing the role. For five years after my graduation, I thought about that book, stewing over my ultimate goals and how I’d structure it. Then, one day, I threw out my trepidation and started writing. The manuscript came together much faster than I expected: Within five months, I had a 200-page draft, with seven individual presidents profiled and a concluding essay that examined their impacts and drew conclusions on metrics of college success and failure. 

Discovering Father Tom Oddo

In my research, to contrast the subjects outlined as the “bad presidents,” I wanted to highlight several “good presidents” too—for no other reason than to compare the contributions of both to their respective campuses. 

This led me to the story of Fr. Thomas C. Oddo, CSC, the young wunderkind president of UP. Having lived in the Pacific Northwest all my life, within the Portland Metro Area for most of it, and as a recent alum of UP, I had never heard of Father Tom. The more I read, the more amazed I was that I hadn’t.

A President Unlike Any Other

A single chapter of a larger history of the university, A Century of Teaching, Faith, and Service, covered Tom’s service as president. From 1982 to 1989, roughly seven years and two months, Tom Oddo was the highly-respected and widely-beloved executive leading the little Catholic university on Northwest Portland’s cliffside “The Bluff” to a brighter and better future. 

From that chapter, I learned that he helped initiate and complete major building projects (including the Chiles Center stadium and UP’s first standalone chapel), oversaw the implementation of co-ed housing after years of student clamoring, took an institutional stand on AIDS by producing educational materials on the disease and opening the university health center to students who tested positive for it, and helped save the local Air Force ROTC unit from closure. To my surprise, the chapter also mentioned Tom’s ministry to the LGBTQ+ community throughout his career, and before he was president. 

It dawned on me: Tom was an activist around the same time as Stonewall, Harvey Milk, and the first Gay Pride celebrations in the US, yet his name is never mentioned in retrospectives of American queer history; he never appears in documentaries on the time or books written about the subject. To learn he died in a horrific car accident at just 45 was also a shock, and before long I had resolved to learn everything I could about Tom. All the while, I continued to marvel about how no one had written a book about him. Privately, I wondered whether my interest was signing me up for the job. 

Biography as a Mosaic

By the Merriam Webster definition, biography is a “usually written history of a person’s life.” Conversely, mosaic is “a surface decoration made by inlaying small pieces of variously colored material to form pictures or patterns.” While it’s true you’re more likely to associate mosaics with paintings and murals, there’s a place for literature too—most of all, in nonfiction, as it seeks to capture the variety of life no one person could fully imagine. From the start, I imagined this book as a mosaic of Tom Oddo’s life. 

His life was not only remarkable, but one lived in remarkable times: Born six days after Normandy, died ten days before the fall of the Berlin Wall. 

These years represented a period of great transformation in the United States; of economic growth and expanded military power; of liberation, active protest, and youth empowerment; of religious revival, both liberal and conservative; and of changing morals throughout society. 

They also represented an explosion of pop culture, and the birth of innumerable entries into the American cultural lexicon. To ignore all of these influences would lead to an incomplete book, and worse than that, an incomplete understanding of Tom and his peers. 

Vatican II and the New American Catholic

One such influence was the Second Vatican Council (also known as “Vatican II”), the historic assembly of Catholic clergy in Rome to determine changes to church custom and attempt to answer lingering questions in church doctrine. The council was announced by Pope John XXIII, a liberal and reforming pontiff who addressed the rights of women and advocated against nuclear weapons. It was concluded by Pope Paul VI, a more moderate successor who nevertheless wished to see the council’s work through after John’s death in 1963. The result was a “reformed liturgy” and a “reformed theology.” Now, priests would face their congregants, and say Mass in the local dialect rather than traditional Latin. For some, this was a massive cultural shift. 

Prior to Vatican II, schools like Tom’s Holy Cross High School aimed to educate a New American Catholic, a patriotic and God-fearing Christian citizen who stood for liberty and integrity. By the implementation of Vatican II’s reforms, the American church began to take on an unfamiliar character. For priests like Tom, however, it was a door opening to a brighter future, for themselves and for believers like them. 

In Vatican II’s wake, Tom and others made effective strides toward wider acceptance of LGBTQ+ parishioners and the creation of church-specific resources to minister to them. He would speak out for non-discrimination laws and help elect the first openly gay legislator in US history, while speaking out against church publications on gay ministry and the efforts of some priests to end his outreach altogether. By the end of Tom’s term as National Secretary of DignityUSA, the national organization for Gay Catholics he co-founded, the church truly felt like a different place. That context is key to understanding his contributions and motivations, just as context about our modern political climate will be key to future histories written about us. 

Tom Oddo’s Legacy in Context and Why it Matters Today

Over the course of writing this book, approximately 18 months to a completed manuscript (but more if you count edits), dozens of states have moved to adopt anti-abortion laws and curtail the usage of LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and other minority figures in American History classes. Book bans have taken thousands of books off school library shelves, while racism and anti-Semitism have seen massive spikes in internet traffic and real-world engagement. Serious threats persist to equal rights previously mandated by the courts. And yet.

In December 2023, the Vatican issued Fiducia Supplicans, a declaration that priests could offer blessings to non-married Catholic couples—including LGBTQ+ partners. In February 2024, the Jesuit ministry Outreach named its first executive director, while its parent organization America magazine ran successive pieces calling for acceptance and equality within the church. In May, the Bishop of Trier, Germany offered a public apology for the church’s treatment of LGBTQ+ people, with the nation’s churches establishing a “network for queer pastoral care” in the months afterward. And as I’m writing this, the Vatican is making preliminary arraignments for the first-ever queer event at the church’s 2025 Jubilee Year celebrations. 

In a mosaic, bright hues and dark shadows combine to create a full picture, just as they do in the history of the church, and the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights. Tom’s energetic life, tragic death, and surprising afterlife are themselves a mosaic of people and events set in motion by one another. But without such consideration of the backdrop, we lose focus on the foreground, on the minutiae of a single life, when so many others came to impact and influence theirs. 

In Tom’s story, we see a truly American mosaic, a tragedy filled with love and happiness that continues to resonate, continues to inspire beyond the years of its creators, and that deserves to be told in the fullest detail the record will allow.