You may not have heard of the Rev. Thomas Oddo, CSC. But you should.

Oddo served as the University of Portland’s 17th president between 1982 and 1989. Hired at the age of 38, he is the youngest person to have held the position. He was also an influential, foundational leader in the early gay rights movement.

Oddo is the subject of a new book, Against the Current: Father Tom Oddo and the New American Catholic, published by Unencumbered Press.

Written by Portland author Tyler Bieber, Against the Current is the first biography of Oddo’s life. It is an important contribution: Oddo is an underappreciated but important figure in the university’s history, the gay rights movement, and progressive Catholic thinking and activism during the 1970s.  

Oddo completed his novitiate, wrote a doctoral dissertation, and entered the priesthood in the wake of the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, often known as Vatican II, which met between 1962 and 1965. Vatican II ushered in dramatic, liberal changes to the Catholic Church, including allowing Masses to be said in vernacular languages instead of Latin and embracing ecumenism, or dialog with other Christian faiths.

Oddo, whom Bieber refers to as “Tom” throughout the book, was a gay man. It was an identity he quietly lived, but it played an enormous role in his ministry as a priest. Early in his priesthood, working in Boston, he ministered and heard the confessions of LGBTQ Catholics who felt that there was no place for them in the Church.

He became the first national secretary for DignityUSA, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the inclusion of gay, queer, and transgender people in the Catholic Church.

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As secretary, Oddo was responsible for developing chapters, increasing membership, and communications. He was instrumental in transforming DignityUSA into a national organization: More than 15,000 people joined the organization during his tenure.

During that time, he became an activist, publishing essays and giving lectures, urging the Catholic Church to accept its gay and queer parishioners, arguing that to not do so contradicted the teachings of the Gospel.

Bieber includes an excerpt of a press release from that time: “Father Oddo said that there are irresponsible homosexual relationships just as there are irresponsible heterosexual ones. ‘However,’ he said, ‘there are life styles within the gay community where a genuine and deep sense of love exists and I feel that they are very beautiful and sacred.’” 

In a multi-page letter titled “Dignity,” Oddo wrote, “the Church must be told that it can no longer continue its inadequate and unjust stance on the issue of gay civil rights, since to do so places it i[n] clear opposition to its Gospel mission.”

When he became the University of Portland’s president in 1981, he ushered in a pivotal, transformative period for the Catholic university. Among his lasting legacies are reforming the university’s Board of Regents and dramatically increasing alumni donations, allowing the university’s budget to be less dependent on tuition.

Oddo oversaw the fundraising and construction of the Earle A. Chiles Center, the Center for Science and Technology, the Louisiana-Pacific Tennis Center, and the university’s chapel, The Chapel of Christ the Teacher, which was designed by famed architect Pietro Belluschi.

During that time, the university also implemented a new campus-wide phone system and introduced computing to campus, with the creation of university’s first computer lab, as well as negotiations with Apple and IBM that led to student discounts for individual computers.

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Dorms were built, existing buildings were renovated, co-ed housing was introduced. Oddo even helped write the lyrics of the victory march still played at sports games today.

Oddo was a “ubiquitous presence” on campus, Bieber writes, eating in Bauccio Commons, attending sporting events, and swimming a mile a day in the campus pool. And he made time to hear students’ confessions and to teach a popular course titled “Theological Problems in Human Sexuality.”

Oddo believed that a “university president should be ‘a lover and promoter of wisdom’” and he espoused the idea that the values of Catholicism worked hand and hand with a liberal arts education. He supported requiring theology and philosophy courses for all students, in order to “expose the students to the key questions about life and meaning.”

He also promoted interfaith culture on campus, at a time when only half of the university’s students were Catholic. In an August 1985 talk, Oddo said: “We must function with an ecumenical spirit, celebrating and witnessing our Catholic heritage, but unwilling to indoctrinate and appreciating alternative viewpoints. Like the Vatican II Decree on Ecumenism, we must celebrate our perspective, while realizing we do not have a monopoly on truth, and instead must seek it together. Our spirit is one of welcoming, rather than driving wedges.”

Oddo’s life was tragically cut short when he died in 1989, at the age of 45, when a trailer carrying a car became unhitched and collided with his car. His death devastated the university community. The bells of St. Mary’s Student Center on campus rang 45 times, once for each year of Oddo’s life. More than 1,000 students, faculty, and staff met the hearse that carried his body back to campus. He would be remembered as a John F. Kennedy of the 1980s who made the university a Camelot. Today, the university has a memorial scholarship in his name.   

Bieber, who is 30, works in higher education. He has published poems and chapbooks under a pseudonym. Against the Current is Bieber’s first professional publication. Anyone who reads it will hope it is not his last.

The book launch for Against the Current takes place at 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 8, when Bieber will give a reading at Annie Bloom’s Books in Portland.  

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Oregon ArtsWatch spoke with Bieber about Oddo and his book. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

It seems like Thomas Oddo is the most important UP president we don’t know about.

Bieber: Absolutely. My publisher originally came up with the tagline that’s now on the inside of the book that says “the most influential gay activist you’ve never heard of.” Originally, I was like, “Well, I don’t want to toot too many horns.” But the more that I’ve told the story and the more that people have reflected on their own struggles in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and their own experience with DignityUSA, it really does feel like that tagline is becoming the case. As you say, he was an important figure in university history, but also such an important figure in so many other contexts.   

How did you first learn about him? 

I didn’t know about Father Tom until early 2023, and it was in the middle of researching another project. It involved some research of the University of Portland’s history; that led me to a historical overview by James Connelly called A Century of Teaching, Faith, and Service. One of the chapters is largely about the 1980s. And that chapter is itself, largely, about Tom’s presidency. I became fascinated by this guy — very young, students were really gravitating toward, got a lot done.

What made you want to write a book about him? 

By the time I got to the end [of that chapter], I said, “There has to be a book about this guy.” I wanted to learn more. There was nothing really available … not even a Wikipedia page. I said, “Someone has to write this, and if no one else is going to, I’m not going wait for someone to come along. This is too good of a story not to write.”

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Tom seemed like a Renaissance man. He was athletic, deeply intellectual, looked like a movie star, charismatic. Could you describe his personality, what it might have been like to be around him? 

I think he was warm, but aloof. I think that he was very much the kind of figure that you would want to have as your faculty. Someone that you gravitate toward as a young person, and so someone you can relate to. But I think, at the same time … he’s a hard person to pin down.

You write that he was someone who kept his cards close to his vest. 

That’s right. I think that the warm kind of gregariousness and caring side was very much something he led with. His true personality, the things that motivated him, he did keep it really, really tight and close to the vest. Whenever he was trying to persuade church officials, for example, to change their tack toward gay Catholics, he had to be incredibly strategic about the conversations he had, about who he had them with, and how he approached the topics. To say nothing of keeping his sexuality under wraps while he’s having those conversations. While he was very much this Renaissance man, as you say, and a celebrity-style kind of person who attracted a lot of interest and positivity from people, I think he was a very strategic operator that could be almost chameleonic.

I say that word specifically, because he was just as endearing to the job-hiring committee for the presidency, the students that he served, the faculty he worked with, and the corporate bodies he was a part of. It doesn’t matter what group of people he was associated with, if people were talking about their experience with Tom, it was nearly the same in every single context. It’s because he knew how to operate in each of those spaces.

Tom identified as gay, and you write that it’s unclear how open he was about his identity. Do you think he used being a priest to closet himself?

I can’t directly speak to whether or not that was the case. But my assumption is that definitely helped. While it may not have been the most welcoming workplace, I do think there’s some merit to the idea that because he was closeted, he could still succeed in the Church, he could still excel and move up within the Church in ways that he couldn’t have if he was open in another workplace.

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You write “as he grew older, though, his sexuality became less of a secret and more of a motivating force.” How so?

I don’t think that he thought the priesthood was going be a pulpit for him to be a civil rights activist. By the nature of him accepting his own sexuality and also hearing confession from people saying, “I’m a gay Catholic and I feel completely out of place in the Church,” I think it became a motivating force for him that he directly related to.

When you read his writing, and when you read the passion that grows over the decade, I get the sense he came into his own self in that decade. He grew into the kind of reformer spirit. He really fully embraced the civil rights struggle as a focus of his ministry. By the end of this time in Dignity, he really has come into his own. 

You write that he would not have called himself a radical or a revolutionary. But he was the national secretary of Dignity before the real beginning of the gay rights movement, when being gay was deeply stigmatized. He was courageous for taking the very prominent role that he did. He was radical and revolutionary in some respects, wasn’t he?

I definitely think he was. I think the reason why he wouldn’t have called himself a radical or revolutionary is the same idea somebody told me recently, that Tom would be embarrassed to have a book written about him. It’s the humility of the person. It also speaks to what he was speaking out about, which are things we take for granted now: the idea that gay people are made in the image of God, and that they are born that way, not changed or choose to be that way.

Those were radical, revolutionary ideas that were highly challenged, even in the wake of Vatican II. But I don’t think he would’ve even considered those to be radical positions. He felt like it’s such a simple message, and such an uncontroversial one that God would love all of his creations exactly as they are.   

Tom became UP’s president at the age of 38. All the finalists for the position were between the ages of 37, Tom’s age at the time, and 46. The university’s Board of Regents wanted to make a pretty big shift in the university’s leadership. What motivated that?

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By the time 1981-82 comes around, you have an institution that is starting to become a bit rudderless with its identity. When the Board of Regents is trying to figure out who they want to select … [they needed] somebody that can work with multiple constituencies, that is able to put the university on a new track.

And Tom just fit the bill. Everybody else that appeared as a finalist for that search, at least according to one of the finalists that I interviewed, agreed to appear in name only because there needed to be some semblance of an actual search. Tom was the sole actual pick the committee wanted to consider. Tom was always the inside pick.  

It’s clear that his presidency was consequential.

I would say so. Of the people at the University of Portland that I spoke with, I can’t remember a single person who didn’t say the university is where it is now because of Tom. 

You write about and quote The Beacon, the university’s student newspaper, quite a bit. For a student newspaper, it was obviously a serious publication.

They did some exceptional work in the 1980s. Some of their journalists went on to very prestigious journalism careers. The reporting from that time was not only solid, but it was award-winning. They wrote about things that would not have appeared in print anywhere else, particularly about university life. The interviews that they conducted with Tom provided insight I wouldn’t have gotten from any other source.

One person you interviewed was Patti Brown, who worked in UP’s cafeteria. Tell me about her. 

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Patti is a great person. She had been working in Bauccio Commons since 1979. She made a special point to talk about Tom. He was not only very different from the kind of priest that she had seen prior to his service, but he was a frequent guest in the Bauccio Commons. He was frequently there eating with students. Students really gravitated toward him, unlike a lot of the other presidents that she worked with.

Patti, I think just as much as any of the other interview subjects, was a good window and a barometer of Tom’s personality, of his leadership style. [She was] in a place where everybody is coming in and out. That was a special perspective to have — that Tom was so exceptional out of all of those people that she had ever served that he was so memorable to her even 40 years on.

While he was president, the university was having an identity crisis over whether or not it could be a Catholic university. How did Tom navigate that, especially given that he clashed with official Church doctrine quite a bit, even though he would argue that he was defending Catholicism and Catholicity?

University leaders were starting to question whether the institution could survive as a truly Catholic institution, or if it should move to a more nondenominational position. Tom came in and said, “We are a Catholic institution.” The institution really saw renewal in its Catholicity under Tom’s presidency.  

In multiple instances, he talked about the importance of Catholicity and Catholicism in general, but also in a university context. He was very much about the ideas that Catholicism stands for, [including] the universal call of holiness, the pursuit of social justice, alleviating poverty, educating people, about pursuing love and peace and goodwill toward our neighbors. He believed in all of these things. He believed that, even though you could have disagreements with the theology, Catholicism by and large was a great value system to base a liberal arts education off.

He was very much about free inquiry and free thought. He was the first person to speak out against book bans. He said fervently, we are not going to be told by the Vatican or by anybody else what we’re gonna be teaching in classrooms. You could say that’s very much in the spirit of Catholicism, even though it was sort of defiant toward the Vatican. When I think about his embrace of Catholicism, despite his reservations about certain parts of the theology or of the liturgy, I think it speaks to the strength of his faith, that he was such an advocate and so devoted to the Church, despite his personal identity maybe not being so reconcilable with the Church’s teaching.