Jim Sunderland told friends and family around his hospital bed Tuesday to give him his shoes “because I want to walk into heaven.”
A few hours later, the popular Catholic priest died. He had turned 81 on Christmas Day.
Sunderland, a longtime Denver-area jail chaplain who constantly fought capital punishment, had battled pneumonia for several days.
He had already mailed out cards inviting people to an observance Feb. 4 for the 60th anniversary of his priesthood.
Sunderland cultivated friendships with Catholics, non-Catholics, non-Christians and the convicts, ex-cons and prostitutes he visited in the jails.
Those he knew from jail called him Father Jim, and he called them parishioners. The Rev. Mi chael Sheeran, a fellow Jesuit and president of Regis University, said Sunderland had a simple view of his beliefs: “God loves everyone, and it was his job to remind them of that.”
Devoted to his sisters, brothers, nieces and nephews, Sunderland enjoyed spending time with them. He never cultivated the rich and powerful but frequently tapped them for money when he wanted to help a kid get to college.
He took his vow of poverty simply “and left this world with nothing, just like he entered it,” said his cousin Catharine Hazlitt of Arvada. He used money given to him for weddings and funerals to help kids, or to take rosaries and prayer books to inmates, she said.
Devoted to the church, he was nevertheless a critic of its conservative trends and was unafraid to speak his mind.
He was not given to pomp and show, said Sheeran, and he often dodged major events that required folderol, telling friends, “I won’t be able to go. I have to do a funeral in Pocatello that day,” recalled a niece, Suzi Comcowich of Denver.
Sunderland marched and preached against war and capital punishment and pushed for prison reform.
For almost two decades he met with a group of men each Tuesday for breakfast at Zaidy’s Delicatessen in east Denver. “We’re all pretty liberal – religiously and politically,” said Ed Hutchinson, a member of the group and lifelong friend.
Sunderland took his high school speech lessons to heart. His sermons were “short and sweet. He never belabored anything,” said Hutchinson. In his funeral instructions, Sunderland asked for only two eulogies and said neither was to be longer than three minutes.
Sunderland could find humor most anywhere, especially when it was directed at him. When he retired and moved to the Xavier Jesuit Center near Regis University, friends said “just put a cot in the office. He’ll be near a fax machine,” Hazlitt said.
It was a joke in the family that Sunderland had a “Kinko’s ministry,” because he was always faxing secular and religious editorials and political cartoons to a legion of friends, Comcowich said.
James Cornelius Sunderland was born at Mercy Hospital on Dec. 25, 1925, and grew up in east Denver. He graduated from Regis High School and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at St. Louis University, St. Louis, and a theology degree at St. Mary’s College, St. Mary’s, Kan.
He taught and was a chaplain in the Midwest before returning to Denver, where he was a chaplain at Mercy and St. Joseph Hospitals. His jail chaplaincy was from 1981 until 1998.
The rosary service will be at 7:30 p.m. Friday and the funeral mass at 1 p.m. Saturday, both at Loyola Catholic Church, 2301 York St.
Burial at Mt. Olivet Cemetery will be private.
In addition to his niece and cousin, Sunderland is survived his sister, Dorothy Schulte of Scottsdale, Ariz.; and six other nieces and nephews.
He was preceded in death by two brothers and one sister.
Staff writer Virginia Culver can be reached at vculver@denverpost.com or 303-820-1223.
