Obituaries

Hundreds of friends and family gathered at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in Homeland May 8 to celebrate the life of Yeardley Love, a senior lacrosse player at the University of Virginia and 2006 graduate of Notre Dame Preparatory School in Towson.

As pallbearers slowly guided Monsignor F. Dennis Tinder’s casket out of Immaculate Conception Church in Towson following his Dec. 12 funeral Mass, approximately 120 priests and deacons united their voices in a final tribute to their brother clergyman. A solemn church bell tolled every few seconds while the white-robed men chanted “Salve Regina” in Latin […]

“He reminded them that the life of every human being was no mistake,” Father Carey said. “God had wonderful plans for each of them.”

Father Robert “Rocky” Kearns, a pioneering Josephite priest, pastor and superior general who was active in the social justice movement, died in an Alabama hospital Dec. 6 from complications of cancer. He was 72.

Father Kevin W. Brooksbank, a 35-year-old associate pastor of Immaculate Heart of Mary in Baynesville, died May 25 at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson after battling a viral infection and kidney failure.

Father Bernard S. Bak, one of the first permanent deacons ordained in the United States who later became a priest for the Archdiocese of Baltimore, died in his Dundalk home June 8. He was 85. A funeral Mass was offered June 11 at St. Casimir in Canton, the parish in which Father Bak grew up and where he served as a deacon after his 1971 ordination. Father Bak also served as a deacon at Christ the King in Dundalk. After his wife of 35 years, Antoinette Stefanowicz, died in 1984, Father Bak petitioned the archdiocese to become a priest. He studied at St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Roland Park and was ordained a priest in 1988.