MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Pilot
3/7/2008, BY FATHER ROBERT M. O’GRADY
Bishop Robert Hennessey was the principal celebrant and homilist at the funeral of his longtime friend and fellow member of the St. James Society, Father Milton Eggerling. Father Eggerling died at Massachusetts General Hospital on Feb. 29 following complications from intestinal surgery.
A native of Orient, S.D., Father Eggerling came from a large family — he once commented that his family comprised 5 percent of the small town’s population. As you read about his various ministerial assignments it will be obvious he was genuinely a citizen of the world and no one diocese could contain him or his enthusiasm.
His parents Milton and Josephine (Ritter) raised the family just outside of Aberdeen, S.D., in the Sioux Falls Diocese. Father Eggerling was born in Orient March 18, 1921. Following education in local schools he attended a small local college and left to enter the Army, serving in World War II from 1940-1945. He returned to Creighton University in Omaha and completed college at the University of San Francisco. He entered St. Patrick, the San Francisco archdiocesan seminary, and Archbishop John Mitty ordained him to the priesthood for his home diocese, Sioux Falls on June 11, 1954 at the “city by the bay’s” St. Mary Cathedral.
He returned to the Midwest and began a series of varied assignments: St. Mary, Marion; and St. Joseph Cathedral, Sioux Falls, both in South Dakota; Corpus Christi, St. Paul, Minn.; Little Flower, Minot, N.D. then to the Newman Center at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, then back to Sioux Falls and Aberdeen. In 1976 he was incardinated as a priest of the Oakland diocese across the bay from San Francisco, he served at St. Felicitas, San Leandro and Corpus Christi, Piedmont.
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