Oblate of Mary Immaculate Father Ronald Harrer — a Minneapolis native who ministered as a missionary in Brazil, pastor and assistant priest of two parishes in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis and chaplain at Regions Hospital in St. Paul — died Nov. 6.
Father Harrer, 82, died at Dammert Care Center of the Benedictine Living Community at the National Shrine of Our Lady of the Snows in Belleville, Illinois. His funeral Mass was Nov. 12 at the shrine’s chapel and burial was at St. Henry’s Oblate Cemetery in Belleville.
Born in Minneapolis, Father Harrer spent much of his childhood and youth in Orient, South Dakota. He professed his first vows in the Missionary Oblates in 1963 and was ordained a priest in 1970.
He began his ministry in Brazil as a seminarian in 1966 and served there for 14 years. Returning to the United States in 1980, Father Herrer served as the archivist of the Oblate’s Central Province and in parishes in Minnesota and South Dakota.
In the archdiocese, he was assistant priest of Assumption in Richfield from 1981 to 1997 and pastor of St. Albert in Albertville from 1997 to 2001. He was chaplain at Regions Hospital from 2001 to 2019 and was in residence at St. Casimir in St. Paul from 2018 to 2021.
Oblate of Mary Immaculate Father Cyprian Czop, pastor of St. Casimir, said Father Harrer was “a great, great community guy. … He was a good soul, a good spirit in the house.”
Father Czop said a particularly poignant memory for him is concelebrating Masses with Father Harrer in a near-empty St. Casimir church in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Father Harrer’s memory began to deteriorate, and he had to move to the care center in Illinois, Father Czop said. “I regretted when he needed to go,” the pastor said.
