When Father Frederick MacIntyre was ordained as a priest of The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington in 1992 at the age of 60, when many people retire, he said, “I don’t really regard it as a new career. It’s a continuation of life.”

His beloved wife of 27 years, Ann, had died of cancer in 1988. The next year, Fred MacIntyre – who had been a salesman, worked for the federal government and taught in Catholic school – entered the seminary after serving as a permanent deacon.

Later when he had been a priest for 25 years and was living and serving at St. Patrick’s Church in downtown Washington at the age of 85, Father MacIntyre said, “I still love being a priest. I love my life.”

Father MacIntyre died on March 22, 2023 at the Washington Hospital Center at the age of 90. In recent years, he had been living at Malta House in Hyattsville, Maryland.

Washington Cardinal Wilton Gregory celebrated a Mass of Christian Burial for the priest on April 5 at St. Patrick’s Church, and a vigil Mass for him had been celebrated there on the previous evening.

A native of Marshfield, Massachusetts, Father MacIntyre was born on June 28, 1932. He earned a degree in political science from Wilmington College in Ohio, and later he earned a master’s degree from the University of Chicago. An online tribute compiled by his three children jokingly noted their dad continued to be “amazed that he made it through this intellectually rigorous school, given he couldn’t really even spell the word ‘rigorous.’”

The future priest, who had been raised Catholic, married his first wife in the Episcopal Church and they had three children, Cindy, Tina and Freddy (Mickey) MacIntyre, but the couple later divorced. He worked as a personnel administrator at an Air Force base in Michigan and later moved his family to the Washington area, where he worked in the Office of Personnel Management.

He later married Ann Louise MacIntyre, and became a part of her family including her four children, Bobby, Paul, Maggie and Chuck. She converted to Catholicism in 1972, and they became active members of St. Columba Parish in Oxon Hill, Maryland. He was ordained as a permanent deacon for the archdiocese in 1985. His wife joined him in a variety of ministries, including serving the aged at D.C. Village and participating in Marriage Encounter, the Charismatic Renewal and Teams of Our Lady. “We were a team, a matched set,” he said, describing their marriage.

While his wife Ann was dying of terminal lung cancer, they had many conversations about what he would do after her death, and she encouraged him to become a priest. He said her courageous struggle with her illness and her graceful acceptance of it touched many people. The next year after she died, he began studying at the Pope John XXIII Seminary in Weston, Massachusetts.

Over the years, Frederick MacIntyre had worked as a salesman, selling everything from men’s clothing to mutual funds to mobile homes. In an interview before his ordination to the priesthood, he said his favorite work during those years was as a substitute teacher, and in the mid-1980s he returned to the classroom for a four year stint as a math and religion and eighth grade homeroom teacher at St. Philip the Apostle School in Camp Springs, Maryland.

“I loved it. That’s such a great age to work with kids… You can really have an impact on kids that age,” he said.

His children’s tribute noted that at St. Philip’s School, their dad “was all over the religion curriculum, but was literally only one day ahead of the kids in math class.”

In an interview before his ordination to the priesthood in 1992, the future priest said, “God knows what he is doing. He doesn’t always go by my script… It (my new life) seems very natural, it’s what I’m supposed to do.”

Joking that he initially decided to enter the priesthood for “the big bucks,” he said his children were delighted that their “old dad isn’t out sitting in a rocker. He’s out doing something he wants to do.”

After becoming a priest, Father MacIntyre was a parochial vicar at St. Michael the Archangel Parish in Silver Spring, Maryland, and then served for a decade as the pastor of St. Mary’s in Newport, a country parish in Southern Maryland, before retiring in 2006 and moving to St. Patrick’s Parish in downtown Washington.

In a 2017 interview as he marked his 25^th year as a priest, Father MacIntyre, then 85, said almost every day he liked to take a couple of mile-long walks around the city.

“People know I take walks. If the see me, (some) will join me,” he said.

At St. Patrick’s, Father MacIntyre said he enjoyed celebrating Mass there four to five days during the week, and the rhythm of prayer that ran through his daily life. His greatest blessing there, he said, was hearing Confessions. “When they walk out of my confessional, they start anew,” he said, adding that as the penitents left, “I always say, go out and do the best you can.”

The tribute written by his children noted that Father MacIntyre in his retirement enjoyed being surrounded by his grandchildren and remained a devoted baseball fan of the Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals. He also enjoyed music, theater and art, and his travels included a trip to Scotland for an international gathering of the MacIntyre clan, joined by his son Mickey and grandson Chris.

“While many of you may call him Father Fred, the three of us call him Dad,” his children wrote in the tribute.

After Father MacIntyre’s death, a link on the St. Patrick Parish website encouraged people to pray for him, and Father Andrew Wakefield, the current pastor there, noted that the late priest “was in residence with us for many years in his retirement and was a beloved member of our parish community.”

The day after Father MacIntyre’s Funeral Mass at St. Patrick’s, Msgr. Salvatore Criscuolo who had been the parish’s pastor when the retired priest was living there, said, “The gospel of the Good Shepherd was read, and Fred was truly a good shepherd. He knew his people, and they knew him. He loved hearing Confessions and talking to people. Someone came to me after Mass today and said she remembers talking to him, and she told Father Fred she worked for four bosses and three of them she really liked and the fourth one, she was having difficulty with. He simply said, three out of four isn’t bad, just keep trying. She said she never forgot those words and (that) made it a lot easier to work with all her bosses. That was Father Fred.”

Following his Mass of Christian Burial, the interment for Father MacIntyre was held at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Silver Spring.