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Father Joseph Charles Linck, priest of the Diocese of Bridgeport, died of cancer onAugust 29, 2008, at the Rosary Hill Home, Hawthorne, New York, to which he had been admitted the previous day.
Joseph Linck was born in Bristol, Pennsylvania, on December 9, 1964, the only child of Charles and Mary (Babkowski) Linck. He was raised in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, and attended Lancaster Catholic High School. As a high school student, he served as a guide at the Ephrata Cloister Historic Site, an eighteenth-century Anabaptist attempt at celibate communal living. In the fall of 1982, Joseph matriculated at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in Merrimack, New Hampshire, graduating four years later with a BA in political science. His class of ten students doubled the size of the fledgling college, and the Thomas More experience propelled him into a lifelong love for scholarship, travel, and enduring friendships. In the months immediately after college, Father Linck was briefly a postulant with the Piarist Fathers. He then spent two years at the University of Dallas and was awarded an MA degree in theology in 1988 for the thesis "The Trinitarian Dimension of Eucharistic Communion with God in the Adversus Haereses' of Irenaeus of Lyons."
In fall 1988, he began doctoral studies in church history at The Catholic University of America, where he was a Johannes F. Quasten Scholar (1988-90) and was awarded the Bishop Thomas Shahan Prize for Excellence in Church History (1990) and a Hubbard Dissertation Fellowship (1991). In the intimate atmosphere of the Church History Department, he, together with classmates Ruth O'Halloran and Raymond Kupke, became one of the "three musketeers," an unlikely trio who pursued historical knowledge, travel, and adventure in the guise of scholarship.
The noted Jesuit historian Charles Edwards O'Neill, S.J., first introduced Joseph Linck to the collection of sermons of the colonial Maryland Jesuits in the Georgetown University library during a CUA graduate seminar in colonial American Catholic preaching and piety during spring semester 1989. His seminar paper "The Eucharist as Presented in the Corpus Christi Sermons of Colonial Anglo-America" was published along with several other papers in American Catholic Preaching and Piety in the Time of John Carroll (Lanham, MD, 1991). The collection also provided the material for his doctoral dissertation...