BY DAVID J. FOSTER
Staff Writer

He never treated the frail this intimately before, and it left him drained.

He was a radiologist, after all, more accustomed to examining patients through the distance of an x-ray. He was a medical "detective," sifting clues generated by radioactive isotopes and magnetic imaging.

Here, the ill stared into his eyes, then bowed to receive whatever power God chose to deliver through his open hand. With each prayer, Dr. Frank Shea's strength ebbed until his aching body drooped.

In this single morning, Shea's dual life unpredictably dovetailed in a way he would attribute to God's mysterious hand in a rational world.

He knows many of his agnostic colleagues at Temple University would wince at the hospital's former chief of radiology conducting a healing prayer service for his congregation at Memorial Church of the Holy Nativity, 205 Huntingdon Pike in Rockledge.

But these were the same analytical minds who rarely spoke of their fellow man of science spending nights and weekends studying to become an Episcopalian priest.

The calling
He heard the calling at his Catholic prep school. He was 15. Three years later in prep seminary, Dr. Shea, still committed to "serving God the best way he could," realized could not commit to the church's vow of celibacy.

But young Frank Shea never lost the "challenge to find truth," he said "to discover." He took refuge in the rationality of science and a Drexel University cooperative program in physics.

"Part of being an Episcopalian is a belief that reason has to play a role in interpreting God and scripture," he said. "Whatever we accept or believe may not be provable, but it cannot be unreasonable. It cannot go against reason. I am very much a rationalist."

That created one of the critical turning points in his life. His Drexel co-op landed the 20-year-sold in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where his uncle, a physician, headed the Oak Ridge medical department. It was the height of the Cold War and Dr. Shea aided in uranium purification for atomic bombs.

He later studied radiology at Temple from 1966 to 1970, then joined the faculty until his retirement in 1996.

"I loved the challenge of diagnosing- the detective work," Shea said. These were the "golden days" of radiology, he said, with the development and expansion of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and the fine-tuning of x-ray techniques like mammography. But the satisfaction was not "humanitarian." The "calling," though muted, remained.

In 1976, Shea, divorced and questioning Catholic church teachings, became an Episcopalian. He remarried a year later.

As an Episcopalian, "suddenly I had the freedom to become a priest," he said. "Being divorced was not a barrier, though it took time to convince my wife."

Still chief of radiology at Temple, he entered a part-time seminarian program in 1989 at the Lutheran Seminary in Mount Airy. Being the department head, he controlled staffing schedules. He agreed to work holidays in exchange for the Saturdays he needed in the classroom. After four years, and a two-year stint commuting to an Episcopal seminary in New York, he emerged Rev. Francis Shea, Episcopalian priest.

Quiet colleagues
During his years in the seminary, his medical colleagues were oddly silent. "In part it was because if you were running a major hospital you might be less than thrilled your chief of radiology was spending his free time on something not particularly geared toward furthering the interest of the institution."

Dr. Shea also ran into a few agnostic colleagues who could be caustic.

"There are a group of people who believe religion is nothing but mythology and legend without a lot of truth behind it," he said. "They feel that it's mainly deluded people who worship God. They are the absolute rationalists. They think all knowledge resides in the furthering of science, not furthering the appreciation of God.

"I think you need both. You need to believe in something with your brain and your heart."

On retiring from Temple, Dr. Shea began his "trainee" period at St. Mark's Church in Frankford. When it came time to find his own congregation, he landed last July at Holy Nativity, a church on wobbly financial footing. Membership was down and the 100-year-old building needed renovation.

"We have a three-year plan to rebuild," Shea said. "We are into our first year and I think we're doing fine."

More parishioners come to "see me as a physician than as a priest," Dr. Shea said, "at least as an initial contact. They will often talk about a physical problem that will lead into a spiritual problem. But it is the medical background that gives me entrée into a lot of people's hearts."

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