The Falls Church News-Press joins people of good will everywhere who today are mourning the passing of U.S. Representative Gerry Connolly at age 75 at his home yesterday.
Some of the overwhelming flow of tributes to his life of public service that have come in to us since yesterday can be read elsewhere in this edition. The measure of a good life, it can truly be said, is to leave the this world a better place than one came into it, and in Rep. Connolly’s case, few could top his contributions.
Boston born, early in life he followed a path toward priesthood, but his opposition to the war in Vietnam in the face of the Catholic Church’s silence on the subject caused him to pursue a different career path. Compassion and empathy defined his role in all he did. Whether serving a decade on the U.S. Congressional Foreign Aid staff drafting annual foreign aid authorization legislation, or whether it was getting elected to the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors in 1995 and serving as its chair from 2004 to 2008, or getting elected to the U.S. Congress in 2008 to fill a seat being vacated by Tom Davis, and to a total of nine terms, Connolly was strident against cruelty, including by standing outspokenly against many of the excesses of Donald Trump.
He often said his career in politics was not unlike a career in the priesthood as a calling to service.
He deserves major credit for turning Virginia bluish, and especially in mammoth Fairfax County, Falls Church’s neighbor, where as of last count, there was exactly one Republican countywide elected official. That was certainly was not always the case, and, in particular, Connolly championed a liberal pro-growth agenda, transforming the county from a bedroom suburb of D.C. into a powerful engine for economic growth in a fashion that grew the Metro Silver Line to Dulles and beyond, and brought the region one of the stronger collections of Fortune 500 companies in the U.S., something that may hold up now as one of its strongest resources against federal workforce reductions.
Politically, it was in the eastern end of Fairfax County, in his 11th District, that a transformation was huge, delivering the greatest shift anywhere in the state to move Virginia from overall red to purple to blue since 2000. In this election year in the state, the prognosis is for a further pro-Democratic gain in both state legislative bodies and a likely election of a Democrat for governor this November in an election that will send a huge signal to the entire nation ahead of next year’s midterms.
Connolly often performed small parts in Providence Player productions in his district, hosted one of the region’s most popular annual political shindigs on St. Patrick’s Days, and was a staunch supporter of the Cappies high school drama encouragement program, always showing up for its annual Kennedy Center fete.
