| Written by Michael Swan, The Catholic Register,
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 TORONTO - When Doreen Cullen went off to study social work at the University of Ottawa's St. Patrick's College in 1950, Catholic social agencies were dominated by do-gooders and amateurs who offered a haphazard patchwork of services. By the time Cullen retired in 1994 as the first lay person to head up Catholic Charities in Toronto, she had blazed a trail for professional competence and filled many of the gaps that had existed in the Catholic network of care.
Cullen succumbed to a six-month battle with cancer on Dec. 30. She was 79.
Always a quiet and persuasive diplomat, Cullen pushed Catholic social agencies into a new era of professionalism during her nine years as executive director of Catholic Charities.
“Doreen was so calm and organized in direction that people wouldn't know they were being revolutionized,” said Kathryn Johnson, Cullen's old classmate from the St. Patrick's College School of Social Work, class of 1952. “Her own dedication to certain things just gradually caught on.”
Among other things, Cullen was dedicated to professional standards.
“She brought a lot of knowledge and experience to Catholic Charities that someone who had never worked in the social work profession really couldn't have,” said Johnson.
Among Cullen's proudest achievements from her years running Catholic Charities was helping to establish Mary Centre which supports families with developmentally disabled adult children up to and including a place where developmentally disabled adults can live independently while still being supported by a community.
“The great achievement that gave her the most personal satisfaction was Mary House, because it was the first group home kind of thing that cared for people with disabilities,” said Johnson. “This was a great breakthrough.”
Though she had often worked outside the Catholic milieu, Cullen always regarded her work as a vocation.
“It is the social worker who takes up where the formal church leaves off,” said Doreen's big brother Fr. Bud Cullen, preaching at her funeral. “The social worker picks up the parts of life left dangling by the more formal church, or introduces the neglected participation of Jesus in the person's life, thus supplying what is needed to effect a close bond to Jesus.”
A sense of vocation permeated all the early graduates of St. Patrick's school of social work, which has since become the faculty of social work at Carleton University.
“That was the origin of Doreen's commitment. They were a strongly bonded group,” said Cullen's friend of 55 years, Jean Vale.
Cullen's career in social work included stints with the Catholic Children's Aid Society of Toronto, the Ontario Ministry of Health, the Children's Aid Society of Metropolitan Toronto, the Hospital for Sick Children's Thistletown Hospital northwest of Toronto, and project management for the Ontario Ministry of Community and Social Services.
Cullen's sense of mission and commitment in everything she did had a lot to do with growing up in an Irish-Catholic family that produced three priests among her four older brothers.
“It was that deep family, church, belief kind of thing — belief in God,” said Johnson. “There was a spiritual development that I think only the old Irish can have.”
Cullen's brothers — Basilian Fr. Ronald James Cullen, Fr. Bud Cullen, Fr. Dermot Cullen and Ray and his wife Kay Cullen — were present to mourn their baby sister's passing.
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