Carroll O'connor: Ashes Of Dead Son `Desecrated' In Spat

ROME - Actor Carroll O'Connor blames "a spiteful nun and a foolish police officer" for removing his son's ashes from a church locked in an ownership battle between Italian nuns and American priests.

In a letter appearing yesterday in an Italian newspaper, the actor denounced last month's removal of an urn containing the cremated remains of Hugh O'Connor, who committed suicide in March 1995.

"How sad. How wrong," O'Connor wrote to Corriere della Sera.

Paramilitary police currently hold the container, which had been placed under a stone slab at the 400-year-old Santa Susanna Church, run by the American Paulist fathers.

The mother superior of Cistercian sisters cloistered in a convent next door called authorities, claiming the remains were interred without proper approval even though the Paulists arranged the ceremony.

The nuns and priests have battled for years over control of Santa Susanna, which has served the American community in Rome since 1922.

O'Connor, star of the television shows "All in the Family" and "In the Heat of the Night," adopted his son immediately after he was born in Rome in 1962.

Hugh O'Connor - who went by the name of Ugo in Italy - had once told his wife he would like to be buried in Rome, his father wrote.

"But strange to tell, there were people who wanted to make trouble where it never existed. . . . A spiteful nun and a foolish police officer suddenly entered the church and dug up Ugo's ashes," O'Connor wrote.

"And yet it doesn't really matter. . . . For me, his remains will always be there. I shall not worry about what I have done. Let those who desecrated his small crypt worry about what they have done."