SAN DIEGO — Deacon William Klopchin, a retired permanent deacon of the Diocese of San Diego, died Oct. 12. He was 88.
He was born on June 28, 1935, in Nyack, N.Y., to immigrant parents — a mother from Czechoslovakia and a father from Ukraine — and was the youngest of five boys.
Deacon Klopchin married his wife, Rose Marie, on July 1, 1961.
He earned a bachelor’s in Accounting and Business from Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey in 1964 and worked as an accountant for the University of California, San Diego.
He was ordained to the permanent diaconate on May 31, 1986, by Bishop Leo T. Maher. The ordination Mass was celebrated at Our Mother of Confidence Church, where he had been a parishioner since 1968 and where he would serve as a deacon from 1986 until retiring in 2010.
During the 1990s, Deacon Klopchin also served in HIV/AIDS ministry through the diocesan Office for Social Ministry. In 2000, he was made ex officio presider over Our Lady of Refuge Parish’s finance council.
