William D. Valente, 83, law professor at Villanova

William D. Valente, 83, formerly of Bryn Mawr, a professor at Villanova Law School for almost 30 years and an advocate for Catholic schools, died of complications from cancer Wednesday at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.

Mr. Valente was the youngest of 12 children born to immigrant Italian parents. He graduated from Southeast Catholic High School, now St. John Neumann, and was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. He completed Penn law school in two years and was editor of the law review and a member of the Order of the Coif, an honorary scholastic society.

After serving two judicial clerkships, he was in private practice in Philadelphia. As an assistant city solicitor from 1953 to 1957, he was involved in property issues affecting the revitalization of Society Hill.

For eight years Mr. Valente was a partner with the law firm of Mesirov, Gelman, Jaffe & Levin before leaving in 1965 to join the Villanova Law School faculty. He was a devoted family man, his daughter Christina said, and one reason for his career change was to be able to be home for dinner every night.

Mr. Valente was a founder and past president of Citizens for Educational Freedom, an advocacy group that won major court victories to secure textbooks and bus transportation for private and parochial school students in Pennsylvania. He was associate counsel for several school funding cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1967 he helped draft legislation for the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Act, which provided state aid for private colleges and universities.

That year Mr. Valente became the first lay president of the Board of Education of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. His goal, he told a reporter, was for the public and Catholic school systems in Philadelphia to do more sharing of facilities and ideas for the eventual profit of both. He said he was not afraid to face separation-of-church-and-state arguments.

"There is no clear-cut constitutional bar to the principle of sharing resources for the good of all children," he said. As board president he solicited financial aid for archdiocesan schools from the business community.

Mr. Valente authored dozens of scholarly articles and several textbooks including

Law in the Schools

,

Local Government Law

, and the two-volume

Education Law Treatise

.

He served on the boards of several Catholic colleges and private schools. In 1982, Pope John Paul II named him a Knight of the Order of St. Gregory the Great in recognition of his service to the church. He received the St. Thomas More Award in 1985 from the St. Thomas More Society of Philadelphia, a Catholic lawyers association.

In 1994 Mr. Valente became professor emeritus at Villanova and was awarded an honorary degree of doctor of laws.

"He was a renaissance man. He was interested in everything," his daughter said. He taught his children to fly kites and play tennis and shared his love of nature and history with them on vacations to national parks, she said.

In addition to his daughter, Mr. Valente is survived by his wife of 56 years, Elizabeth J. Valente, sons Joseph and Andrew; daughter Claire Balof; and five grandchildren.

A Funeral Mass was said Saturday at St. Patrick Church in Philadelphia. Burial was in SS. Peter and Paul Cemetery, Marple Township.