His death, at Calvary Hospital, was caused by cancer, his identical twin brother, Joseph, said.  Father Grangeâs life traced the arc of the American Roman Catholic Churchâs struggle to absorb Latin American immigrants. He was ordained in 1966, when others of his generation were joining the sexual revolution, burning draft cards and marching for civil rights. But he believed, he once said, that he could make a difference through the church.  To that end Father Grange spent most of his career, by choice, at St. Jeromeâs parish in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, where he fought to save the parish school that he had attended as a child and raised $1 million to renovate the church, an Italianate building in a landmark district. The church was in such disrepair that it faced the possibility of being shut down.  Father Grange started a cleaning service to employ women in the parish, many of them from Mexico. A disciple of the community organizer Saul Alinsky, he began working with South Bronx Churches, an ecumenical community organizing group, to build housing for the poor and improve local public schools despite resistance from some church leaders, who feared that better public schools would be a threat to the local Catholic schools.  But âmany of our kids couldnât afford a Catholic High School,â recalled the Rev. Frank Skelly, who as pastor of Immaculate Conception Church in the Bronx worked with Father Grange on such issues.  To accomplish those goals, Father Grange could often be irreverent, beginning with his appearance. Finding the special treatment that came with being a priest distasteful, he favored a turtleneck rather than a clerical collar, except when saying Mass.  In 1992, at a meeting with Cardinal John OâConnor to protest the scheduled closing of St. Jeromeâs parish school, Father Grange brashly declared: âSt. Jerome, pray for us. And pray for Cardinal OâConnor.â  The school stayed open until this June, when it finally succumbed to budget pressures. After 31 years, first as associate pastor in 1977 and then as pastor beginning in 1981, Father Grange was no longer there to protest. In 2008, he was reassigned to St. Athanasius, also in the Bronx, and then, in 2012, to Our Lady of Guadalupe at St. Bernard in Manhattan.  Father Grange had earlier challenged Cardinal Edward M. Egan to save St. Jeromeâs dilapidated church. In 2001, he packed the audience at a meeting of several Bronx churches with his Mexican parishioners. Cardinal Egan called Father Grangeâs domination of the meeting âan outrage,â but later helped secure the money to give the church, built in 1898, a sparkling renovation.  One feature of the renovation that Father Grange was most proud of was the repainting of the Godâs eye in the vaulted ceiling from blue, as the primarily Irish congregation that built the church had imagined it, to brown, as the Mexican woman who cooked for him told him it should be.  Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the New York archdiocese, said on Thursday that Father Grange had represented an era of transition for the church. âHis fluency in Spanish, his identification with the people, his efforts on their behalf is, I think, what people will remember,â Mr. Zwilling said.  John Owen Grange was born on Feb. 7, 1940, to an Irish-American family on East 136th Street in St. Jeromeâs parish. His father, Joseph, was an accountant; his mother, the former Margaret Scanlon, was a homemaker and, after Father Grange was ordained, an assistant in the chancery office of the archdiocese.  Besides his twin brother, Father Grange is survived by two other brothers, Owen and Malachy, and a sister, Mary Ann Romano.  The area around St. Jeromeâs, on Alexander Avenue at East 138th Street, was once considered fancy â the Irish Fifth Avenue. But in the 1950s, as Puerto Rican, then Dominican, then Mexican families moved in, the Irish fled north and the parish became one of the poorest in New York City.  Father Grange embraced the change, so much so that in the Ireland House Oral History Collection, at New York University, he said, âI think Iâve lost my Irish identity.â  In his final days, his brother Joseph said, more than 1,000 parishioners, mostly Mexican, streamed through his hospital room, forcing the nurses to limit visits to no more than five minutes at a time.  One visitor was Dora Madrigal, whose daughter had been baptized by Father Grange. She remembered a day when he had taken a group of children to the beach and delighted everyone by coming back with only one of his shoes.  âHe was the holy father of the Bronx, of the poor,â she said.
Father Grange helped rebuild the impoverished South Bronx parish where he was raised into a more hospitable place for Hispanic immigrants in New York City.