Knighthood of St. Gregory by the Pope. He was also a Knight of Malta and a Knight Commander of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. While many of his Irish songs were quite sentimental, he did not indulge in strongly nationalistic themes and the first funds raised for the Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation in the early 1970s were takings from a concert he gave in the Rupert Guinness Hall. Later, he continued to donate to the Centre from performances by him at the National Concert Hall in Dublin. Faith of our Fathers Patterson was one of various artists (including the Monks of Glenstal Abbey, the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir, and the Dublin Philharmonic Orchestra) to create the Faith of Our Fathers album, which topped the Irish Albums Chart for two months in 1996. Illness and death In 1999, he learned he had a brain tumour. He had several operations in the following year and his condition appeared to have stabilised. Cardinal O'Connor, in his personal funeral plan, had requested that Frank Patterson sing Ave Maria at his funeral. Patterson was diagnosed with a recurrence of his illness on 7 May 2000 and he cancelled his appearance at the cardinal's funeral on the following morning, 8 May. Following the cardinals's funeral, Patterson briefly recuperated and resumed performing. Patterson's last performance was on 4 June 2000 at Regis College in Weston, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Shortly thereafter he was admitted to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center where he lapsed into a coma and died at the age of 61. At his death accolades and tributes came from, among others, President of Ireland Mary McAleese, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and Opposition leader John Bruton who said he had "the purest voice of his generation". He was survived by his wife, the concert pianist Eily O'Grady, their son Eanan, a violinist with whom he frequently performed, and by his sister Imelda Malone and brothers Noel and Maurice. Legacy In December 2005, Lisa Marie Presley attended a celebrity wedding in County Tipperary, and while there made a detour to place flowers on Patterson's grave as a tribute from the Presley family, impressed by Patterson's interpretations of songs later performed by Elvis. "You'll come and find the place where I am lying, And kneel and say an Ave there for me; And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me, And all my grave will