Like most folks when they decide to step away from full-time work, priests face a decision on where they’re going to live.
Some choose to move to private residences. Some decide to live in a parish rectory. Others with health challenges might need to go to a place that offers assisted living.
Wherever they end up, though, these faithful men who have served the Catholic Church for most of their adult lives never stop being priests. To a man, they remain willing to continue that service as long as they can, whether it’s filling in at parishes to celebrate Masses, hearing confessions, visiting nursing homes, anointing the sick or doing whatever is needed.
The convenience of living in a parish rectory can be attractive to some of these older, or senior, priests. Calling them retired priests is a bit of a misnomer based on their activity.
While they’re no longer pastors or assistant pastors responsible for the daily operation of a parish, many of them keep plenty busy, particularly as the Church deals with a shortage of priests.
Fathers Thomas Kessler, James Walter and David E. Young are among a handful of priests in the diocese who have chosen to reside in rectories and help at the parish where they live and at other churches.
“I like being present,” Father Kessler said. “I like being around and available.”
When Father Kessler “retired” in 2018 as pastor of Lancaster St. Bernadette and Bremen St. Mary churches, he needed living quarters with first-floor access because of some physical difficulties.
Father Dan Dury, then the pastor at Columbus St. Catharine Church, invited Father Kessler to come there and use a first-floor suite in the rectory. Father Dury graciously offered to move himself to the second floor to accommodate Father Kessler, who accepted the invitation and has remained there since then.
Father Matthew Morris is now the pastor at St. Catharine. Ironically, Father Kessler received Father Morris’ dad into the Church as a convert to the faith while serving as pastor at St. Bernadette.
“I have a lot of arthritis in my knees, and I determined I’ve got to live someplace where there are either elevators or limited number of steps,” Father Kessler said. “Father Dury was just very hospitable and was really going out of his way to move upstairs because of my mobility issues, and I appreciated very much the sacrifice.”
Father Kessler, a former Catholic Times editor, celebrates Mass several times a week and on Sundays at St. Catharine Church, hears confessions and has been a spiritual director to seminarians at the Pontifical College Josephinum. Occasionally, he will celebrate Masses at other parishes.
At St. Catharine, he spends at least three hours a week in the confessional, which he noted is much more frequent than when he was ordained 48 years ago.
“That’s a surprisingly new phenomenon,” he said. “When I was a new priest in 1974, we would be in the confessional for half an hour or 45 minutes every Saturday. And the numbers plummeted right around that time, but now it’s turned around a lot, and St. Catharine’s is one of the places where the turnaround, I think, is pretty visible.
“There’s an emphasis on the sacrament of penance now, but also there’s a dynamism about this parish that took me by surprise. St. Catharine being a leafy neighborhood, with lots of homes half a million dollars or more, and lots of people in their 50s and older, I was not sure what to expect, but the surprising thing is the number of families with small children. Many of them are at weekday Mass.
“And these are the people who are teaching their kids confession, and going to confession themselves. It’s more of a middle-class parish that you might not expect in an area that has the reputation of being loaded with wealthy people. It’s touching just seeing how deeply and seriously people are taking their faith.”
Father Walter, 86, officially retired earlier this month as pastor of Sugar Grove St. Joseph Church. Bishop Earl Fernandes honored him at a Sunday Mass on July 17.
“Gratitude to God for 60 years of priesthood,” Father Walter said. “It was a magnificent crowd and all the trimmings and a wonderful reception.”
Father Walter has stayed active into his 80s, spending more than a decade in the Lancaster area, first at St. Bernadette and Bremen St. Mary for four years as pastor, and then at St. Joseph as pastor for 13 years until his recent retirement. In addition to his duties at the parish, he made regular nursing home and hospital visits and for 10 years has served as a chaplain for the Children of Mary religious sisters in Licking County.
He had come to Lancaster at age 69 after 11-plus years at Sunbury St. John Neumann, where he was pastor when a new church was built there for the rapidly growing parish. Eventually moving to a smaller parish community in Sugar Grove, where at age 73 he replaced Msgr. James Geiger, proved to be a good fit.
“I needed a smaller parish that I could really handle in my advanced years,” he said. “It worked out.”
Father Walter will continue to help at the parish while living in the rectory at Lancaster St. Mark Church, where Father Peter Gideon is pastor and now administrator of the Sugar Grove church.
“In retirement, I see three things,” Father Walter said. “One would be it’s an opportunity to be able to spend more time visiting relatives, nieces, nephews, cousins and so forth.
“And then secondly, to have some time for self-improvement. I love to read, I love to write and I even would appreciate more prayer time.
“And thirdly, to actually spend some time with families in the parish or those confined to nursing homes or hospitals. So often in the busy routine of parishes it’s, sadly, easy to neglect some of those sorts of things because you just can’t quite get the time to do it.
“And so, to build deeper friendships and then listening to parishioners with a greater frequency or intensity. You can do more to maybe give them a little guidance, help them and encourage them just by the fact you can listen a little bit longer and appreciate their needs and so forth.”
Blessed with good health and a family lineage that includes three cousins in their 90s, Father Walter is thankful for the blessing he has received in the priesthood and plans to keep going as long as he can.
“It’s all in God’s holy plan,” he said.
Father Young, 75, also ended up in a smaller parish at Zaleski St. Sylvester in Vinton County, where he relocated five years ago after stepping away from full-time ministry into so-called retirement.
Zaleski, a village of about 300 people in the southern part of the diocese, wasn’t exactly where Father Young expected to land, but he learned through other priests that the rectory there was unoccupied.
“I was at a meeting with other priests in December before retirement, and one of them said, ‘Where are you going to go?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know right now,’” Father Young said. “I said, ‘I can live in a tent.’”
He recalled passing through Zaleski only once before. Later, though, he found out that some ancestors had lived there and are buried there.
“I needed a place to go, and so I told Bishop (Frederick) Campbell that’s where I’ll stay,” Father Young said.
His schedule at St. Sylvester, which attracts a considerable number of guests who are visiting Zaleski State Forest or nearby campsites, includes a Wednesday daily Mass and a Sunday Mass, and hearing confessions and leading devotional prayers.
St. Sylvester is part of the Jackson-Vinton Consortium with Wellston Ss. Peter & Paul and Jackson Holy Trinity parishes, and he fills in at those churches when called upon. He also travels to Chillicothe once a month as the chaplain for the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Heart.
“I need to keep moving and keep my mind going,” Father Young. “And I love meeting new people. We get people from out of town at Mass and people from the other parishes.
“It’s really very quiet here, and I’m pretty much left alone. I meet the townspeople in the post office and talk with them a little bit, and they know who I am.”
Geographically, Vinton County is large but quite poor. Every Thursday, the St. Francis Evangelization Center, located nine miles away in McArthur, comes to the parish to distribute food.
“I try to be out there to see people,” Father Young said.
“It’s a good situation here, and I’m glad to be here. I don’t know where I’m going to end up, but I’ll be here as long as I possibly can.”
Father Young welcomes the slower pace of a smaller town that affords him time for personal prayer and reflection. He recites the rosary in the afternoons in church and prays the Liturgy of the Hours at his residence.
“I certainly have a better prayer life than I did before,” he said. “I reflect on my life and my priesthood and look at the things that I perhaps have done wrong and pray the Lord will make good what I did.
“Above all, I want to do the right things, be a good example. It’s one of the things I think about a lot.
“I remember the old priests that I knew so many years ago and how I was so attracted to them. It was not so much what they said but what they did. I mean, there’s an old Latin expression that says, ‘Sounds make noise, but example thunders.’ I always remember that.”
All three priests are enjoying this stage of their lives and feel blessed to continue to minister while taking time to attend to their own spiritual and personal needs.
“It’s parallel to being a grandparent,” Father Walter said. “I see priestly retirement more as spiritual grandfatherhood, where grandparents spend a little more time with grandkids and with friends because the younger generation is too busy trying to earn a living and keep the house going. So, it’s a different momentum, a different pace.”
Father Kessler offered a similar observation.
“You don’t retire from the priesthood,” Father Kessler said. “You don’t retire from being a husband or father, but it does take on different activities and a gentler flow of activities.
“I’m not the beloved grandfather because I’ve only known these people in the parish for a few years. But I can act as a spiritual director to a few laypeople, and that’s been a pleasure, and to be available as a priest and not just as an administrator.”
