Father Kenneth Acosta’s journey to Delaware St. Mary Church took him halfway around the world and back again.
He grew up in the Dominican Republic, was ordained as a priest in Australia, where he had his first two parish assignments, then came to Delaware 4 ½ months ago to serve as parochial vicar for two years under an agreement between former Columbus Bishop Robert Brennan and Archbishop Timothy Costelloe of the Archdiocese of Perth, Australia.
“What happens after two years, I don’t know,” Father Acosta said. “I’ll either go back to Australia or continue here, depending on where Bishop Brennan’s successor and Archbishop Costelloe decide I’m most needed.”
Father Acosta, whose full name is Max Kenneth Acosta Garcia, met Bishop Brennan during one of the bishop’s frequent visits to the Dominican Republic while he was a priest of the Diocese of Rockville Centre, New York, which has a large number of Dominican immigrants.
“I came in contact with then-Father Brennan while I was helping in my home parish, doing office work and assisting the parish priest,” Father Acosta said. “I kept in touch with him, and he was a source of encouragement as I was discerning whether God was calling me to the priesthood.
“After four years in Australia following my ordination in 2017, I wanted to have an experience as a priest closer to my homeland, somewhere my family could visit. I wrote Bishop Brennan in Columbus asking if he could help me, and he and Archbishop Costelloe worked out a way to make it possible.”
Father Acosta, 36, is the second of four children and has a younger brother and two sisters. He grew up in the Dominican capital of Santo Domingo, where his mother is an administrator with the government and his father is a coffee merchant. He was brought up mainly by his mother and grandparents because his parents are divorced.
“I felt the first stirrings of a call to the priesthood when I was about 9 years old,” he said. “As a young boy, I loved singing and playing music and serving as an altar boy. Possibly because of my family situation, I had a longing to be more involved in the Church because I felt comfortable there. Like many Dominican boys, I also enjoyed playing baseball.”
At age 14, he became part of the Neocatechumenal Way, an apostolate of small, parish-based communities founded in 1964 in Spain that takes its name from the early Church’s baptismal preparation of converts from paganism, known as catechumens. It provides post-baptismal information to adults who already are Catholics or to people who have been attracted by the communities’ testimony of Christian love and unity.
It has been an important part of the Church’s World Youth Day celebrations, has about a million members in 21,300 communities in 134 nations and has established 125 diocesan seminaries. In the United States, it has about 1,000 communities in 300 parishes in 75 dioceses.
“My parish Neocatechumenal Way community played a big part in my life,” he said. “I learned to play the guitar, became a cantor in my parish and joined a pre-seminary group. Though I was interested in the priesthood, I still had doubts.
“I had some friends who were seminarians, so I knew the type of life you had to lead in the seminary and knew you had to study a lot. I was looking for a girlfriend and studying business administration and just sort of wandering about.
“In 2007, I attended a European youth meeting in Loreto, Italy, led by Pope Benedict, and during that time, I felt a flame in my heart that took away whatever fear I had of the priesthood. I was ready to jump into the adventure. The Neocatechumenal Way wanted to send young people to Europe, Asia, America and Australia. I was willing to go anywhere, so I was picked for Australia.”
After six months of intensive training in English, he left for Australia at the end of 2007. He studied for the priesthood at Redemptoris Mater Seminary in Perth and the University of Notre Dame in Fremantle, both in western Australia, and was ordained on Nov. 17, 2017 by Archbishop Costelloe.
During his seminary training, he spent a year in the community of Alotau along Milne Bay in Papua New Guinea, where the Allies had an important naval base in World War II. “It was exciting to do street preaching there and to get an instant response and know you were affecting people,” he said.
His first service as a parochial vicar came at Good Shepherd Church in Kelmscott, Australia, a parish of about 600 people. “I did the usual variety of things a vicar does, working with the young and the old, with people in various types of distress,” he said. “This makes you realize your importance as a representative of the Church, ‘another Christ,’ and your closeness to Christ in being a priest.
“My greatest enjoyment comes in working with young people. I’ve seen in the three parishes I’ve served that there is a great future in the Church through its young people, and we need to give more to them to encourage their spirituality.”
After two years in Kelmscott, he was transferred to St. Helena Church in Ellenbrook, a suburb of Perth. He was stationed there until coming to Columbus. He said Ellenbrook is very much like Delaware in that both communities are about 20 miles from a larger city and are undergoing a similar type of transformation caused by expansion of that city into formerly rural areas.
In Delaware, he is leading St. Mary’s adult faith formation and youth outreach and is working with the parish’s Hispanic community, celebrating a 2 p.m. Mass in Spanish every Sunday. He said his biggest adjustment so far has been adapting to the weather.
“I’ve never served anywhere where it’s been this cold,” he said. “But the people have been very hospitable here, making it very warm in spite of the cold weather. I’ve found the Church to be a fundamental part of life in many countries, and it’s the same here.
“It’s a bright and alive Christian community, and Father Brett (Garland, the parish’s pastor) and I want to make sure the people of the parish take their calling to be missionary disciples seriously.”
