Fr. Don’s Weekly Letter ~ 25 May 2025

Dear Good People of Saint Bernadette,

“Well, the archdiocese of Kansas City Kansas finally got one of the Rooney brothers,” said Archbishop Naumann at the beginning of his homily at my brother’s ordination to the transitional diaconate last weekend.

We were asked a lot: why?

First, if you don’t know already, my brother Bob is now a transitional deacon! His vocation story is a beautiful one, and I’d like to share a bit of it with you.

Bob and I both went to the seminary in the fall of 1989, the year our brother John was ordained a priest for Lincoln. Why not Kansas City? When we were kids, our parents were always fighting against the then-archbishop Ignatius Strecker (who served as archbishop from 1969 until 1993) and we grew up thinking he was a bad guy. He was, indeed, one of the principal council fathers of Vatican II, and he sat in sessions next to Karol Józef
Wojtyła, also known as Saint John Paul II. It is true that some crazy things were happening in the Church (in Kansas City, at least), and we were told “It’s Vatican II.”

So we were convinced that Kansas City wasn’t a good place to be a priest, even if we were to have been accepted considering our parents. So Bob and I joined the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska.

I was sent to Saint Charles Seminary in Philadelphia – I loved it, but Bob was sent to a place with a more monastic style and discipline. Not to his liking, he returned and finished his law degree at Georgetown.

But he still felt he was called. In 2006 or 7, Bob went back to seminary, this time studying for Kansas City at Mundelein, Chicago’s seminary. My dad suddenly had a stroke in 2008 (Mom was the one who had real health problems) and died in the early days of 2009. That year Bob left the seminary to take care of them. He had been a very successful medical malpractice defense litigator and took good care, first, of Dad, and then of Mom until she died in 2019.

Shortly after that, he informed us that he would be seeking to go back to the seminary, but he was already older (four years younger than me) and beyond the normal cut off age for people to enter formation. Then, the pandemic... Kansas City sent him to Saint John XXIII seminary in Boston, a seminary for “older” vocations, where he still has one more year before being ordained a priest.

He gave a beautiful homily last Sunday (which just happened to be our mom’s birthday) about why all of this matters. He spoke of sacrifice, he spoke of grace and blessing, and how we mirror the reality of Jesus in our lives – not just priests, all of us.

At the end of Mass (I presided) I thanked him for how he had literally put his own life on hold to take care of our parents, something that the others of us could not have done living at long distance.

Do you see how God, first of all, doesn’t let go? God also is faithful, though most of the time it feels like we’ve got to be the ones hanging onto him. Bob certainly enjoyed being a litigation attorney (I learned last weekend that Bob had only lost one case in 30 years), but it wasn’t really the reason he put Bob on this earth. We knew this to be true as our family came back together again (the last time we were together was also at our home church at Mom’s funeral), and his many friends and colleagues from over the years came together to his ordination and Mass as he begins this new chapter.

So often as a priest you feel like you have to be counter-cultural. But for a weekend in Kansas City it seemed normal, even if it is a bit unusual to have three in one family. If you think you might have a vocation (or know somebody who might), share this story. It’s good, and normal.

The Lord be with you.