Close your door and pray to your unseen Father

By Peter Finney Jr.
Clarion Herald

It's great when a young bishop has a mischievous sense of humor.

So, there was Holy Cross Father William Wack, quietly minding his own business in 2017 as a pastor in Austin, Texas, when he received what he described as a frightening phone call from the papal nuncio. He was just 49.

The papal nuncio usually calls a priest directly for one of two reasons: Either you are in big trouble or you are going to be asked to change your life for the life of the church.

In this case, Father Wack, who grew up as the ninth of 10 children in South Bend, Indiana – in the shadow of the Golden Dome – was being asked to move out of his comfort zone and his communal life as a Holy Cross priest to become the bishop of Pensacola-Tallahassee.

He wasn’t ready for the call, Bishop Wack told 350 priests at the Louisiana Priests’ Convention on Sept. 21. After all, he was flourishing in his role as a pastor and former assistant vocations director for his community.

He was happy and fulfilled.

A few days after accepting the appointment from the Holy Father – of course, he couldn’t tell anyone – Father Wack got to the airport for his flight in advance of the big announcement early the next morning.

The flight was delayed for several hours, so Father Wack improvised like he always had been taught to do growing up in a family of 10 kids.

“I snuck under the chairs and slept on the floor,” he said. “No one knew I was there. The next morning, around 7 before the 9 o’clock press conference, they took me on a tour: ‘Here’s the pastoral center, here’s your office, here’s the cemetery where you’re going to be buried.’ My whole life was flashing in front of me.”

Father Wack thought of his mother Alice and what she might say. When William had been ordained a priest, Alice bought a small charm inscribed with the words, “Mother of a Priest.”

Imagine a few years later, when her youngest son Neil also was ordained a priest. So, she bought a second charm.

When Bishop-designate Wack finally called home to break the news, he asked his mom what she was going to do with her two charms.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I’ve got two sons, but now I’ve only got one priest.”

Bishop Wack told the priests  candidly that he struggled in the first couple of years with his appointment. He missed the easy camaraderie and community of his Holy Cross brothers.

At a regional bishops’ retreat, he poured out his anxieties to a retired bishop about the sense of isolation he was feeling. The bishop told him: “Bill, no offense to your Holy Cross brothers, but you have to understand we’re your brothers now.”

That is why the power of fraternity is so important in the priesthood, Bishop Wack told the assembled priests.

When he was ordained to the episcopacy, Bishop Wack’s medically fragile father Jim was able to attend and brought up the gifts.

As Jim handed the bread to his son, he reached out and traced the Sign of the Cross on his son’s forehead.

“That was the last time I actually saw my father,” Bishop Wack said. “He went home and had a heart attack.”

The seedbed of two priestly vocations was not hard to miss. Bishop Wack’s folks joined him on a campus ministry retreat in Alaska once, and they shared a hotel room with two beds.

In the dark, Bishop Wack heard his father rustling in the sheets one night.

“My pop is in his boxers, and he gets out of bed and kneels down and prays in silence,” Bishop Wack said. “I asked my mom later, ‘Did he do that for me?’ And she said, ‘Get over yourself! He’s done that every night since we’ve been married. He gets down on his knees and prays for all of you kids every night.’ That was one of those moments where my entire life made sense.”

Bishop Wack said every night, he does the same thing for his priests. “Pray for one another,” he told his brothers.

[email protected]