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Eric Sammons:
Fr. Dwight Longenecker has had quite a life. Brought up an evangelical Protestant, he attended the fundamentalist Bob Jones University. He eventually went to Oxford, and became an Anglican minister. And then, finally he was receiving into the Catholic Church, and eventually became a Catholic priest.
We’re going to talk about his story today on Crisis Point.
Hello, I’m Eric Sammons, your host, Editor-in-Chief of Crisis Magazine.
Before we get started, I just want to encourage people to hit the like button, subscribe to the channel, follow us on social media at Crisis Mag, subscribe to our email newsletter, you know the drill.
So normally I give a bio at this point, but I don’t think there’s any reason to give a bio, since we’re going to talk about your bio right now. Father, so you wrote this book, so yeah, I should let people know, but Dwight Longenecker wrote the book, There, and Back Again, A Somewhat Religious Odyssey, from Ignatius Press just came out I think a couple of months ago. It’s a great book. Highly recommend it. I’ll make sure I put a link to how you can buy it in the description.
Now, I know, this is like the generic question, I always avoid asking people about a book, but I think it’s appropriate, and that is why did you write this book? In other words, why would you think you should write an autobiography? You address it in the beginning of the book, but I want you to address it here. Why did you write an autobiography?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Well, I’ve told my conversion story at different conferences, and speaking engagements over the years, and people said, “Is there a written version of this, an extended version?”
And I always drew back because, well, like I say in the introduction, some of the guilty parties are still living. But now, I’ve moved on. I’m a little bit older. I wanted to write it down, and record it there. And so, it’s really for people who are interested in hearing my story, not because it’s so special, but because it is a bit unusual. So I finally got down to writing the whole thing down.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, and we’re glad you did. Now, I want to just go through some of the high points, low points, whatever you want to call them, of your life at times.
One thing I was struck by, right at the beginning, is I think it was at the age of five, you accepted Jesus as your personal Lord, and Savior, and it was due to a preaching you heard. I had a similar experience. I was older. And I think sometimes cradle Catholics might not quite understand what that experience is, might discount it, but can you explain what that meant to you, and how it continued to mean something throughout your entire life?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Yeah, one of the strengths of Evangelical Protestantism, has always been an emphasis on the personal relationship of a person with the Lord Jesus, personal faith, a real faith where the person quite senses a personal relationship with the Lord. And I don’t discount that. I think that’s a good thing.
And furthermore, I believe an awful lot of Catholics also have that kind of relationship. They just don’t use that kind of language. So I’ve tried, through my ministry, to make connecting points with that, and I can still remember that I was a five years old, a kindergartner, when I came home from church, and told my mom that I wanted to accept Jesus as my Savior.
And so, we knelt together by the bedside. I said I was sorry for the wrong things I’d done, and that I wanted to be saved, and go to heaven. And that first, personal experience of faith, I believe is a profound experience.
In the Catholic Church, we say that a child reaches the age of reason at the age of seven. For me, it was a bit earlier, and I don’t apologize for that, but I do try to explain it to people, and say, “That was the kind of foundation experience of faith for me. And it’s meant a lot, and it still means a lot to me, even today.”
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, and I think it is something where we know it’s not a sacramental event, of course, but it really did have an impact. I know, my own life, it changed the direction. I was going one way, and then, after I did it as an early teen, and then, I just started living a completely different way, and it really can have something.
So then, explain a little bit then, how, before you went off to college, what your life was like as an evangelical Protestant, your family life, what were you involved in that continued that path that you started at the age of five?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Well, we would’ve gone to church twice on a Sunday. We would’ve endured long, Bible-based homilies. If people complain about the length of their homilies in the Catholic Church, we regularly sat through 30, or 45 minute Bible sermons twice on a Sunday, and once on a Wednesday evening.
And we also had family devotions every night, where we would read a Bible passage, and we would pray together. So our faith, a simple, Protestant, Bible-based faith was very much part of our day-to-day existence, and our weekly existence. So the Lord meant a lot to us, and we had a real faith under understanding that God would provide for our needs. And this is one of the themes that’s run through my story, There and Back Again, about how God provides step-by-step.
Eric Sammons:
Now. Okay, here’s something you did, I didn’t do in high school as evangelical Protestant, is you smuggled Bibles into Russia. And can you just tell us a little bit about that? Because obviously, that that’s a big deal.
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Yeah, it sounds dramatic, doesn’t it?
Eric Sammons:
It does.
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Well, one of the other strengths of evangelical Protestantism is they take missionary work seriously. And we would have these various missionaries visit in our home as we were growing up, and we would hear their stories of the heroic things they did when they were working in the jungle with indigenous tribes, or when they were working in the inner city in some squalled place, and doing real, genuine frontline missionary work.
And one of those missionaries was an old Ukrainian Baptist pastor named Peter Danica, and he had found refuge, found what you call asylum in the US, and smuggled Christian literature, in Bibles from Western Europe, into the Eastern Bloc countries, the communist countries, and finally then onto Russia.
So I went on a summer mission team with his mission, and that was our job. We were ostensibly American college tourists driving into Poland, and Czech Republic, and some of the Eastern Bloc countries, and taking van-loads of literature which we then handed on to Christians in those countries, who then repackaged them, and took them to the next step into Russia.
Eric Sammons:
Now, did you think at that time, did you just look at Russians who, of course, obviously, orthodoxy, now, Soviet Union Times that had been crushed a lot, but did you see them as Christians, or did you see that people behind Eastern Bloc as mostly just atheists, or non-Christians?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Now, remember this is in the sixties, and seventies when the American attitude to Russia was, “They’re all communists, and atheists.” As an evangelical Christian, I knew nothing about the Eastern Orthodox Church except that there were beards, and lots of icons.
And so, they were people that needed to be converted, people that needed to read the Bible, and get saved as far as we were concerned. And so, sending them the Bible was a way to both help to evangelize, but also, there was a political edge. Sending the Bible was a way of undermining the communistic, atheistic regime.
Eric Sammons:
Right. Now, as a Protestant, I remember one of the most famous, and infamous universities was Bob Jones University. Now, I was of the Methodist more mild. We thought that Bob Jones people were crazy when I was a Protestant. And then, of course-
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
And we believe that you were just liberal modernists.
Eric Sammons:
Exactly. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. But you went to Bob Jones University, which is famous in Catholic circles as being very anti-Catholic.
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Yes.
Eric Sammons:
Can you talk a bit about your experience at Bob Jones University, what it was like?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Yeah. The Evangelical fundamentalism in my home in Pennsylvania was pretty mild-mannered. We weren’t anti-Catholic, but we did believe Catholics needed to get saved. But at Bob Jones, of course, the temperature, the climate, and the theological temperature went up considerably.
So yeah, at Bob Jones, Dr. Bob as he was called, this is the son of the founder. I was there when Pope Paul the sixth died,” and I recount this in the book actually, and I say that Dr. Bob got up in chapel, and said, Pope Paul the sixth, that old deceiver has gone to his appointed place with his brother Judas.” So that was the kind of rhetoric which we had at Bob Jones, which is anti-Catholic.
He also said the next month, when John Paul the first was elected, he got up, and said that second Pope John Paul, so-called John Paul, has died in his sleep suddenly. And he said he was probably poisoned by the Cardinals like it was in the Middle Ages. He said, nothing has changed. And in the book I say, he would be surprised how many Catholics actually agreed with him.
Eric Sammons:
Right. Exactly. So did you basically take on the anti-Catholicism of Bob Jones University while you were there, or did you just see it as just a quirk of being there?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Yeah, I took it in my stride. I had come across, while I was at Bob Jones, I used to do yard work on a Saturday morning to earn some pocket money, and I tell the story there of how I met a lovely Catholic lady who was named June Reynolds, and she lived in a little cabin in the woods.
And her daughter was the mother superior of the Poor Clare Convent, which is next to her property. I had never met, or heard about Poor Clare nuns, but June was a winning person, a kindly, gentle, academically minded person. She was a former professor of botany at George Washington University. So she was literate, she was kind.
And for the first time I encountered a Catholicism, which was genuine, and real, and sincere, and also, very loving, open-minded, and that was a real attraction to me.
Eric Sammons:
Good. Now, the stereotype of fundamentalists is that they’re, let’s just say, not very bright, they’re uneducated. Even Bob Jones University graduates, I think a lot of people would look down on them, yet you went from Bob Jones University to Oxford, and I think that’s something that, at least the stereotype would be like, that seems a little bit odd. What drew you from one to the other?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Well, while I was at Bob Jones, not only did I meet June Reynolds, who was a kindly, and winning Catholic, but I also was afflicted with a serious illness called Anglophilia, which is the love of all things English.
And I’ve been reading C.S.S. Lewis, and T. S. Eliot, and these great English writers, and I can remember clearly asking myself as a sophomore in college, these guys are, obviously, Christian writers, but they’re not members of the local Southern Baptist Church. What are they? And it turned out they were Anglicans.
I then discovered that there was a little breakaway Anglican church in Greenville called Holy Trinity Anglican Orthodox Church, and we were actually permitted to go there. And a whole bunch of my friends started to go to worship on Sunday nights at the Little Anglican Church. We went to Evensong, which is the Anglican version of Vespers. We sand decent hymns, knelt down to pray, and lit candles, and thought it was wonderful. So that was my introduction to the Anglican Church.
Eric Sammons:
Now, I’m a little bit surprised that Bob Jones allowed that, in a sense, if they’re so anti-Catholic, you think they’d be against, of course, even this pseudo-Catholic Catholicism, whatever you want to call it, that was found in this Anglican church, but they were okay with that.
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Bob Jones University was founded in the late 1920s by Bob Jones, Sr., a Methodist country preacher, who realized that as the mainstream colleges like Harvard, and Yale, Princeton, and so forth, were departing from their Christian foundation, that good Christian families in all sorts of denominations would want a good solid college to send their kids to.
So he founded Bob Jones not as a Baptist College, which it largely is now, but as a non-denominational, interdenominational college. And so, he wanted to have kids from good Christian families from Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran, and Episcopalian, all the different Protestant denominations to go there.
So that’s why we were allowed to go to the Anglican Church, because it was still considered to be okay. This was a breakaway from the Episcopal founded by a breakaway priest in the early 1960s. And furthermore, one of the major donors of Bob Jones was on the board of this little church as well, so there was another motive for having us, allowing us to go there.
Eric Sammons:
Now, I consider myself an Anglophile as well, but man, you are a hardcore one, because you wouldn’t live there.
Tell us about, so you went from Bob Jones, you moved to, and I guess, you were already Anglican it sounds like, when you moved there, but then, you moved to England, and that’s where you ended up becoming Anglican priest, correct?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Yeah. I had this idea, while I was still at Bob Jones, that it would be a dream to be an Anglican, I’d visited England a couple of times, to be an Anglican priest in a beautiful old English village with one of these ancient churches. The sorts you see when you watch one of those, those TV crime stories in England, the ones that everybody loves, Miss Marple, and so forth, to be a priest in one of those beautiful old, mellow churches, a thousand years old, and live in an English village.
And so, when I left Bob Jones, I wrote to the only Anglican theologian I knew, or I’d heard of, I didn’t know him, J. I. Packer, who’s, now, deceased. And he wrote back, recommended a couple of theological colleges as they call seminaries in England. And one of them was at Oxford. And so, I applied, and the door opened from there. That’s why I keep saying, “God will provide.”
Eric Sammons:
So were you married yet?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
No, I was in my early twenties. I graduated from Bob Jones in my early twenties, and went over to Oxford, and began to train for the Anglican ministry.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. So then, you became a priest while you’re over there, and did you end up at one of these churches that you imagined?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Yeah, after being ordained, I served for four years in a parish in East Sussex, down in the southeast corner of England. And then, I did a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which I talk about in the book. And after that, I went to be a chaplain at Cambridge for two years. And after that I went on to be the vicar of two beautiful old churches on the Isle of Wight, an island, which is just off the south coast of England.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. And at what point during that time did you get married?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
I got married after I was in the parish for a couple of years, so this would’ve been by then the late 1980s.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. And now, I want to bring up your trip to… Actually, let me take a step back. Looking back on, now, that you’re a Catholic priest, do you feel like your call to the Anglican priesthood, that vocation, was it similar to how a Catholic might be called to the Catholic priesthood, or was it different in any way?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Well, I don’t know how once someone’s called to the Catholic priesthood. By the way, I was called to the Catholic priesthood through this roundabout sort of way, a first been called to the Anglican priesthood.
But I think there are, naturally, going to be some similarities that the man will here have a desire, first of all, a desire to be a priest, and then, to hear a particular call through the experiences of his prayer life, and that’s what happened to me.
And I think I can look back, and say I was being called to be a priest, and from my particular evangelical Protestant background, the Anglican Bridge, the Anglican Church was a good bridge into that final calling.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, I see. Now, you mentioned about Jerusalem, and I want to bring this up, because this is fascinating, so you, basically, hitchhiked to Jerusalem, if I remember correctly, and you’re an Anglican, but then, you stopped at Benedictine monasteries on the way, is that right?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Yes, through my friend June back in Greenville, I had become acquainted with the Benedictine tradition, and visited some Benedictine monasteries. So after my first job as an Anglican priest, I decided I had three months free before starting up in Cambridge, so I decided to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, hitchhiking all the way, and staying in Benedictine monasteries on route. It was a great adventure.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, sounds like it. Yeah. Now, you end up becoming Catholic. Now, can you talk a little bit about, you’ve been an Anglican vicar I guess, for a while now, and I assume you’re probably, in a lot of ways, living the dream you had, and so, you ended up upending that dream, so what happened?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Yeah, I very much was living the dream. We had a big house in the country, a big old vicarage house in the country, I was the pastor of two beautiful old churches that were a 1000 years old, and enjoyed the Catholic worship, the Anglo-Catholic worship.
By this time, my understanding of the faith, the Anglican experience, was much more Catholic in its understanding, and in its practice. I had accepted a Catholic understanding of the priesthood, and the Sacraments, and I would’ve argued that I was a Catholic, but just not a Roman Catholic. My misunderstanding was corrected later.
Eric Sammons:
Yes. Right. So I assume, at this time, you believed, obviously, your orders in Anglican were valid, unlike the Roman Catholics were saying, but you were basically, yeah, I think this is similar to Newman, of course, he had a very Anglo-Catholic view beforehand, and so, you’re living as this, but then, what made you then swim the Tiber?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Well, by the end of the 1980s, the debate over women’s ordination to the priesthood in the Church of England had reached a climax, and it was being debated, all across the church, from the general Synod level, down to the diocesan synod, the deanery syn, and the parish level. Everybody was debating whether the Church of England shall ordained women as priests.
And I have always tried to be open-minded by upbringing, and by nature I’m conservative, but I was trying to give the other side a fair hearing. And in fact, the proponents of women’s ordination had some very good arguments, and I was listening to them, and paying attention to them. But really it came down to this, what the question is, what do you do? I call this the Protestant problem. What do you do when sincere, good, Bible believing, prayerful, generous, Christians disagree about a major issue?
The only thing they can do is say, “Well, I guess, it doesn’t really matter. We’ll stay together.” Or they say, “It really does matter. We have to go our separate ways.” And this is why we have tens of thousands of Protestant denominations.
And that caused me therefore to look again, at the authority question in the Catholic Church, which made me to reexamine that question, which led me back to the writings of Cardinal Newman, the fathers of the church reexamining the real story of the Protestant reformation in England, and so forth, which then helped me to make the decision.
Eric Sammons:
Now, today, for Anglican priests converting, we have the whole mechanism of the ordinariate, which Pope Benedict generously set up. But in your time when this happened, you have no, to my knowledge, there’s no real mechanism, obviously, for your livelihood. You’re giving up your dream, not only your dream, but a way to support your family.
So what did you do when you decided to become Catholic? Because we’ll get to the second, but you didn’t become a Catholic priest immediately. You just became a Catholic. So what did you do?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Well, first of all, there was actually a mechanism set up. It’s called the pastoral provision. And the pastoral provision was set up by Pope John Paul II, in the early 1980s, for Episcopal priests only in the USA, allowing Episcopal priests who were married to convert, and receive a dispensation from the vow of celibacy.
So in the Anglican Church, and by the early 1990s, we knew about this provision, and when I came over, came into the Catholic Church in the early 1990s after the Church of English vote to ordained women as priests. Nearly 800 other Anglican priests also came in, which was nearly about almost 10% of the Anglican priesthood at that time.
Eric Sammons:
Wow.
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
And the numbers were played down for diplomatic ecumenical reasons, but really a large number came into the Catholic Church. And at that point, Benedict the 16th, or maybe it was when he was still Ratzinger, I don’t remember the exact timing, but he actually extended the pastoral provision, which had only been for the US, to England as well, to accommodate us.
So a good number of my friends who were actually married men did receive a dispensation, and were ordained as Catholic priest in England in the early 1990s.
My own story was delayed for another 10 years.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. Did you know Fr. Ray Ryland?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
I did know, yes.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. I got to tell the story, because I like it so much, is when I first was going to school at Steubenville, I’d just been a Catholic for less than a year, and I had no idea who Fr. Ray Ryland was, or that, and I go to confession my first week there, and it was a room where you could see the priest, and he’s sitting there, he’s hands down, and I see on his hand, I’m looking down to, I see his hand, and I’m thinking during confession, I’m like, “That looks an awful lot like a wedding ring. And I think that’s scandalous that a priest would wear that, and people would think he might be married.”
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Right.
Eric Sammons:
And then, later, I learned, of course, oh, he is married, he’s a former Anglican priest. So I always think of that when I think of married Anglican priest becoming Catholic priest.
But so, now, you had 10 years, I guess, why decide not to look into becoming a Catholic priest immediately? And then, why did you then decide 10 years later, yes, you felt call a Catholic priesthood?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
It wasn’t my decision. To answer your earlier question, I had to go, and find a job. So I retrained as a script writer, and got a job with a little video production company, and we moved our family to another part of England, and got settled, and bought a house, and got on with life, trying to support my family, like any married man does.
I applied for the priesthood, and began to do my training with some of the other former Anglicans, but my paperwork got stalled in the bureaucracy, and for all sorts of reasons it didn’t happen. Went from one Bishop to another Bishop, and it took them six months to answer a letter, and then, they said, “Yes, we think so, but not in my diocese.” And for all sorts of petty reasons.
Anyway, the Lord had other plans in store. I continued for 10 years, working. I then was working for a Catholic charity called St. Barnabas Society, which offers a bit like Marcus Grodi’s Coming Home Network, it offers help to former Protestant clergy who committed the Catholic Church.
I was a fundraiser for them for about seven years, and also, began to do some freelance writing. So that began to help support my family as well.
And then, bit by bit through God’s providence, the door opened for us to return to Greenville, South Carolina, where I was ordained as a Catholic priest for the Diocese of Charleston.
Eric Sammons:
Now, I should have asked, obviously you became Catholic, but that doesn’t automatically mean your wife, and your kids would become Catholic. So did they come into churches the same time you, did you all go this together, or was it more of a piecemeal situation?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
When we committed the church, our oldest two children, we only had two children at that point, and they were just infants, so they came into the church with us, and my wife also was received into the church at that time.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. So now, you’re a Catholic priest, you’re a married Catholic priest. You’re with, what’s the diocese for Greenville? I forgot.
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Diocese of Charleston. It’s the whole state of South Carolina.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. Diocese of Charleston, South Carolina. So now, when you get started, did you just get assigned to a parish, as like an associate pastor somewhere?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
No, the Vatican says that if we’re the married man should be assigned to jobs where there is an independent salary. So usually as a school chaplain, a hospital chaplain, or something like that. And we’re allowed to help as an assistant in a parish, but not to be pastors.
So I was first assigned to be chaplain of St. Joseph’s Catholic school here in Greenville, and was a full-time job, so I went to school in the morning with my kids, who were by this time, old enough to go to middle school. So that’s where I served for the first five years.
I then wrote to the Bishop, and said, “I’m aware with a shortage of priests, that I’m happy where I am, but if you would like me to serve in a parish somewhere, I’m happy to do so.” Because I reckoned that having a full-time priest for 700 high school kids who also have their own parishes to go to was a little bit of a waste of manpower.
So he, then, assigned me as the administrator of our Lady of the Rosary Parish in Greenville. And then, five years later after we built the new church, and things were going well, he appointed me as pastor, and he had to get back to the Vatican for special permission for that appointment too.
Eric Sammons:
Are there any other married Catholic priests, or pastors in this country that you know of?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Yes, I believe so. In fact, I think one of my friends from my time at Wycliffe Hall at Oxford, father Gregory Elder, I believe he’s a pastor in California.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. Now, I think I probably should ask this for everybody to understand. Do you support the discipline of celibacy for priesthood? Do you think that’s best, or do you think it should be changed to allow married men?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Soon after I was ordained, the National Catholic Register interviewed me about an article on this topic, and the person writing the headlines for the day must’ve been having an off day, or must’ve been very busy, because my wife cut out the headline, and she laminated it, and put it on our fridge. And it says, married priests favor celibacy from personal experience.
Eric Sammons:
Oh, my gosh.
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Yeah. So do I favor the discipline of celibacy? First of all, I always want to honor my fellow priests, the vast majority of whom in my experience accept the discipline of celibacy with good sheer, and with a lot of down to earth realistic attitudes.
I don’t find them pushing for a change in the discipline, and it’s not up to me to push for a change in the discipline. I have my particular opinions about it, but it’s above my pay grade. So yes, I support the discipline of the church, because it’s not my place to say it, or to challenge it.
Eric Sammons:
Now, what about your own experience though, as a married Catholic priest, as the pastor of a church? What are the challenges, and the unique perspective that you bring to that experience?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Well, that’s a complicated question. First of all, I would say, for the people who criticize this, and say, “The celibate men are always available 24/7, to serve the Lord, and to serve us, and to serve the church, and how does a married man do it?”
And I would say, “Come on, the celibate men work hard. They’re great guys, but they have days off too. They take vacations, and so, they should. Okay, they’re not available 24/7, and to be honest, some of them are not so hardworking as I like to make out.”
In my experience amongst any group of people, there’s going to be some people who are lazy, some people who are not available, some people give people the brush-off. So we need to be realistic about that, and not romantically, ideologically concerned about it.
The other thing is about the timing. It’s true that as a Catholic pastor, there are demands on my time, and there are schedules which are difficult to maintain with a wife, and family, but there are many people in many professions who have those kinds of demands. Firefighters, first responders, truck drivers, soldiers, and so forth. And they learn how to cope with night shifts, and with difficult schedules. Schedules, which I might say are probably more difficult than mine.
And also, a parish pastor is his own boss, so I can arrange those schedules accordingly as I need to.
So from a practical point of view, it’s not really a problem.
Eric Sammons:
Do you find that, is anybody ever hesitant, or concerned that you might be sharing the problems in the parish, or the people, with your wife, or spouse, or anything like that? Because heard that too, that a celibate man basically, he’s not going to be telling his wife. “Oh, yeah. So-and-so is a problem,” or anything like that. Do you find any concern with that?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Of course, I go home, and I share my day with my wife, and we talk about things in the parish, and we talk about problems in the parish, and people in the parish as anybody would. But of course, we never talk about the confessional.
We never betray any confidences within a counseling situation, just like any other person who’s in a confidential situation. Doctors don’t go home, and discuss the intimate details of their clients with their spouses, and neither does a priest, and we certainly don’t violate the seal of the confessional.
Eric Sammons:
Right, right. Now, we’ve been talking a lot here about your journey to become Catholic, how you start out Protestant, fundamentalist, Anglican, Catholic. I think a question a lot of Catholics today would have, isn’t, Why did you become Catholic back then, but why do you stay Catholic now?
Because a lot of people have left the church. We both know this. There’s a lot of confusion in the church. We both know this. Why do you stay Catholic now? What keeps you in the Catholic Church?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Well, one of the things which the present chaos, and the present crisis has actually produced in me, and I think in a lot of others, is to reassess our priorities.
I love being a Catholic. I love being a Catholic priest. I can’t think of any other way of life, or any other church though I wish to follow. However, we do have a tendency in the Catholic Church to focus on church, church, church, church politics, church liturgy, church people, priests, prelate, popes, all these things.
Come on folks, we’re Christians. We follow the Lord Jesus. We love the Lord Jesus Christ, and his blessed mother. We love the sacraments of church, because they are the seal of our salvation. This is the priority in our lives. And if we’re disappointed with the particular priest, or with a particular pope, or the particular direction of the prelates in the church, it helps us to focus back on what we’re really about, living the Gospel, living the faith, proclaiming the faith with our lives, and with our words, and our works. And that’s what it’s about.
And I also try to focus also on what’s local.
With social media today, and with the mainstream media, we get bad news, 24/7, right into our palms with our little cell phones, from all over the world, and over the church. And everybody loves to focus on the bad news, and the bad news is being dished up all the times. All it takes is for a priest in New Zealand to drop his trousers, and suddenly all across the media, and we hear all the bad news, and we never hear good news. News is real, and it’s local.
I tell people, “Focus on the local. Do what you can, with what you have, where you are. Be thankful, if you have a good parish, and a good priest, and good people, focus on what you’re doing there, live the Gospel, that’s where it’s real. Don’t worry about what’s going in Washington, and New York, and Rome, and London, okay, you can’t do anything about that anyway, just get on live your Catholic life, and be joyful.”
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, that’s good advice. I was thinking, there’s a couple in my parish that got married this past weekend, and I just was thinking at one point that this is far more important, and far deeper meaning than, like you said, the priest in New Zealand who draws his trousers, something like that, or whatever the case may be, and this is real, because these are people I know, these are people in my parish, these are people who are going to, now, be married, and hopefully, God willing, have children, and raise them in the faith, have them baptized more souls for Christ.
It has a far greater impact directly to me than whether, or not some priest, or bishop in California, wherever, does something stupid, or something like that. I think it’s very good advice that you’re giving there.
So Father, I want to recommend, first of all, to everybody listening, your book, There and Back Again, a Somewhat Religious Odyssey. It’s a great book, it’s just easy to read, interesting, it keeps you there. I just wanted to ask you though, is there anything else, any other advice you want to give us? Anything else you want to let us know, your pastoral wisdom, so to speak, for people who are listening, or watching right now?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Yeah, I think I would, again, talk about social media, and the media generally, and to remind people, remember people who are sending out the social media, and people are sending out the mainstream media, almost everybody has an agenda they’re trying to push. You don’t have to believe it. You don’t have to believe every headline you read. The Lord gave you a brain, and he’s given you a heart. Use your heart to love the Lord. Use your brain to assess, and think through what people are saying, and before you jump to conclusions, think it through, pray it through, and you’ll be stronger in these times of confusion in crisis.
Eric Sammons:
Now, I believe you have, I know you do, you have your own website? Can you tell us about what people can find there, and where we can go to get it?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Yeah, the website is dwightlongenecker.com, and I still blog just about every day, although blogs are getting a bit old hat. I know I should probably have a video in the YouTube channel, and all the rest, but there we go. I still blog almost every day. There’s also some audio courses, and video courses there, as well as my bookstore, where they can browse all my books.
Eric Sammons:
And also, I can’t have this interview without asking you also about your parish. I’m just going to let everybody know my own daughter goes to Fr. Longenecker’s Parish, so could you tell us a little bit about Our Lady of the Rosary, and what stuff is going on, what good things are going on there?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
It was basically a warehouse-type building, which had been converted as a worship space. And the first meeting I had in the parish was with some lay people who said, “We’ve been trying to build a church here for the last 50 years. You’re the guy to do it.”
Okay, so we rolled up our sleeves, we built a beautiful Romanesque, traditional-style church, and then, we turned our spine to the parish school, which was a traditional K4 through grade eight school. We hired a new headmaster, and he’s transformed the school to a classical academy, and we’ve added grades nine to 12, and the enrollment is, now, up from less than 100 over 300. And we’ve just got plans to build a new school building, because the old buildings are 60 years old, and were built cheaply to start with. So we’re going to build a new school.
And one of the growth points is that in the school we have something called the Faithful Family Scholarship, where members of the parish pay tuition for the two oldest kids, and all the rest come free. And this has been a great boost to our parish, and been a great boost to the school, because we’ve had families from all over the country moving here with their 6, 7, 8 kids.
And they belong to the school, the school’s got a great family atmosphere, and they can, now, start in kindergarten, and go straight through to grade 12. So we’re real excited about that, and excited to see what the Lord is doing there.
Eric Sammons:
Now, we were living in a time obviously where a lot of parishes are closing, like when my diocese, they’re merging a lot of parishes, parishes are decreasing. Do you know of a secret sauce that helps the parish to grow, like your parishes growing?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Well, people ask me, I say, “Well, I don’t know. I’m just being Catholic as far as I can make out.” Our worship is a traditionally celebrated Novus Ordo for those who know about the lingo on that. In other words, our celebration of the Novus Ordo is informed by the traditional Latin mass. We don’t celebrate the traditional Latin mass, but, because it’s celebrated across town at Prince of Peace.
But that has attracted a lot of young people, a lot of young families, and we have an Ad Oriental celebration of mass. We have an altar rail, and most people receive communion, kneeling, and on the tongue, we have beautiful choir with Gregorian Chants and Sacred Polyphony, decent pipe organ. So we’ve integrated all these things, which I might add, are actually the things said we’re supposed to have in the documents of Vatican ii. And that seems to be a recipe for success, as well, in our school, which has attract a lot of families.
The other thing is we are blessed with a very encouraging demographic in Greenville. The South is growing, it’s economically prosperous, there’s a good number of jobs, house prices are relatively cheap compared with the rest of the country. Cost of living in South Carolina is cheaper than it’s in the rest of the country. We have lower taxes, we have lower gas prices, and things like this.
So all of these things together have helped to combine to really make our parish, also, I guess, a kind of success story, if you want to look at it that way. So it’s not just the ideas that I’ve had, or things that I’ve done. The Lord has blessed us.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, and I just want to mention that when Crisis did our survey of 10 top cities for Catholics to live, Greenville definitely made the list, and I visited, and it’s well-deserved. I was telling you before we got on that, I felt like when I visited, I was bumping into good Catholics just left, and right, just down there, so I highly recommend that, if there’s especially young Catholic families looking for a place to move, because they’re not happy wherever they are, Greenville is definitely a place to check out.
And I tell you, I don’t think I knew about this first two kids you pay, and the rest for free, so you got eight kids, take advantage of Fr. Longenecker. You got a situation here.
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
We’ll help you to find a big house too.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, right, right. There you go. There you go. Okay, so the book is There and Back Again, a Somewhat Religious Odyssey, from Ignatius Press. I’ll put a link to that in the description. Plus also I’ll put a link to Fr. Longenecker’s website, where you can check out his blog that he says he still blogs regularly there, so you can check out his writings.
Anything else we need to know about things you got going on right now?
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
No, just happy to be in touch with people, if they want to learn more about what we’re doing. If you have anybody who have any big donors out there, and want to help us to build this school, I’m happy to hear from you.
Eric Sammons:
Very good. Yes, definitely reach out to Fr. Longenecker if you want to help support a good Catholic school. Okay. Well, thank you very much, father. I really do appreciate it.
Fr. Dwight Longenecker:
Thank you.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, until next time everybody, God love you.