‘God, I really do want to be a priest more than anything’

Father Mark Beckman, a priest of the Diocese of Nashville for 28 years, says prayer and community are the foundations of a successful priestly ministry. He and all priests of the diocese, and the U.S., will be honored on Priesthood Sunday, Oct. 28. Photo by Rick Musacchio

After eight years of seminary study and two years of working in a parish and as a teacher in a Catholic high school, Mark Beckman was still struggling with the question of whether God was calling him to be a priest.
 
“I remember I was home in Lawrenceburg during the Christmas break and I was walking down the road in front of my home and I said, ‘God, I really do want to be a priest more than anything.’ And right when I said the words I knew it was true, so this deep peace came over me,” he said.
 
For the last 28 years, Father Beckman, the pastor of St. Henry Church in Nashville, has served God and His people as a priest of the Diocese of Nashville.
 
“For me, the priest is always about serving God and the kingdom of God, about serving Christ and serving God’s people. I mean, it’s a vocation of service,” Father Beckman said. “The work of God is alive in every person’s life. But the priest, in a sense, in proclaiming the Gospel, holds up the mystery of Christ in a way that people are able to experience … that Gospel in their own life.”
 
On Sunday, Oct. 28, Father Beckman and all the priests across the diocese and country will be honored on Priesthood Sunday, a day to reflect upon and affirm the central role of the priesthood in the life of the Church.
 
In conjunction with Priesthood Sunday, the Diocese of Nashville will hold a special collection to raise funds for the diocesan Seminarian Education Fund.
 
The Tennessee Register interviewed Father Beckman about his call to the priesthood and his life as a priest. Following are excerpts from that interview.
 
‘A rich place to be Catholic’
 
“One of the great things about growing up in Lawrenceburg is it’s a great place to grow up Catholic. Sacred Heart Church and School have been around for over 100 years. I think it was actually the Precious Blood fathers, brothers and sisters that brought the faith to Lawrence County. And it’s been a very rich place to be Catholic.”
 
“One of the things I’m very aware of is that we’ve had a lot of vocations to the priesthood and religious life from Lawrence County. Bishop James Niedergeses, who confirmed me and also accepted me to the seminary and ordained me, I’ve always felt a connection with him. … Msgr. George Rohling was from Lawrence County. Father Bernard Niedergeses has his roots in Lawrence county. So, it’s been a place that the people of Lawrenceburg and Lawrence County have had a rich faith experience. I think growing up in that environment, obviously, was important to nurturing my vocation to the priesthood.”
 
“My parents were very much a part of the life of the parish. … I think the faith of my parents obviously also shaped my awareness of my vocation.”
 
“It was Father John Kirk that really was the first priest that kind of kindled a spark in me to think about priesthood. I think I was in seventh grade when he arrived at Sacred Heart. … He started connecting with us young people a lot. … We had outdoor Masses at Davy Crocket State Park. He took the altar servers and the youth group to places like Point Mallard Wave Pool in Northern Alabama. First time I ever saw a priest in a bathing suit, and actually, seeing him as a human being who enjoyed being in the wave pool with the kids connected me with, priests are human beings, they’re real people. And it was the first time I thought, you know, that would be something I could see myself doing. …
 
“He seemed to be a person of great prayer and also he seemed to care deeply about the people. My thought was if I could be this close to the Lord and this close to the people, that’s what I want to do with my life. That’s where the seed really began to grow.”
 
After attending a retreat for high school juniors and seniors considering the priesthood, “I went to Father Kirk and my parents and I said to my parents, ‘I think I might be interested in becoming a priest.’ And their reply was very helpful. They said, ‘We want you to be happy with whatever vocation you choose. So if this would make you happy, then we would support you.’ … And I went to Father Kirk and told him the same thing. And he said, ‘I’ve been wondering when you were going to tell me that,’ so he kind of had an idea.”
 
‘Absolutely wonderful experience’
 
After graduating from high school, Father Beckman enrolled at St. Ambrose College in Dubuque, Iowa, as a seminarian.
 
“St. Ambrose seemed to be a more ordinary college experience and I thought the healthier thing for me is to have a normal college experience. So I ended up going to St Ambrose. I spent four years there, and that was an absolutely wonderful experience.”
 
“We actually had a dorm that was about 30 guys who were all thinking about the priesthood. So I lived in this special dorm on campus but it was right in the middle of the campus. We took classes with all the other students, but we had morning prayer together every morning in the chapel at 7:15. And we had Mass in the college chapel which was open to the whole community at 4:30 every afternoon. And we also had evening prayer at 10 o’clock at night, which was also open to students from throughout the campus. So we had regular prayer every day.
 
“I remember the Masses being especially joyful. … We had different priests celebrate every day. The homilies were fantastic. There was something very spiritual about the place. … Having the experience of doing both an ordinary college experience and at the same time having the opportunity to make further discernment about the priesthood was a key part of that time of my life.”
 
“There were a couple of priests in my time at St. Ambrose that were real role models for me of priesthood. One was the rector of the seminary Father Ed Dye. He had a profound influence upon me. He was a great preacher. He was extremely insightful pastorally. I went to him more than once to talk about my life, and the way that he responded to me was so Christlike. It gave me an insight if I want to be a priest, I’d like to be able to preach as well as he preaches, to celebrate the sacraments with the sense of mystery that he celebrates them with, and be as pastorally responsive as he is. So that was just another level of awareness, of kindling that vocation.”
 
After St. Ambrose, Father Beckman continued his seminary studies at the University of Louvain in Belgium.
 
“That was for me kind of an experience of being in the crucible. I had no concept of how homesick I was going to be. … Being in a foreign culture, not knowing the native language, being that far from my home, from my friends, from my own country, it was a challenging experience. … I think because of that, I asked myself more than once would I be really happy as a priest.”
 
“In the spring of 1988 when I was finishing my studies, normally I would have come home to Nashville and be ordained to the priesthood. But I think because the four years had been so challenging I really did still have serious questions about whether God was really calling me. … I remember I called Bishop Niedergeses, and I said I’m not sure, I really need to delay my ordination this summer. And I will say this, he was very gracious.”
 
Father Beckman spent the next year serving as a deacon at St. Stephen Catholic Community in Old Hickory and as a teacher at Father Ryan High School. The following year, still having questions, he taught religion at Notre Dame High School in Chattanooga. When Bishop Niedergeses said he needed a decision by the end of the year, Father Beckman met with his spiritual director and eventually decided God indeed was calling him to be a priest.
 
“I called Bishop Niedergeses up … and I said, ‘Bishop, I would like to set an appointment to meet with you this week if I could to talk about being ordained to the priesthood.’ And the first words out of his mouth were, ‘Praise be to Jesus Christ.’ So he set a meeting with me on Good Friday that year, April 13, 1990. I went to meet with him at the Cathedral of the Incarnation. And he said you will be ordained three months from today on July 13, 1990, at the Cathedral.”
 
“I felt this interior peace, and I will say that that peace has never left me.”
 
‘Deep identification with Christ’
 
“What has become clear to me over time is that the vocation of priesthood invites the person into a deep identification with Christ in the sense that we are called to be Christ with and for others. So being a priest is being a priest for the sake of God’s people, the Church. And to me the heart of it is the sacramental ministry in the life of the priest and preaching the Gospel. Those are kind of the two great foundation stones.”
 
“One of my favorite parables, the kingdom of God is like a sower who goes out to sow seed. I think the priest is pre-eminently a sower of seed, the seeds of God’s word, of God’s life. And God does the rest. You don’t have to bring about the results. We’re simply called to sow the seed with God. To me that’s the heart of priesthood.”
 
“There are always challenges. … There are elements about the vocation of priesthood that require a great deal of personal sacrifice, and a carrying of the cross. And why is that? It’s because in this life we human beings are all fundamentally affected by the woundedness of original sin and each other’s sins. The priest is not perfect yet nor are the human persons that we minister to. So, because of our own brokenness and the interactions of the human person and the challenges of caring for a wounded people, that in itself is a mystery of suffering. But it’s a redemptive mystery of suffering. We suffer with Christ along the journey of life because that’s where Christ is. He’s in all the elements of life including the suffering and the death and the brokenness. And in doing that we also get to taste the resurrection.”
 
“The greatest blessing about being a priest is the real relationships that we have with God’s people. And when you begin to experience the people in the parishes, lives being transformed by the grace of Christ in both good times and bad, … it is unbelievably rewarding to see how Christ is working in people’s lives and to be able to be a part of that great work of God. That’s the blessing.”
 
“The other thing that I’ve been more and more deeply aware of as time has gone on, is that the priestly ministry is never a ministry done in isolation. So, it is precisely in our connections with and for each other that we are most effective as priests. … What I’ve discovered more and more is it’s never done apart from him but it’s always with Christ.”
 
“Prayer is the foundation of my life. … The core of it is, ‘Here I am Lord. Help me to know what your will for me today is. Give me the grace I need to do it.’ … When I’m doing whatever I’m called to do during the day, more and more I have these interior turnings to God. So when I meet a particularly difficult situation, I will just say, ‘Lord I don’t know what to do about this. Holy Spirit guide me, give me wisdom. Give me courage. Give me the gifts that I need to do what you want me to do at this given moment.’ And that interior reaching out is almost always answered with promptings. God does give grace when we ask those kinds of requests of God in prayer.”
 
Dealing with scandal
 
Father Beckman’s parishioners have come to him in recent weeks to discuss the clergy sexual abuse scandal.
 
“For me it’s a reminder of the real difference of the faith we have in Christ and in God and the human element we have in our Church. We have to be more diligent than ever in doing whatever we can to protect children. … People are legitimately concerned about whether we’re doing enough to protect children. Anyone who experienced abuse as a child is especially attuned to this.”
 
“I’ve met with a lot of people who are trying to process this. We priests also have to process it as well. When you love the Church, you hate to see people who have great authority in the Church harm vulnerable people and those charged as shepherds who didn’t act to protect people from that harm.”
 
A successful priest
 
“The measure of success is the work of God, and we can see the fruits of God’s work but we can never be certain about what God has actually been doing in and through us. … So my barometer of success is not an exterior one, it’s a matter of being faithful to God and what I think God is asking of me.
 
“Serving in the community one looks for the fruits of the Holy Spirit alive. Is the life of prayer in a community alive and well? The people of God, are they nourished spiritually in the homilies that are preached? The sacred liturgical celebrations, do they nourish God’s people? When people leave the Church have they experienced an encounter with the holy mystery of God? Are they inspired to live the Gospel? If that is happening in a community and the faith is being handed on to the next generation, that’s the fruit of successful priestly ministry in my mind. And nothing gives me greater joy than celebrating Sunday Eucharist, than preaching the gospel, than seeing people spiritually filled with the life of God. That’s the joy of being a priest. And the fruit of it. That’s the ultimate barometer.”