News

New parish is a lifelong wish

By Patricia Kasten
Compass Associate Editor

After 49 years in religious life, Sr. Mary Jo Kirt is finally getting what she's always wanted.

This month, she became parish director at SS. Peter and Paul Parish in Hortonville.

"Parish work is something I've had a leaning toward and a desire to do all my life, even before I was a sister," said Sr. Kirt, who joined the Sisters of St. Francis of the Holy Cross in Bay Settlement at age 14. As a girl in her home parish of St. Peter in Oconto, she would lay out vestments, plan prayer processions, and lead prayer in church.

"I grew up in Oconto. There wasn't much else to do," she quipped with characteristic humor.

That humor will be a hallmark of her new post, a parish of some 500 members, in a largely rural area that has become a bedroom community for Appleton. The parish has been without a pastor for some time now and is in the process of building a new 450-seat church to replace an aging structure built in 1892.

Sr. Kirt will live in the rectory and serve as the parish's spiritual and administrative leader in all matters except sacraments, which will be handled by Msgr. Jim Feely, a senior priest. But she believes less in the power of leadership and more in the strength of community.

"I see the biggest joy of going to Hortonville as that I will be part of a vital community," she said, "a community that wants to build a place for God."

Building a place for God is something Sr. Kirt understands. Her most recent position, as director of Mt. Tabor Retreat Center in Menasha, tested her community-building skills. When she was appointed there in 1999 by Bp. Banks, the retreat center - then called the La Salle Center and housed in a former convent - was in a sorry state. "There was no money and the place was a mess," she recalled. "We had to build and beg."

When she left in June, turning the now remodeled and financially more secure center over to directors Eden and Katherine Foord, she felt Mt. Tabor had become "a place where kids feel loved and accepted. And, when they feel that, they can translate that into God loving and accepting them."

Mt. Tabor serves about 1,000 young people annually. Sr. Kirt also started the Soup and Sermon Advent and Lent programs, and the monthly Janssen Forum to nurture the spiritual health of adults.

Thinking she had accomplished what God wanted of her in Menasha, Sr. Kirt prepared to pursue parish work. But God had something else for her to accomplish first.

"In July," she said, "I found out I had cancer."

Surgery, radiation and other cancer treatments followed. So did learning more about her relationship with God.

Always a vocal person, she was accustomed to frequent conversations with God. But now, she found only silence. It was a new experience.

"I learned there was nothing I could say," she said of those months. "Then it dawned on me that this was prayer: the pain, the silence, the people. Prayer didn't have to do with words, but with walking with God and having him there."

Being naturally pastoral, her new insights spread to other patients and staff at St. Vincent Hospital's cancer center. When she had finally finished medical treatments there, the staff presented her with a going-away present "because they said I had been so pastoral with the people there."

Sr. Kirt believes the lessons she's learned in her years as an elementary school teacher, a DRE in Green Bay and Combined Locks, associate director of vocations for the diocese, at Mt. Tabor, and as diocesan representative for religious (a post in which she will continue), will serve her well at Hortonville. The post of parish director - which she shares with only nine others in the diocese - is a new one for SS. Peter and Paul. But she calls the staff and parish members "fantastic" and "hospitable" and ready for the challenges they will all face together.

She sees those challenges as "the ordinary ones of building anything: finances, helping people make ideas and pocketbooks match, letting people feel ownership, and building a beautiful place for God."

For help, she will rely on parish members, priest friends, including retired Bp. Robert Banks, the advice of other parish directors, and her own community of sisters whom she said were "my strongest support" during her illness.

And, of course, she expects God to do his part - just as he did for Mt. Tabor.

"He will inspire everything. After all," she said, laughing, "he doesn't want an angry old nun on him."