First it was the New York Times in June. Tomorrow it is CNN. Fowler and Westphalia, two small farming communities, eight miles apart in Clinton County in Central Michigan, have both produced 22 priests for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Lansing. Fowler, the slightly larger village with a population of 1,224, had been trailing by two in the ordination derby until June 14 when 26-year-old identical twins Todd and Gary Koenigsknecht from Holy Trinity Parish were ordained as priests at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in East Lansing by Bishop Earl Boyea, Jr., the fifth bishop of Lansing. Three other deacons – Daniel Westermann, James Rolph and Vince Richardson – were ordained by Boyea at the same mass.
On Aug. 16, Santa, Monica, California broadcast journalist Lisa Ling, host of the original CNN documentary series, This is Life with Lisa Ling, arrived at Holy Family Parish in Grand Blanc where Father Gary Koenigsknecht is assigned and St. Thomas the Apostle Parish in Ann Arbor where Father Todd Koenigsknecht is now based to begin filming “Called to the Collar” her last show this season for This is Life with Lisa Ling, being broadcast on CNN Nov. 16 at 9 p.m. Central Standard Time and at 10 p.m. EST and PST. You can watch a 30-second YouTube trailer for the episode here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeJlWpUHtuY
According to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University there are 38,275 priests in the United States compared to 58,632 when the Second Vatican Council ended Dec. 7, 1965. Ordinations in the United States have fallen from 994 in 1965 to the 494 expected this year. Those figures and other Catholic data, statistics and research can be viewed on their website at: http://cara.georgetown.edu/caraservices/requestedchurchstats.html
While some have expressed concern about Ling’s revisiting the perennial hot-buttons issues of clergy sex abuse and celibacy, Father John Linden, the Diocese of Lansing’s director of vocations and seminarians, has said he’s optimistic about the CNN segment airing Sunday: “The New York Times did a fantastic job… We thought this was a good opportunity and that Lisa Ling would do something along those lines,” he reportedly told Patti Murphy Dohn, recently retired campus minister and religion teacher at The John Carroll School in Bel Air, Maryland and a blogger for The Catholic Review, the newspaper of record for the Archdiocese of Baltimore.
The June 16 New York Times story, “In Two Michigan Villages, a Higher Calling Is Often Heard,” was written by Christina Capecchi, owner of Ries Media in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota, who is a Catholic syndicated columnist and journalist from just south of St. Paul, and who has written for MinnPost.com, the Chicago Tribune and Medill News Service, as well as the New York Times. Capecchi has a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University and did her undergraduate degree at Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Her Times story can be found online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/us/in-two-michigan-villages-a-higher-calling-is-often-heard.html?_r=1
Linden told Dohn that during Ling’s filming questions surrounding clergy sex abuse kept coming up, and the priests and seminarians who were interviewed tried to eventually lead the conversation away from this topic, but found that they couldn’t get away from it.
Linden explained that though the topic of clergy abuse was brought up in each of the interviews done for “Called to the Collar,” it is his hope that Ling’s program will “open the door for people who are searching for answers and who might take another look to the Church and see why someone might seek out the Catholic faith.”
soundingsjohnbarker 