The diocese’s leader celebrates Sunday Mass on the centennial weekend of the church
By Dan McWilliams
Bishop Mark Beckman capped the 100th-anniversary-weekend celebration of Holy Ghost Church’s current worship space by celebrating the 10 a.m. Mass on April 26, Good Shepherd Sunday.
Pastor Father John Orr and associate pastor Father Valentin Iurochkin concelebrated the Mass, and the parish’s Deacon Gordy Lowery assisted.
“During this great season of Easter as we gather to celebrate the resurrection of the Lord and celebrate the Good Shepherd, it’s a particularly festive occasion as we are 100 years since the foundation of this church, a beautiful witness to the risen Lord this community has been,” Bishop Beckman said in his opening remarks.
In his homily, the bishop referred to the day’s Gospel reading from John 10.
“I am the Good Shepherd. The sheep hear my voice, and they follow me because they recognize my voice: the words of the Lord spoken in the Gospel today,” Bishop Beckman said.
Bishop Mark Beckman incenses the altar at Holy Ghost Church on April 26 as Deacon Gordy Lowery watches. (Photo Jim Richmond)
The bishop, before he became the leader of East Tennessee Catholics, recalled a purchase his father and mother made.
“When I was a young priest back in the 1990s, my parents bought a farm in Lawrence County where I grew up, out on the edge of town on Buffalo Road. My grandfather had had a farm, but I was too little when my grandfather had the farm to remember it,” he recalled. “But when my dad and mom bought this beautiful piece of property and got cows on the farm, I got the chance to witness firsthand how living things respond to those who care for them.”
The cows knew Bishop Beckman’s father—but not the future bishop.
“When I would drive home to Lawrenceburg and drive up to the farm, when my car drove into that property, all the cows would just stand around looking at me like I was nothing. But when my dad drove up in his pickup truck, they recognized that truck right away because dad fed them, so as he drove through the gate, all those cows would come running up from the pasture to wait for my dad to get the feed out of the back of his truck and to feed them,” Bishop Beckman said. “They clearly knew my father. They knew his voice. They even knew his pickup truck, and he also knew each of the cows, so he enjoyed that time period in his life taking care of that farm in Tennessee.”
A good shepherd literally lay at the gate of the sheepfold, the bishop said.
“The intimacy of the shepherd who stayed with the flock throughout the night and cared for the sheep knew each and every one of the sheep intimately, in the first century,” he said. “He was not only their provider to feed them and care for them, he was also their protector against the dangers that would inevitably come to the flock.
“Someone told me several years ago that in the first century, many of the sheepfolds were actually a ring of stone and the shepherd would lead the sheep into the sheepfold at night, and the opening where the gate was—the shepherd would actually lay down in that gateway during the night and sleep in that gateway protecting the flock inside that enclosure. That image of the shepherd as gatekeeper laying in the gate has stayed with me as a mental picture. Jesus says today, ‘I am the gate of the sheep.’ He is the one who lays down His life that the sheep may live. He came that we might have life and have it more abundantly, and the way that we discover that life from that Good Shepherd is by listening to His voice.”
The Lord “already knows each one of us intimately. He knows our whole life story. He knows all of our thoughts, all of our words and actions. He knows us through and through,” Bishop Beckman said. “His voice calls us to follow Him, and each one of us is called to listen to that voice and to allow the words of the Good Shepherd to shape the journey of our life. It’s by staying close to Him that we discover the abundant life that He came to bring us.”
At Holy Ghost, “a hundred years ago folks laid the beginnings of the foundation of this beautiful church, and for the last century the people of God gathered here Sunday by Sunday have heard the voice of the Good Shepherd over and over again as the Gospel has been proclaimed, and that voice of the Good Shepherd has nourished and protected this flock for a century,” the bishop said. “He has accompanied the faithful who have journeyed in this place all the way from baptism to the moment their bodies were incensed and blessed with holy water before burial. The Good Shepherd has been present to this community in a profound way.”
Bishop Beckman referred to the 1971 musical Godspell and its “Day by Day” song based on a 13th-century prayer of St. Richard of Chichester.
“I invite those of you here today to become part of the next hundred years, so that 100 years from now, God willing, when another good shepherd like myself—I hope I’m good in the Lord—another Good Shepherd comes to celebrate 200 years of this faith in this community, that because you have heard the voice of the Shepherd and listened, that this church will be full of the people of God still listening to that voice of the Good Shepherd,” he said.
“I am reminded of the words sung beautifully in Godspell: be a good Christian ‘day by day, to see the Lord more clearly, to love the Lord more dearly, and to follow the Lord more nearly, day by day.’ These things we pray, that we will hear the voice of the Shepherd, love Him more dearly, and follow Him more nearly, day by day. This we ask of the Good Shepherd, Jesus, risen from the dead, who is Lord for ever and ever.”
After Mass, Bishop Beckman spoke of the words from Matthew 28:19 shown in the stone above the front doors of Holy Ghost Church.
“A hundred years ago they laid the foundations to create this beautiful church, and for this last century they’ve been preaching the Gospel. I love that in the stonework on the front outside it says, “Teach Ye, All the Nations,” and that’s been happening here,” he said. “I’m so grateful to be here to celebrate, especially as the shepherd of the diocese—we call this Good Shepherd Sunday—so it couldn’t be a better day to celebrate this with this community.”
Monsignor Xavier Mankel served as pastor of Holy Ghost Parish from 1997-2014.
Bishop Beckman has connections to a pair of major figures in Holy Ghost and Diocese of Knoxville history in Father Albert Henkel and Monsignor Xavier Mankel.
Father Henkel, pastor of Holy Ghost for 38 years from 1958-96, was born in Loretto, Tenn., in the bishop’s native Lawrence County. Father Henkel was baptized at Sacred Heart Church in Loretto before his family moved to Nashville by the time he started school.
Monsignor Mankel was pastor of another Sacred Heart Parish, in Bishop Beckman’s hometown of Lawrenceburg, from 1979-84 before later becoming a founding father of the Diocese of Knoxville in 1988 and serving as pastor of Holy Ghost from 1997-2014.
“Father Henkel was a distant cousin of mine and grew up also in Lawrence County, where I grew up,” the bishop said. “Father Mankel, as he was in those days, was pastor of Sacred Heart Church in Lawrenceburg when I was in high school, so I knew him as a teenager as I was preparing and discerning a vocation to the priesthood.”
The diocese has a number of historic buildings such as Holy Ghost Church, Immaculate Conception Church in downtown Knoxville, and the Basilica of Sts. Peter and Paul in Chattanooga. Bishop Beckman said that it is key as the Catholic Church experiences growth in numbers today to remember older churches such as those.
“I think it’s important because one of the great blessings of being Catholic is we’re part of a living tradition that goes back 2,000 years. The seeds of faith were planted here (at Holy Ghost) over a century ago, and we’re called to nourish the next century of faith,” he said.