Future priest meets future pope

From the latest NW PROGRESS

don't you love those young guys... to Ratzinger:  "you're our favorite cardinal..."  
"when he was elected pope, I was jumping up and down...” (Pat)

Four priests from the Archdiocese of Seattle, Fathers: Paul Kaech, Thomas Nathe, Frank Schuster and David Young, are scheduled to participate in the Masses at Nationals Park or Yankee Stadium, either as concelebrants or distributing Communion. At Yankee Stadium, 800 priests will concelebrate and another 550 will be in the stands to distribute Communion.
Father Kaech, a parochial vicar at St. Edward, St. George and St. Paul Parishes in Seattle, expects it will be a “very life-giving” and “universal-church” experience to gather and share with Catholics from all over. “You get to talk about your own experience of church and you get to hear someone else’s experience of church,” he said.

Father Nathe, priest administrator of Queen of Angels Parish in Port Angeles, St. Anne Parish in Forks and St. Thomas the Apostle Mission in Clallam Bay, also anticipates a “universal-church” experience to occur. But it won’t be the first time he’s met the pope.

Four years ago, while a transitional deacon about to be ordained to the priesthood, he and fellow seminarian Nick Wichert were in Rome when they decided they wanted to meet and have their photo taken with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

“All seminarians loved Cardinal Ratzinger,” Father Nathe explained last month. “There was the Pope (John Paul II), and there was Cardinal Ratzinger in terms of the seminarians’ and the recently-ordained clergy’s two favorite church people.”

After finding out where the cardinal was celebrating Mass, the two seminarians donned their clerics to gain access past the Swiss Guard, and then sat in the back pew at the liturgy. Afterwards, they waited patiently as German seminarian after German seminarian asked the cardinal to bless various items.

“Finally, when he stepped out (from the sacristy), there we were with camera in hand,” Father Nathe said. “He asked where we were from, and we said, ‘Seattle,’ and he said, ‘Oh, the West Coast.’ And he was quite familiar with Seattle.

“We told him, ‘you’re our favorite cardinal,’ and he smiled and blushed a little,” Father Nathe recalled.

“He’s a very wonderful man…kind of diminutive (with a) big smile and a real good command of English.

“He was very gracious with his time,” the priest said, “and very personable.

“When he became pope, I was literally jumping up and down.”

Wichert, now in his pastoral year at St. Anthony Parish in Renton, remembers, too, that the future pope seemed to be a “very humble man.

“Everything that he said was glorifying God and not about himself.”

Wichert will be among seminarians and other young people from across the country who’ll meet Pope Benedict on April 19 at St. Joseph Seminary in Yonkers, N.Y.