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Fr. John Lankeit is passionate about the universal call to holiness, vocations and building a culture of life.

FR. JOHN LANKEIT

Silent retreat opens door to priesthood, life as parish pastor

It’s a long journey from the cloudy skies of Seattle to the sun-drenched streets of Tolleson, but Fr. John Lankeit knows the way. The pastor of Blessed Sacrament Parish in this small community west of Phoenix began discerning the priesthood when he was 21 years old.

At the time, he was student at Seattle University who had spent three years being the chief “gofer” for the Jesuit community there. Running errands, washing cars, washing dishes — through all of it, he saw the lives of the priests up close.

At a Seattle Mariners game he attended with one of the Jesuits he worked for, he shared his thoughts about one day becoming a priest himself.

“He sensed it was more of a thing of trying to figure out what to do with my life,” Fr. Lankeit said. “So he cautioned me to let it stew a while.”

After earning a degree in marketing and psychology, Fr. Lankeit went on to work for the Mariners Major League Baseball team, doing corporate marketing for them and interfacing with corporate sponsors such as Coke and Farmers Insurance. A self-described “sports fanatic” during those years, he was paid to attend games and deal in the business side of professional sports.

Despite earning a comfortable salary and enjoying professional success, he found himself searching for meaning in his life.

“I guess the long and short of it is that I didn’t find fulfillment in relationships or in my career no matter how much money I made or how successful I was. It just felt meaningless,” Fr. Lankeit said. “I had more than I needed and I asked myself, ‘Is this all there is? There’s got be something more.’”

From the time he was a small boy, his faith in God was strong, though he said his catechetical formation was less than optimal.

“My parents never had to drag me to church,” he said. “I would rather miss school than Mass.”

After suffering through the breakup of a serious relationship and trying to make sense of his life, he decided to follow a friend’s example and make a 30-day silent retreat at a Trappist monastery in Oregon. It was 1997 and he would never be the same.

“I entered into deep silence where you can’t run away from yourself and there’s no where to hide, there’s no distraction,” Fr. Lankeit said. “There’s no media, no telephones. It’s you and God and I think that’s the beauty of it: God shows Himself and yourself to you. I really had to take a close look at what was going on inside, at the total uncertainty of my life.”

At the conclusion of the retreat he was thinking about entering the priesthood, but his spiritual advisor told him that he was not ready and that if the call was for real, it would come back. He clearly needed time to sort things out.

In 2000 Fr. Lankeit moved to the Phoenix area, where he said he began having profound experiences at Mass. In 2001 he entered St. Meinrad Seminary and he was ordained to the priesthood in 2006.

After serving for a year at St. Anne Parish in Gilbert, he was transferred to Blessed Sacrament in Tolleson where he served as parochial administrator. Last July he was named pastor of the largely Hispanic parish.

What are you passionate about as a priest?

The universal call to holiness, the culture of life, but most of all vocations to the priesthood. The universal call to holiness — if that’s done right we will have vocations, we will have stronger marriages and people who are pro-life. We were created, all of us, for nothing short of becoming saints. If we take that call seriously, we will have vocations and a culture of life and Jesus will be known.

Did someone invite you to consider the priesthood?

No one invited me — there was never an overt invitation. There was the influence of my grandmother. She never talked about her faith; she just lived it. If we were in the car with her, we prayed the rosary. I don’t think I ever heard her say a negative thing about anybody. She was a quiet but powerful witness. She influenced me without saying a word.

What can families do to encourage more vocations to the priesthood?

The family needs to pray together. They have to live a life of self-sacrifice which means contraception cannot be in the family because it teaches how to withhold self. Any parent knows kids pick up attitudes. If parents use contraception, they are practicing in their own lives the withholding of self and that cannot help but spill into other areas of life. Kids coming out of that environment… it would be unlikely that they would find a life of self-sacrifice attractive if they hadn’t had it modeled in their family.