ROME — A native of the Archdiocese of Detroit was one of 44 Legionaries of Christ priests ordained Dec. 15 at the Vatican’s Basilica of St. John Lateran.
Fr. Ronald Conklin, L.C., was born in Ypsilanti and attended St. Anthony School in Temperance through sixth grade, having been homeschooled after that. He was one of 11 Americans ordained for the order by Cardinal Velasio De Paolis, C.S., the pope’s delegate for the Legionaries of Christ and Regnum Christi. The Legionaries are present in 22 countries, and the order includes three bishops, 920 priests and more than 2,000 religious, novices and students.
“We had never seen anyone celebrate Mass like that,” Fr. Conklin said. After he and his brother spent some time talking with Fr. Gomez, the priest invited them to visit the Legionaries seminary in Connecticut.
“That trip changed my life,” Fr. Conklin said. “I didn’t see it perfectly clear at the time, but I had received a mission; I became a part of the mission of the Legion and the mission of the Church; to extend the kingdom of Christ in the world.”
Fr. Conklin said a trip to Denver for World Youth Day in 1993 also was a factor in his vocation. The next few years were marked by repeated trips to the seminary, door-to-door missions and weekend retreats that found him falling further in love with the Legionaries.
After a year of volunteer work with the Regnum Christi Mission Corps, Fr. Conklin said he started seriously considering the priesthood.
“My main reason for going and my main goal was to give God a chance to tell me that I did not have a vocation to the priesthood,” he said. “I gave my word to God that I would not leave until He told me that he did not want me to be a priest.”
That never happened, Fr. Conklin said. “At the end of my first year of novitiate, I had given God my word again, this time it was not to wait for Him to speak, it was just a simple and total ‘yes’ that I knew would mean all of my life,” he said.
Fr. Conklin is currently dean of studies at Immaculate Conception Apostolic School in Center Harbor, N.H. Also among the 44 new priests was Fr. Mark Thelan, L.C., an Ann Arbor native from the Diocese of Lansing. The stories of the new priests’ personal journeys was published in a new book, “The Joy of Believing,” which can be read online at www.regnumchristi.org.
During the ordination Mass, Cardinal De Paolis told the new priests that in light of the order’s recent struggles as part of the clergy sexual abuse scandal, their vocation was a “witness of divine grace.”
“Dear young men, you are members of the Legion of Christ, a religious congregation which has had to confront a particularly difficult moment in its own history,” he told them. “This history has been marked by sin, by discouragement, perhaps even dejection and humiliation. As St. Paul says, you have been afflicted from every side.
“But you have advanced. You did not lose heart. You have persevered in your vocation. You believed in the one who called you. You believed in grace,” the cardinal said. “For grace, everything is possible.”
