In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus shared the parable of the talents with his disciples. The foolish man, afraid of losing the talent his employer had given him, buried it in the ground; while others invested the talents they’d been given, and saw their value multiplied. We can see that story played out in today’s society: Some people bury their talents, while others put them to good use, for the sake of the Church and for the good of mankind everywhere.
One person who has used his talents well is Fr. Dwight Longenecker, a Catholic convert and now pastor of Our Lady of the Rosary parish in Greenville, South Carolina. Fr. Longenecker demonstrates an exuberant creativity, resulting in many positive gifts to the Catholic Church. He is the author of more than twenty books, and is also the force behind construction of a new church in the classical tradition, and an expanded classical school. He is the creator of a podcast, a popular blog, and a stage play about Shakespeare’s Catholic faith.
An avid reader and traveler, Fr. Longenecker spent time researching the “Sword of St. Michael,” a line of monasteries in Europe and named for the Archangel Michael, and he hopes eventually to create a documentary film explaining the story. And he has hinted at other projects still in the planning stage: perhaps a Catholic senior center and, opening next year, Rosary College, which will offer a two-year classical curriculum.
In his latest book There and Back Again: A Somewhat Religious Odyssey, Longenecker leads readers on an engaging tour through England and America, including his years as a self-described Anglophile, an Anglican priest shaped by the writings of thoughtful Anglicans including C.S. Lewis and George Herbert, John Donne and T.S. Eliot. What is apparent, aside from the rich humor, is the amazing diversity of his projects and goals.
Fr. Longenecker talked recently with Catholic World Report about the impetus to create, and about how that has motivated him to develop wide-ranging projects which help to spread the Faith.
“Someone has recognized a gift that I have,” he explained, “that I didn’t know I have. It is the gift of ‘putting together’—of seeing connections between things that other people have not been able to connect.”
Raised in an Evangelical home, Dwight Longenecker attended Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, where he earned a degree in Speech and English. He then traveled to England, where he studied theology at Oxford University and was ordained an Anglican minister. However, his continued personal study led him to a deeper understanding of the Truth, which could only be found in the Catholic Church. In 1995, he was received into the Catholic Church along with his wife and family. Ten years later, he was ordained a Catholic priest under the special pastoral provision for married former Anglican clergy.
Longenecker’s career development during his years in England helped to prepare him for making those important connections. “When I was a Catholic layman in England,” he recalled, “waiting for ten years to be ordained as a Catholic priest, I trained as a scriptwriter. I studied story structure and characterization. I learned about the Enneagram—not, as some might see it, as a New Age practice, focusing on its spiritual or occult aspects, but simply as a personality profile, a useful tool in characterization study.”
Meditating on man’s inherent longing to know his Creator, Fr. Longenecker realized that man’s goals could be understood using the allegory of an amusement park. There, he noted, the different rides—the roller coaster, the hall of mirrors, the tunnel of love—each symbolized a different exciting, but unreal fantasy and flight from reality.
Although a career as a Hollywood scriptwriter was not in Fr. Longenecker’s future, he recognized that the tools he’d developed to analyze personality traits had a commercial application: He could use the plot lines of stories to help other people understand how change happens, and how individuals and businesses can use that change effectively. “So I started a business training program,” he explained, “called Working Hero. It used plot lines and characters from movies to help business managers manage change and understand their teams better. Then I wrote a book, How to Be an Ordinary Hero, which boiled down the Hero’s Quest into ten stages. I used it as a give-away to promote the business.”
As How to Be an Ordinary Hero grew in popularity, Longenecker was invited to offer retreats for Catholic groups. He utilized film clips to illustrate the Hero’s Quest and to show how people can use the ten steps to grow spiritually. That mental exercise was eventually unveiled in his new book The Way of the Wilderness Warrior, a novelized account of the spiritual life through the bold adventures of a young man named Austin. Through Austin’s story, Fr. Longenecker unveils a twelve-part plan for union with God that parallels the classic purgative, illuminative, and unitive stages of the spiritual life. He explains:
- How our wounds and weaknesses can lead to growth,
- Different forms of Catholic spirituality,
- How to stay the course and win the great prize of becoming a saint,
- How to surrender to God and answer His call to perfection, and
- Why Confession and the cultivation of virtue are at the very heart of spiritual growth.
But, Fr. Longenecker reported, just as his training enterprise, Working Hero, was beginning to take off, the door opened—he had the opportunity to return to the United States and be ordained to the Catholic priesthood. Back in America, he served for a while at a parish in Greenville, South Carolina; then after his ordination in December 2006, he was named pastor of Greenville’s Our Lady of the Rosary parish.
He is, he explains, a Benedictine oblate, and he is inspired by St. Benedict to create a parish which is focused on prayer, work and study; and liturgy is an important part of prayer.
“These three calls of the spiritual life,” he explained, “planted the seed of a new civilization during Benedict’s lifetime. I hope to do the same in the hearts of our children, at the school, or among all the people in the wider community…. When I prepare couples for marriage, I will say to them, ‘Come to our 10:30 Mass on Sunday morning. This is what you should be aiming for: Get married; stay married; have kids; come to church; and it will change your world.’”
The many connections that Fr. Longenecker has put together have clearly produced positive results in the Church and the community. No one should be surprised to see many more connections in the years to come.
Related at CWR:
• “A Hobbit’s Journey Home—Part One: Dreaming of the Shire” (August 18, 2023) by Joseph Pearce
• “A Hobbit’s Journey Home—Part Two: Crossing the Atlantic and the Tiber” (August 25, 2023) by Joseph Pearce
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Father Longenecker’s story is not only interesting but is told with humor. For example (with apologizes to Father Fessio, SJ), when Father Longenecker is describing his fundamentalist background he writes “… the pope’s shock troops were the Jesuits. Their leader was called the ‘black pope’, and they had all taken a blood-curdling oath of total obedience to the true Catholic religion, and as soon as he gave the signal, they would march out and round up all the true Christians. I did not know then that the idea of Jesuits taking an oath of obedience to the true Catholic religion was an improbable concept.”