Tag Archives: St. Francis Xavier Parish

On Conversion

On Conversion – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I spoke with a friend who converted to Catholicism as an adult about her conversion and how she relates to the Catholic Church as a whole.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, I spoke with a friend who converted to Catholicism as an adult about her conversion and how she relates to the Catholic Church as a whole.

The Catholic Church in 2025 stands at a crossroads in the shadow of our late Pope Francis when the world at large has fallen into so many new wars, conflicts, and when fearmongers are the loudest voices in so many countries and governments. It was striking then when Pope Leo XIV began his Urbi et Orbi address, his first public address as pontiff, last Thursday with the words “peace be with you.” To achieve that peace, one needs to allow one’s heart and soul to open to the possibility of peace and of dialogue with both our innermost selves and the world around us. Faith gives an avenue for this dialogue which has provided a moral foundation for generations. Biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman made the case in his book The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters that the faith of Moses and the Hebrews evoked in Exodus was the first faith recorded which preached love for neighbor and love for oneself. It was the first time in human history that a religion sought to elevate humanity and dignify us as children of God made in the Image of God.

Kim Meyer

I’ve long considered this topic of conversion; in fact, I’ve often noticed how different the perceptions of our shared religion are between cradle Catholics like myself and converts to the Church. My own Catholicism is built on fifteen centuries of believers in my family going back to my distant early medieval Irish ancestors who in the fifth century surely noticed when St. Patrick made his pilgrimages up the holy mountain on the southern shore of Clew Bay, a mountain that towers over the townlands where my ancestors lived for thousands of years that now bears the saint’s name as Croagh Patrick. I asked my friend, Dr. Kim Meyer, if she could tell me more about her perceptions of her faith and our shared religion. A convert to Catholicism who grew up in a secular suburban Kansas City family with Lutheran and Methodist roots, Kim told me about how she found her faith through the most horrific experience of her life as a journalism student at Kansas State University reporting on the activities of a cult in Abeline, Kansas in 1977. Kim described it as “a really dark, dark time and my editors had people in the room with me when I was editing it because I was terrified. It was several months of terror.” After one particularly intense night of terror during her investigations in Abeline when she felt she “was terrified for my soul and I started praying to God, and my Mom had given me a penny of the 23rd Psalm on it, but I was so scared that I couldn’t remember the Lord’s Prayer so I kept rubbing this penny saying, ‘God, if you exist, save me until morning.’ It was really a horrible, horrible, terrifying experience. The next morning, I was still praying and the sun came up, and I realized that the sense of evil was no longer present.” Kim described how she went to several local religious leaders to tell them her story, including the cult leaders, but the only one who listened was the local Catholic priest at St. Andrew’s Parish in Abeline, Monsignor Alfred Wasinger.

This speaks to something that I’ve known, and that has led to little conversions of my own often from one plan or ambition to another. We are drawn to people who appreciate our humanity and who listen to us as this priest listened to Kim at the darkest moment in her life. That’s something that Pope Leo was famous for before his papacy; in all the reports of his life he’s often referred to as a good listener. This draw to a faith that listens to its people is what drew Kim to the Jesuits. More than just thinking of herself as a convert, Kim said she doesn’t “think of myself as a Catholic first. There’s still so much tradition and so much politicking around Catholicism that I find deeply offensive, but the Jesuits’ critical thinking, open spirit, missionary focus, all of that, and it’s the same theology for both, and it’s all about how we practice, and I’m not into the way how some sects of Catholicism practice.” For her, the Jesuits are “really trying to walk the Way of Jesus. It’s literally the Way of Jesus. Some people want to walk the way of Paul or the way of the most recent Pope, but they forget it’s really all about Jesus.” 

Converts like Kim have more of an opportunity to find “the beauty of questioning and the opportunity to discover their faith.” This questioning has marked my faith for most of my life, yet even more so in my adult years as I moved on from my Jesuit undergraduate university and onto graduate and doctoral programs outside of the Church. Whereas my faith is so deeply rooted in millennia old traditions and inheritances embodied in the last century by the various neighborhood parishes that my family called home in Chicago and Kansas City, Kim’s faith seems to fly above that tradition, seeking a closer connection with God through the mysteries of Catholicism and our belief that God opens us to a wider world of possibilities. In Kim’s words, “once I came to believe that God loves me and God is in every person, and I really believed in it that the world wasn’t really the same.” It is notable that of those old neighborhood parish churches, Kim and my parish, St. Francis Xavier in Kansas City is the only one left open. Unlike the others it has adapted with the changing demographics of its home neighborhood, which a few generations ago was largely Irish American, and now caters to Kansas City Catholics seeking Ignatian spirituality. St. Francis was one of the fastest growing parishes in Kansas City during the pandemic, in large part because of its Jesuit affiliation. However, due to a variety of factors the Jesuits left the parish at the end of July 2024 and transferred its leadership to the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, leading to an uncertain moment for a parish that stands out in this city for its openness and Ignatian spirituality. Kim noted that “Last year we didn’t know what the transition away from being Jesuit would look like, and our community is just as Ignatian as it has ever been.”

Because of this, Kim said she feels more closely connected to the Jesuits than to the Church as a whole. I’ve been struck in the two years since I met Kim how much her outward approach to others reflects this deep well of her faith. I felt in our conversation that we could relate in that depth, though I do not outwardly project my own beliefs in the same way she does, preferring to take a rational approach to life. Yet that rationality has its limits, as I’ve written here in the Wednesday Blog before. Faith and a conversion to accepting the possibility of the improbable is necessary to be open to new and unknown things both in the furthest fringes of our knowledge and at home in our understandings of ourselves. Like anything, there is a blind spot closest to home and that self-reflection and introspection is necessary to live a full and enriching life.

With the election of Pope Leo, the Cardinals embraced this period of self-reflection for the Church in full. They chose a pope who embraced synodality in his Urbi et Orbi address and who said he would continue the efforts of Pope Francis all while seeking to build bridges between the increasingly disparate factions and camps in the Church. The Pope’s humanity shows in his imperfections, in his poor history of dealing with the sex abuse scandals, something familiar to many of us in our own bishops and local leadership. Kim’s approach to life, her mentality born from her Catholic faith has led her to think “’what would Jesus do?’ and that means looking at each person and trying to see God inside of them, and that’s each person.” This stands in contrast to “‘what is the right thing,’ which has less clarity and less consistency in the secular world. Because if you think right vs. not right, where you draw that line is a lot more subjective in the secular world.” The greatest way toward conversion, she said, is prayer. “Pray with others, go find somebody you trust as a spiritual mentor. Stretch yourself and pray. Find ways that you praise that you never imagined.” Both of us pray the Ignatian Examen in our own ways, as Kim said “Prayer changes over time. What I do in my prayer time changes from one season to the next.”Just as May brought us a new Pope and each passing day new things to worry about in politics, the economy, and in ordinary life, so too this conversation told me that the place where one’s spirit is resting will change with time. It may float along in the river of our life, following the currents where they take it, yet it will be there for an opportunity to pray to announce itself. In the wider world we hear messages of people seeking connection with something greater than themselves; it’s a part of our social nature. We do these things to find connection with other people and to grow in those connections as we were born to do. These are all conversions, all transformations of ourselves which can reawaken something dormant that will lead to us living fuller and richer lives. A conversion can reawaken the self to their spirit and spiritual need for connection to something greater than themselves through God as love.

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On Servant Leadership

On Servant Leadership – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, in memory of His Holiness Pope Francis and of the revolutionary anniversaries in America and Ireland this week, some words on the humility necessary for the best sorts of leaders.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkanePhoto: By Korea.net / Korean Culture and Information Service (Photographer name), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34828249

Photo Credit: By Korea.net / Korean Culture and Information Service (Photographer name), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34828249

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This week, in memory of His Holiness Pope Francis and of the revolutionary anniversaries in America and Ireland this week, some words on the humility necessary for the best sorts of leaders.

Over the past weekend as we marked the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s Ride, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the Siege of Boston, and the beginning of the American Revolution, I started to think about writing this week about that anniversary. I partook in the Veterans’ Rally on the Plaza here in Kansas City, which was part of the National Day of Action against Kings. During the hour walk to and from the event in Mill Creek Park I thought long and hard about what I would say, of my fascination with Paul Revere as a child, or about my first visit to Boston in 2002 when my parents & I walked the Freedom Trail with a family friend who I reconnected with on this most recent trip. Normally, at this point in April I’m more focused on the more recent revolutionary anniversary of the Easter Rising which began with the reading of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic in front of the General Post Office in Dublin. Perhaps I could blend the two revolutionary touchstones into something profound for our own moment; of the unrealized dreams and aspirations of both sets of revolutionaries.

Yet events of the following days have changed all that. I’m writing this now close to two hours after I heard the sad news of the death of Pope Francis. After a half an hour replying to messages from my parents and various friends who texted me the news over the night, I wrote my own brief message which appeared on my social media accounts:

This one feels different to me. Papa Frank was our pope: from the Americas, a Jesuit, and more open minded to the world. His Universal Synod will remain a testament to the man and his twelve years of service to our Church.

Francis’s pontificate marked my early adult years. He was elected at the height of my time as a student at Rockhurst University, when I was surrounded by Jesuit philosophy and spirituality, at a moment when his election seemed to match the optimism I felt in our world. Pope Francis remained a rock amid the tempestuousness of the years that have followed. His humility and humanity shone beyond either of the other two popes of my lifetime. Last summer, my European tour originally included nearly a month in Italy on the way to a dear friend’s wedding party. I’d planned to be in Rome for one Wednesday in the hopes of going into the Paul VI Audience Hall to see Pope Francis in person, even if I was way in the back of the room and wouldn’t be able to meet him. The Swiss & Italian portions of that trip didn’t end up happening, and I regret not getting to see the man in person.

Despite this, I felt that I knew Pope Francis on a personal level. He always struck me as another guy trying to make the best out of life. I’ve heard many people refer to him as the grandfather of the Church away in the Vatican keeping us in mind and in good humor. I like this image; it matches what I saw when he was interviewed by the American television networks. Like Voltaire, my mental image of Pope Francis is him with a smile on his face, an earnest and caring smile and perhaps with a joke in mind. Pope Francis was a leader I was willing to follow because he did so with intense humility. I was standing in the lobby of the Campus Ministry, Counseling, and Career Counseling offices at Rockhurst that afternoon of 13 March 2013 when Cardinal Tauran delivered the Habemus papam announcement from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica and announced that Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires was our new Pope, Francis, a name chosen to commemorate the humblest of saints. That he asked us to pray for him, to help him in his pontificate was for me the first sign that this man was different.

The Catholic Church exists in a very different world today than it did a century ago. Then when only 150 years had passed since the eruption of the American Revolution and even less since the anticlerical outbursts of the French Revolution the relationship of the Church to democracy was more fraught. A century ago, fascists in Italy claimed they were acting in defense of tradition and of the Church to attacks from communism. We saw where that road led in the Second World War. A century ago, the Church emerged from the ashes of the Irish Civil War in a dominant position in the new Free State, a position it would hold through the founding of the Republic in 1949 and into my own lifetime. Here in America, Catholic voices led the chorus of the most extreme and anti-democratic factions in this country railing against anyone who opposed them, even their fellow Catholics.

I worried twelve years ago as we neared the end of the first decade of Pope Benedict XVI’s reign that the disconnect between the Church and our world would only continue, and that locally the voices of we liberals and progressives in the Church would remain a hushed minority. We received two new bishops in Greater Kansas City that were appointed by St. John Paul II in 2004; in January Archbishop Fred Naumann was appointed to lead the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas where I grew up, and in May Bishop Robert Finn was appointed to lead the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, which covers the Missouri half of this metropolis. Both were far more conservative than their predecessors, and far more dogmatic. Bishop Finn closed a great many of the social justice ministries of the Diocese and alienated at least a quarter of the local Catholics. My own parish, St. Francis Xavier, often stood in sharp opposition to his leadership as the Jesuit parish remained welcoming and open to all. By the time Pope Francis was elected Finn’s leadership was crumbling under the weight of his inaction and obstruction with the abuse scandals, though Archbishop Naumann was only replaced in the last two weeks with the far more synodal and open Bishop W. Shawn McKnight, who previously led the Diocese of Jefferson City in central Missouri. I for one am hopeful that Archbishop elect McKnight will prove to be a better listener to the Catholics of his new archdiocese.

I remember the sun shining on the day when Pope Francis was elected. It was actually very similar to today, Monday, 21 April 2025, and my sense of a new dawn for our Church. The Sun was shining overhead, and the Spring birdsong was resounding around campus. I experienced many of the same things today. It’s profound to me how similar those two days are.

It did feel revolutionary in many ways when he was elected. He was the first Pope from the Americas, an Argentinian by birth. He was the first Jesuit pontiff, the first pope in a long time to be the child of immigrants. Pope Francis felt like he was one of us. Over the weekend I thought a great deal about what it takes to enact change and restore optimism and hope to a society such as ours which is so bereft of it. Pope Francis brought hope because he was one of us. The minutemen who stood up for their communities and their rights as citizens of a democracy 250 years ago at Concord were like us. The Irish Volunteers like so many of my great-grandparents’ siblings who stood up to British colonial rule a century ago and for better or worse kept fighting even after some liberty had been attained were like us. The people I saw on Saturday were mere ordinary people standing up not just for themselves but for all of us.

The true merits of a servant leader lie in their willingness to help everyone, not only their friends or fellows. Pope Francis was the Papa for all Catholics, especially those who disagreed with him and so loudly denounced his efforts at reform. He was the Pope who listened to us even when the bishops receiving his messages didn’t always heed them. I participated in the Synod on Synodality in the initial parochial stage when I was still in Binghamton; I spent an evening writing my own lengthy and heartfelt answers to the questionnaire, and when my parish’s report was published, I was excited to see some of my comments appear amid the harmonious chorus of like-minded people at my parish. Yet when the diocesan report was published, I was saddened to see how little of that chorus was heard, and at the one listening session I was able to attend several years into the Synod process I felt that as much as we in the laity heard each other that our local clerical leadership kept their ears closed.A servant leader listens to the people. They are approachable, open, and honest about their decisions. I’ve known many leaders who fit this bill: from the late Pope to many of my pastors down the years, to our Mayor Quinton Lucas, a man who I consider to be a friend. Servant leaders do great things as ordinary people. During my walk home from the rally, I remembered a scene from the second episode of the 2008 HBO miniseries John Adams, one of the touchstones of all millennial history buffs in this country. That scene showed a team of men and oxen pulling the cannons from Fort Ticonderoga past the Adams farm to the Dorchester Heights to the south of Boston. I rewatched this episode that afternoon and felt a upswelling of emotion at seeing something akin to what I saw on the Plaza that afternoon: ordinary people working together for a common cause to make life better for all of us. These are the extraordinary acts of ordinary people. That, dear reader, is servant leadership.

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