By Anne Bingham

Sacred Heart School of Theology

The grown ups thought the whole thing was a fine idea. The little ones, though, had their doubts about Charles J. Kerscher’s plans.

“If Grandpa becomes a Father, will he still be our Grandpa?” they worried on the eve of his departure for Sacred Heart School of Theology.

“If anything, we’ve become even closer,” Kerscher observes years later. “Five of the six grandchildren are in school now, and I send my grades home to them. When we write, we talk about our schoolwork. It’s something they can relate to.” Kerscher, who retired from the Atlanta Post Office in 1972, is one of 110 men from 33 dioceses and a dozen religious orders who are studying for the priesthood at Sacred Heart. The theologate, located in Hales Corners, Wis., is one of two in the country that specializes in training the so-called “delayed vocation,” men older than college-age who feel called to the priesthood. The average age of Sacred Heart students is 38; a few, like Kerscher, are retired.

A native of Omaha, Kerscher has lived in Georgia since boyhood. In Atlanta, he attended Sacred Heart Grade School, Boys High School and Georgia Tech before enlisting in the Army just before World War II. After his discharge, he went to work for the post office, He considers Duluth, Ga., his home town, and St. Patrick’s, Norcross, his home parish.

“I thought about the priesthood when I was an altar boy, of course -- who doesn’t? And I always had a high regard for the priesthood,” he recalls.

When his wife, Edna Marie, died in 1976, he suddenly found himself “retired, with a good pension, all my children grown, and no responsibilities or unfinished business. I was free to pursue a new adventure.”

He considered the Trappists, but they wouldn’t accept candidates older than 45. He talked with Father John Adamski, then archdiocesan vocation director; Monsignor Jerry Hardy, the chancellor, and Archbishop Thomas Donnellan.

“We don’t have an age limit,” they told him. He filled out a number of forms, took a number of tests, and went off to Philadelphia for the Eucharistic Congress. When he returned, he found he had been accepted at Sacred Heart, and was to report to “someplace called Hales Corners,” he found out, is a few miles southwest of Milwaukee. That pleased him.

“My grandfather had worked in Milwaukee for two years in order to earn enough money to bring his family over from Bavaria,” he said. “I’d never been here, but in a way I had roots here. My grandfather eventually settled in Kaukauna, near Green Bay, and I still have an uncle there.”

He did have reservations about one thing, however: “When I found out the school’s address was ‘Lover’s Lane Road’ I thought they had to be kidding!”

The first months were rough. He makes no bones about it.

“I’d been out of school for 35 years. Philosophy and theology were completely new to me. We just didn’t worry a lot about ‘metanoia’ and ‘exegesis’ at the post office, you know. So, I spent a lot of my time pouring over a dictionary.”

Many of the Sacred Heart students have degrees, but others have not completed their college work. The course of studies is flexible to meet the needs of people with backgrounds varied according to profession (teacher, electrician, barber, banker, salesman, social worker) and age. An “Introduction to Theology” course, which everyone takes their first year, gives everyone a common basis to start from; to take off some of the pressure, it’s offered on a pass/fail system.

As the catalog states it, the concern at the seminary is to train parish priests, not scholars. The two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but “competency in areas necessary for effective ministry” has priority over rigid credit requirements.

In addition to the academics, there’s a certain adjustment necessary in going from a private dwelling to living in a community with over a hundred other men.

“You just can’t make that kind of adjustment without the Three P’s -- patience, prayer and perseverance,” Kerscher says. “There are times when I feel I just can’t handle the workload physically as well as mentally. That’s when I just make an out-and-out prayer to Christ telling Him He has to help me. I always muddle through.”

On May 19, he’ll be ordained to the diaconate by Archbishop Donnellan in the chapel of Sacred Heart School of Theology. It was Archbishop Donnellan who sponsored him at the school for priestly service in the Archdiocese of Atlanta. Within another year, he’ll be a priest. What does it all mean to him?

“I’ve been a lot of things in my life: breadwinner, parent, widow, soldier, civil servant, retired person. I think I’ll be able to share with the parishioners many areas of their life: the joy at the birth of a child, sorrow in sickness and death, career anxieties, all the things that go into living. I think this kind of priestly service will be the ‘crowning point of my life.’”