By Gretchen Keiser

Father Bill Hoffman recalls that his vocation to the priesthood got a push as he decorated a church in Gainesville many Christmases ago.

The Beltran family had moved from Pennsylvania to Gainesville and two sons, Zeb and Joe, were young seminarians. “I bumped into them as we were decorating the church for Christmas,” Father Hoffman said, and he began asking them “all kinds of questions about seminary.”

“Finally Zeb said to me, “Well, look, if you want to know, why don’t you go and find out.”

The conversation with the seminarian, who is now bishop of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and his brother, a pastor in the archdiocese, was a pivotal point in turning Father Hoffman away from studies in chemical engineering at Georgia Tech and toward St. Bernard College in Cullman, Alabama.

Three years at St. Bernard’s, each one encouraging him to return for one more, led to four years of study at the American College in Rome. Father Hoffman was ordained a priest Dec. 20, 1961 at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, and will celebrate his silver anniversary this Saturday at his parish, St. Jude’s in Sandy Springs.

He is looking forward to the Mass at 10 a.m. at which he will be the homilist and Archbishop Thomas Donnellan will preside. The priesthood “just gets better,” Father Hoffman said. “As I allow it to happen, it happens. As I cooperate, it happens.”

Another pivotal point came about 10 years into his priesthood, when Father Hoffman was given permission by the archbishop to join the St. James society of missionaries serving in Latin America. The bishop was responding to a call by the pope for bishops to share priests with Latin America where the need was great. Father Hoffman volunteered and made a five-year commitment to the Society, that was extended.

His years from 1972 to 1982 in the town of Andahuaylas in Peru changed him as a priest, Father Hoffman said. The agricultural community in the mountains in Peru taught him a great deal, he said.

“I guess it was just being in a different culture and being in a poor culture that helped me to see things differently,” he said. “I think the Peruvians taught me an awful lot more than I taught them.”

Among the lessons were “patience and a certain toleration for things being not perfect, not on time, not complete, that life and family are more important than a lot of possessions, a lot of wealth,” he said. He also experienced a very traditional “sacramental ministry to the people” by the church under a bishop who told his priests, “don’t preach to others what you don’t do” in a way of prayer and sacramental life. “Hours and hours” were spent in the sacramental life of the church and hearing confessions, he said. “I came back thinking there is an awful lot of wisdom” in what the church has practiced for centuries and “more inclined to accept the leadership of the bishops and especially the pope…I came back much more settled, a much more spiritual priest than I went down there.”

Returning in May 1982, he was assigned to the Hispanic Apostolate of the archdiocese and worked to draw additional bilingual priests to the ministry from the United States, Mexico and Latin America. Two orders of sisters have also come to serve in Hispanic ministry in Atlanta.

A class of approximately 50 permanent deacons will be ordained next May for the archdiocese, a group who began the three-year study program while Father Hoffman was director of the program. Deacon Walt Bedard is now overseeing the permanent diaconate program.

The Ministry to Priests program out of the Center for Human Development in Washington, D.C. also began in the fall of 1984 while Father Hoffman was overseeing the Continuing Education of the Clergy program. Ministry to Priests provides support groups and one-on-one ministry to priests in an effort to provide emotional, psychological and spiritual support by priests to one another. Father James Schillinger is now overseeing Continuing Education of the Clergy.

Within the archdiocese he has served at Our Lady of the Assumption in Atlanta, at St. Joseph’s in Athens, at Emory University and as pastor of St. John Vianney in Lithia Springs from 1968 to 1972. He has been pastor of St. Jude’s since January.