By Paula Day

Dalton, Georgia has given the church one of its sons. Last October, Donald Kinney was ordained to the priesthood as a Discalced Carmelite - the first priest ordained from the northwest Georgia town and one of only a handful from the northwest quadrant of the state.

Father Donald Kinney, O.C.D., is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Hinton Eugene Kinney. At the present time he is an associate pastor at St. Therese Church in Alhambra, Calif., an assignment he received after his ordination by Los Angeles Archbishop Roger Mahony last fall.

In a telephone interview with The Georgia Bulletin, Father Kinney retraced the high points of his pilgrimage.

Hinton Kinney, a Dalton attorney, and his wife, Mary Alice, are active members of the Methodist Church in north Georgia. “As Methodist as the pope is Catholic,” commented Father Tony Curran who served as pastor in St. Joseph’s parish in Dalton and knows the Kinneys.

“My parents were pillars of the church,” Father Kinney recalls, speaking of his childhood. “I was president of the (Methodist) youth group in high school.” But when he went away to college, “for about 10 years I did not go to church except when I went home and my parents forced me to.”

The younger Kinney attended the University of Tennessee and majored in French. After graduation he studied in Paris for two years and then returned to the U.S. and earned his master’s degree and doctorate in French language and literature at Princeton University.

After his Princeton study, Donald Kinney took a position teaching French at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. There was no hint at that time of his future conversion. “I had no Catholic friends,” he added.

However, he did realize that he didn’t want to teach and resigned from the Stockton position in 1979.

Then something “miraculous” happened, Father Kinney said. “One Sunday I drove past a Catholic Church in Los Angeles and I went in. Mass was going on. I didn’t understand it, but something drew me back the next Sunday.”

He continued attending Sunday Mass and then began going to daily Mass. He wondered, “Maybe it’s just the church. So I went to another parish and liked it even better. I had a sense that God was there. I felt very happy there.”

During the late summer and early fall of 1979 he was also interviewing for jobs and took a position in Torrance, California. He joined a parish in Redondo Beach, began preparing to become a Catholic, and made his profession of faith on the feast of the conversion of St. Paul, January 25, 1980.

Parallel to his joining the Church, Father Kinney said, “I knew I had a vocation to the priesthood. I was thinking and praying about it.” He recalls the smiling response when he told this to a priest adviser. “You may have a vocation, but before you become a priest, you will have to become a Catholic,” the priest told him.

After his profession of faith, Donald Kinney began investigating religious orders for men. It was also at that time that he came across and began reading “Story Of A Soul,” the autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux.

“I wasn’t 10 pages into it when I knew I was meant to be a Carmelite,” he recalled.

He visited the Carmelite parish of St. Therese in Alhambra in April and entered the Carmelite novitiate in June 1980.

Donald Kinney completed his studies for the priesthood at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union and was ordained Oct. 1, 1988, in “the same church where I first discovered the Carmelites, St. Therese in Alhambra.”

His life since October, Father Kinney said, has been “busy learning how to be a new priest with all the ups and downs and happinesses.”

He returned to Dalton in mid-October and celebrated three Masses of thanksgiving in his hometown.

“What meant as much as anything,” he recalled, “was that at the Masses not only was the parish there, and my parents, but many of my friends from childhood - Methodists, Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists, Episcopalians. It was a Catholic Mass, but it was ecumenical. It was very beautiful.” Father Kinney said at the time his conversion was difficult for his parents, but his vocation is “a real joy to us all now.”

“A vocation is not just for one person,” he explained, “but for the person’s family and for the whole world. If it is a true vocation from God, one’s family and friends will come to understand and accept it too.”

Although he is on the other side of the country, Father Kinney’s thoughts are close to his native state and to the Church in Georgia.

“I’ve seen beautiful things there during my priest visits to Dalton,” he said. “The Church there is always in my prayers. The Church there is always close to my heart.”