CHARLOTTE — Two decades after coming to St. Peter Church as a newly-ordained priest on his first assignment, Jesuit Father Tim Stephens has returned as pastor – ready to help his flock heal from the pandemic and reconnect with their faith.
In the intervening years, his assignments have taken him many places and informed his ministry, especially his most recent assignment at what he calls “ground zero” of the COVID-19 pandemic.
AN UNFOLDING VOCATION
A native of Nashville, Tenn., Father Tim had a solid Catholic upbringing, but he did not discern a vocation to the priesthood right away.
He was an altar server and lector at his home parish, and he attended parochial schools run by the Sisters of Mercy. He studied economics at Washington University and went on to earn a master’s degree at Northwestern University. He then studied law at Emory University in Atlanta for a year before getting a job with the U.S. government in Washington, D.C.
He first felt the tug of a priestly vocation while working in the nation’s capital. He was living on Capitol Hill when he met a Jesuit priest at the Catholic church he was attending nearby, St. Aloysius.
“That was the first parish I had been to in the Washington area where the priest came up after Mass and said, ‘You must be new here. I hope you come back,’” Father Tim recalls.
The Jesuits’ joy and spirituality intrigued him. He started getting involved at the parish, helping at an overnight homeless shelter on Saturday nights.
“I found that I enjoyed that and seemed to relate to people who were homeless and poor, and that made me ponder at a deeper level what I should be doing with my life. ... So, I took the giant leap and said I wanted to be a Jesuit.”
He entered the Jesuit order in 1989 at the age of 32. His training and studies took him to many locations around the U.S. during his formation period – from serving alongside the Missionaries of Charity at an AIDS care home in Manhattan to teaching high school calculus and computer science in Scranton, Pa. In between teaching and serving, he studied philosophy, theology and pastoral counseling.
Those years of teaching, serving and learning were formative, he says.
Ten years after entering the Jesuits, he and six other men were ordained at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in Baltimore in 1999. Then Auxiliary Bishop Gordon D. Bennett of Baltimore and the late Bishop George V. Murry of Youngstown, Ohio, both Jesuits, presided at his ordination.
TWO DECADES A PRIEST
After ordination he was assigned to St. Peter Church, where he served alongside his fellow Jesuits, the beloved late pastors Father Jim Devereux and Father Eugene McCreesh, as well as parochial vicar, Father Bob Paquet. At 42, he was half their age.
“I think they thought they needed me in the interim to slow them down,” Father Tim jokes. “I helped with the sacraments. … You learn a lot in your first year as a priest, from baptisms to weddings to visiting the sick.”
His time in Charlotte was brief – about six months – before he was called to return to southern Maryland where he directed Loyola-on-the-Potomac Retreat House for four years before returning to the classroom as a high school teacher in Washington, D.C. He then became provincial treasurer, and over the next eight years visited different religious communities to celebrate Mass and minister to them.
He also celebrated Masses for “Radio Mass of Baltimore,” an apostolate the Jesuits started in the 1930s. Long before the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to tune in for Mass on TV and online, this radio outreach served the homebound and those who were incarcerated and could not physically attend Mass.
In 2019, he started a new assignment – and little did he know that there he would use all of the pastoral skills he’d gained over the years.
The assignment was at St. Thomas More Church in Decatur, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta. The parish was a recent addition to the churches staffed by the Jesuits, at the request of former Atlanta Archbishop Wilton Gregory.
One year after he arrived, the pandemic erupted.
“St. Thomas More was kind of like ‘ground zero’ during the pandemic,” he recalls. The church is located near the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Emory University Hospital, where clinical trials for the Moderna vaccine were being held. Many of his parishioners worked there, literally on the front lines of fighting the pandemic.
Father Tim was enlisted to administer the sacraments to sick and dying COVID-19 patients at Emory University Hospital.
“As much as they would permit, I would go to the hospital,” he says. “Sadly, the anointing of the sick went back to becoming extreme unction, as we were only let in when someone was close to death.”
The experience was heartbreaking, he says. “I could go in to anoint them. ... A nurse was there holding an iPad or an iPhone so the family could see their family member was being ministered to, but they couldn’t be there themselves. It brought consolation to people as best it could.”
He knew parishioners who died from the coronavirus, as well as fellow Jesuit brothers.
“I wasn’t worried for myself, in part because I trusted the medical people. I took inspiration from Jesuit saints of centuries before – in particular, St. Aloysius Gonzaga – who ministered to those dying. I felt that there is a long history of not just Jesuits, but priests and religious women being with people during their worst times. I thought, ‘What else should I be doing?’”
A RETURN TO ST. PETER
Returning to Charlotte, where his priesthood began, just as the pandemic is easing makes him reflect.
“I think to some extent, hardly a weekend goes by that someone doesn’t come up after Mass and say, ‘This is the first time I’ve been to Mass in (place number of months here),’” he says. “I hear their stories of what it was like to watch Mass from home. They say how grateful they are to see a priest they know celebrating Mass. In all that time away they wanted the Eucharist, and that was the piece we couldn’t give them at that time.”
“People say, ‘I missed Mass.’ The pandemic has brought that out – that they miss going to Mass. Part of it is the Eucharist. It is also being with fellow Catholics. It clearly is important to people, and it means a lot that they can come back.”
He thinks often about all the people who have not yet come back to Mass.
The parish is planning a homecoming to welcome people back, he says. Future challenges – including dealing with space needs and master planning – can all wait, he says. Right now, the new pastor is focused on the essentials of ministry as people emerge from the darkness of the pandemic. “How can we minister to them?
How can we encourage them to continue to build up the people of God?”
— SueAnn Howell, Senior reporter