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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Transitional Deacon Reinhardt’s 600-mile trek in Europe prepared him for God’s call

Transitional Deacon Michael Reinhardt took a bit of a zigzag path to the priesthood, including a near-600-mile trek that crossed the Pyrenees that he said prepared him for God’s call.

Deacon Reinhardt, 43, grew up Lutheran in Rockford, Illinois, attending an old Swedish Lutheran church where he stayed active through high school. He remained in tune with the faith while studying mechanical engineering as an undergraduate at Bradley University in Peoria. A note on the school bulletin board directed him to a local family who drove him to a nearby Lutheran church for services.

When he moved to the Twin Cities to attend the University of Minnesota Law School, he didn’t know any church-going Lutherans, so he accompanied a law school friend to his Baptist church. “It was a great community, a great group of young adults there, but I did not want to join that community unless I agreed with what they were teaching more than what I was brought up with as a Lutheran,” Deacon Reinhardt said.

Reading St. Augustine, Cardinal John Henry Newman, G.K. Chesterton and, more recently, Father Richard John Neuhaus, had a big impact on his faith, he said. Their faith comes alive through their words, each in unique ways.

“They’re all very much their own person,” Deacon Reinhardt said. “I wasn’t looking necessarily in the Catholic direction, but for whatever reason, these men spoke to me. They’ve been instrumental in my journey into the Church.” In retrospect, he noted, they’re all converts.

Deacon Reinhardt said he had a sense over the years that he was being led into the Church. “And I didn’t want to, because I was Protestant and I didn’t know any Catholics.”

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Deacon Reinhardt decided at the end of 2011 to stop attending the Baptist church and start going to a Catholic church. He chose the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis, close to his law office at the time. “You see people from all walks of life, all ages, from all over the world,” he said. There he completed the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults and entered the Church in spring 2013.

He had been practicing patent law for years, but grew bored and quit. With time on his hands and an adventurous spirit, Deacon Reinhardt purchased an airplane ticket to Spain to walk the Camino de Santiago, or the Way of St. James, an ancient pilgrimage route to the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela where the Apostle St. James the Great is believed to be entombed.

Deacon Reinhardt started on the French side of the Pyrenees and walked to Santiago de Compostela and the Atlantic Ocean. He walked about 17 miles a day and traveled nearly 600 miles. “You meet people, you’ve got a lot of time to yourself and with God,” he said. “I (took) a lot of time to listen to God and to learn what that feels like.”

His journey was one step at a time. “That’s most of life,” Deacon Reinhardt said. “You do one small thing, that doesn’t seem to amount to much every day, but you keep on more or less in the same direction and you get places.”

The simple lifestyle during his walking trip helped him feel more integrated and able to listen for the voice he would later hear.

“I started hearing the call that following winter,” he said of priesthood. By spring 2015, he thought “well, this is not quite going away.” Once he picked up his seminary application, he felt a powerful sense of confirmation. “It’s been a really beautiful journey,” he said.

While he sought adventure with the Pyrenees trek, Deacon Reinhardt said in hindsight, he doesn’t think he would have had the capacity to hear God’s call if he hadn’t made that journey.

“It’s been a real privilege to walk these years with my brothers,” he said of his fellow seminarians. “We’re blessed to be a part of this particular group of men. And it’s been a very rich experience.”

Deacon Reinhardt believes his legal background will be helpful, at least indirectly. He has withdrawn voluntarily from active law practice so he does not plan to offer legal advice. But the profession of law is about analyzing texts, such as statutes, regulations “and facts with a view to helping people.”

This analysis happens on every level, he said, from the minutiae of textual analysis to big-picture policy questions and everything in between, as well as what will serve a particular client. “All of this is very helpful both in theology and in helping people,” he said.
“There are also the practical aspects of keeping track of important dates and getting the work done,” he added. “So, I think my legal background will be helpful; it provides good foundational skills for big parts of what being a priest in ministry is about.”

Deacon Reinhardt said that as a young man who didn’t grow up Catholic, he never imagined he’d become a priest. “Sometimes I joke that I’ve come a lot further into the Church than I ever expected, but I wouldn’t trade it.”

He will celebrate a Mass of Thanksgiving at the Basilica at 9:30 a.m. May 30, and at his teaching parish, St. Mary of the Lake in White Bear Lake, at 9 a.m. June 6.

 


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