August 13, 2024 // Diocese

‘I’ve Inherited Something Really, Really Good’

Paula Lent

After Eight Years Away, Monsignor Michael Heintz Returns to the Diocese as Pastor of St. Pius X

“I love parish life,” Monsignor Michael Heintz told Today’s Catholic. “I’m a theologian, but parish life is a place where theology is embodied and practiced and lived out.”

After spending the past eight years as a professor and academic dean at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, Monsignor Heintz is excited to be back in the diocese and is looking forward to sharing life with parishioners as the pastor of St. Pius X parish in Granger.

He is no stranger to St. Pius X, having made it his second home during his summer and winter breaks throughout his appointment at Mount St. Mary’s. He did so in response to the invitation of his former high school chaplain and longtime friend, Father Bill Schooler, who recently retired after 23 years of pastoring St. Pius.

“When I was going out to the seminary, Father Schooler invited me to have a room at St. Pius,” Monsignor Heintz shared. “He had a big rectory, and he said that way I’ll have a place to stay when I come home. So I kept the room there. It was very gracious of him, and it was great because it kept me connected to parish life.”

Before being on loan to the Archdiocese of Baltimore beginning in 2016, Monsignor Heintz acquired a lot of experience with parish life, first during his five years at St. Charles Borromeo Parish in Fort Wayne after his ordination and then as the pastor of St. Matthew’s Cathedral in South Bend from 1998 to 2016. Throughout this time, he also served as a chaplain and teacher, first at St. Joseph High School in South Bend and then at Marian High School in Mishawaka. In 2008, Monsignor Heintz completed his doctoral degree in patristics at the University of Notre Dame, where he then taught for more than a decade and served as the director of the school’s Master of Divinity program.

At Mount St. Mary’s, Monsignor Heintz was largely responsible for the academic component of the seminary program. But his tutelage extended beyond the classroom and the textbooks. His decades of experience of being deeply embedded in parish life not only enabled him to share wise and practical perspectives with the men but also informed them of the ways in which he lived his own life – showing them by example the importance of being a member of the Church within a parish.

Monsignor Heintz said that while at Mount St. Mary’s, he “learned that there are a number of wonderful young men who have lots of zeal for souls in the seminary, and who really love God, love the Lord, His Church, and want to get to work.”

“And our work was actually forming them to be really good parochial vicars,” he noted. “It’s their first pastor who’s really going to help them learn how to be a pastor. And the danger of forming them to be pastors is that they’ll land in the parishes as parochial vicars and think they’re the boss. And they’re not. They have lots to learn. They have lots of ardor, lots of zeal, and the learning curve is sharp, because there’s so many things that no seminary on earth could prepare them for.”

Monsignor Heintz continued: “The biggest virtue they need is prudence: How do I handle this particular concrete situation prudently?” he said before noting the dual importance of an intellectual understanding of theology and being able to truly minister to the person in front of you. “They should certainly be able to give you the textbook answer to theological questions. That’s great. They should do that. But that’s not quite the same as the virtue of prudence in pivoting [for example] – you could have two conversations, one after another, and what the person in those conversations each needs is very different, and you can’t just hand them a textbook answer. You need to be able to accommodate that answer so that they can understand. And that’s true with preaching, it’s also true with one-on-one pastoral care: How do I help this person best receive what I have to give?”

As much as he loved the seminary community, Monsignor Heintz found it necessary to also become involved in a parish. “I began assisting every weekend at the parish in northern Virginia, St. John the Apostle in Leesburg, and for eight years, I was able to serve there on weekends, and I loved it,” Monsignor Heintz said. “It was life-giving. I would hear confessions on Saturdays and celebrate the Sacrament of the Mass. The pastor and I became good friends. And it’s a wonderful parish. And I admit that leaving them in some ways was harder than leaving the seminary, because the seminary population changes yearly, whereas parish life is more stable. So, in some ways, the attachments there were stronger than in seminary. So that was life-giving. I couldn’t imagine teaching in secondary school and not doing parish work on the weekend.”

Monsignor Heintz also developed long-standing friendships with his lay faculty peers and their families.

“Among the lay faculty members, there were probably five or six married persons with large families, and most of them a little younger than me, so the families were still at home. And it would not be unusual for them to say, ‘Hey, why don’t you come to our house Sunday for dinner?’ Or, ‘Why don’t you come hang out Sunday afternoon and have coffee with us?’ … And that was not just to me or other priests – they would host the whole diocese: all the seminaries from particular dioceses at their home for dinner. They are really gracious and hospitable in building that kind of community.”

That kind of community is one that Monsignor Heintz sees as essential for all involved, and he was glad for the seminarians to be able to see it.

“I think priests have to have both priest friends and lay friends,” he said. “I think fostering friendships with lay friends, lay couples, is really important in the life of a priest. It doesn’t replace good priest friends. And neither do good priest friends replace any good friends. We need both as priests. And so it really modeled that for them.”

While his community is ever-expanding, his return to the area is an opportunity to enjoy new seasons with communities and community members he’s invested in before.

“I was at St. Matthew for 18 wonderful years, and because of that,” Monsignor Heintz reflected, “I got to know lots of people in the South Bend area. So, people that I taught in high school, I’ll run into here at the grocery store, or they might belong to St. Pius now.”

Monsignor Heintz is also returning to Notre Dame to teach homiletics and direct the John S. and Virginia A. Marten Program in Homiletics and Liturgics, which forms seminarians, priests, and lay ministers.

Having served in high schools for many years, Monsignor Heintz is excited to be part of the school and formation programs at St. Pius X.

“I would love being in the school and in the religious education program,” he said. “We do family catechesis here; I’ll be involved with that. I’ll be involved with OCIA, catechizing there as well.”

To say that Monsignor Heintz values community is correct. But, even more accurate would be to emphasize how much he values Christian community and the ways in which it calls us to invest in and share life with one another.

“What I love about parish life is you’re living the rhythms of the liturgical year: You’re celebrating sacraments regularly with people, you’re hearing confession, you’re anointing the sick, you’re witnessing marriages, preparing couples for marriage. You’re also dealing, in the course of any day, with a range of other things that just pop up on the radar that weren’t planned, couldn’t be planned, and you have to deal with,” he said. “Like yesterday: I was in between two appointments, and I got a call that someone was dying and needed to be anointed. They needed a priest, so I ran out to the house and anointed this wonderful woman who was pretty close to death, and I prayed with her and her husband. That’s what we do.”

“A parish is a manifestation in a local place of Christ’s body,” Monsignor Heintz said. “The Church is never reducible to anyone in a particular parish or place, but you don’t encounter the Church except in a particular parish or place.”

Monsignor Heintz said he is looking forward to continuing to encounter the Body of Christ in the parish of St. Pius X throughout the coming years.

He’s off to a great beginning.

“People have been incredibly gracious, generous and gracious, very kind,” Monsignor Heintz said of his reception by parishioners since beginning at the parish on July 1.

Having been called to take the position formerly held by his longtime friend, Father Schooler, who was beloved of the congregation, Monsignor Heintz said: “I told them I have very big shoes to fill. … He’s an incredibly fine pastor and role model. I would tell the seminarians they could do no better than to follow his example.”

Monsignor Heintz comes to the parish with no agenda but rather a humble sense of gratitude and expectant joy.

“I have a joke: Don’t change anything in the first year except your socks,” he said. “I’ve inherited something really, really good. I just want to keep building on it.”