By Jessica Able, Record Staff Writer
A strong desire to serve the poor and to live in community led Father Dismas Kline, a native of Louisville, to the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal and eventually to the priesthood.
Father Kline, 35, was ordained a Franciscan Friar of the Renewal May 28 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City by Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan. He was one of 14 ordained — nine were ordained for the Archdiocese of New York and five as Franciscan Friars of the Renewal.
The road to the Franciscans — and later the priesthood — was not an easy one, Father Kline said during an interview last week.
For years, Father Kline said, he expended energy fighting what he believed God was calling him to do — become a priest.
“I had a terrible fear that God was asking me to be a priest. I thought that was pretty horrendous,” he explained. “I didn’t want to do well in religion class. I didn’t want to be pious or devout because I was afraid of what that might suggest to someone, to myself or to God.”
When he entered Western Kentucky University in the fall of 1998, Father Kline said he began rejecting his faith in earnest for a number of reasons, including the fear of his vocation and what he calls a “lukewarm theology” he received in school.
He even went so far as to inquire how to formally leave the church.
All the while, he maintained good relationships with friends and described himself as a “sincere seeker” while attending Western, he said.
After a couple of years in college, he said he decided to remove himself from the “weight of skepticism” that he experienced in college and joined AmeriCorps, a service organization funded by the federal government.
“It was really healing for me to be among the poor, serving them and living in community with nine other people,” he said, joking that the experience was almost like Franciscan life, except that he lived with women.
The experience helped clear away some of the skepticism he had experienced but he was still not a believer.
He enrolled at the College of Charleston in South Carolina and found himself being pulled back to the church.
Father Kline still attended Mass during his period of tremendous doubt, sometimes even attending daily Mass.
“I didn’t receive Communion or say the Creed or say Amen,” he said. “But I found the church magnetically attractive.”
Then he began to pray for something specific — to find Catholic male friends that “were normal.”
“I wanted to find friends who were devout Catholics but also liked to play basketball, drink beer and eat pizza,” he said.
Soon, he said, God answered his prayers and he met two men who were also seeking something similar. They moved into a two-bedroom apartment, where the young men bunked in one room and turned the other bedroom into a chapel.
“The Lord gave me the experience of religious life before I knew what religious life was,” he said.
Father Kline encountered the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal at the March for Life in Washington,D.C., in the early 2000s. He saw three Franciscans standing around chatting while twirling the cinctures that hung around their waists.
“That spoke volumes to me. It said ‘we are normal but we are also so devout and radical that we wear medieval dress. We are willing to go to these lengths to proclaim the Gospel,’ ” he said.
All the things Father Kline had been pursuing on his own — serving the poor and living a simple life in community — he said he found with the Franciscans.
A year after taking his temporary vows, Father Kline traveled to Honduras as part of his ministry and said he fell in love with Latin America. He spent three years in Honduras and two in Nicaragua.
“I found the greatest joy of my religious life, so far, there,” he said
In 2012, he returned to the United States to complete his studies for ordination. Just this week, he embarked again for Nicaragua, where he will serve in the order’s ministry providing prison and hospital chaplains. He also anticipates working with young people through the congregation’s program Corazon Puro (Pure Heart), a youth chastity program.
Father Kline is the son of Laura and Dick Kline of Louisville. He has two brothers, Vincent and Cabe. He is a graduate of Our Mother of Sorrows School and a 1998 graduate of St. Xavier High School. He celebrated a Mass of Thanksgiving at Our Mother of Sorrows Church June 5, the parish where he grew up.
