Steve Skojec

We got back late last night from the trip to Atlanta, and all in all things went well.

I was unable to get pictures of the ordination, but the first Mass was a different story. I was pleased to get this picture of the first consecration of Fr. Jim Flanagan:

It’s kind of hard to believe that this is the same unassuming guy in a flannel shirt and jeans I met early on in my college years en route with some friends to a West Virginia bar. Quickly becoming friends, we would often hang out at his house eating cheap Chinese food and watching Jeopardy, or drinking Glenfiddich and talking about theology. We always listened to The Smiths and laughed out loud at the absurdity of the lyrics, if we weren’t making up our own. We spoke in exaggerated German accents (and still do) and would turn everything into an acronym (T.E.I.A.A.) or reverse words at random just to throw people off track. (It was never a question of going to Wal Mart, only of going to “Tram Law”.) Once, on a Good Friday, we craved meat so badly that we stayed up until midnight, Jim cooking a pot of hamburger-laden spaghetti that was ready to devour when the clock struck 12AM. We stayed up all night playing Trivial Pursuit without the board, just testing our knowledge against the cards and laughing at how pathetic we were for the spaghetti stunt.

In a word, our humor was intensely absurd, and we laughed harder and longer because of how stupid we could be despite (or perhaps because of) our mutual love for the intellectual life.

Jim rediscovered his faith while serving in the Air Force in Germany in the 1990s. A friend of his, only nominally Catholic at the time himself, gave him a pamphlet on the Eucharistic Miracle of Lanciano. I remember Jim telling me that he went out that night an agnostic and came home a Catholic. In college, he was a guy I think most of us looked up to - older, more knowledgeable, and intensely likable. Knowledgeable is an understatement - I think Jim is one of the smartest guys I’ve ever known. He never rubbed it in though. His strength of character was only outweighed by his modesty. Only his clear sense of confidence belied the fact that he was a self-possessed man.

After graduation, Jim moved to Atlanta because of a girl he met at Steubenville. Shortly thereafter, he got engaged, though for a reason not imminently clear at the time it wasn’t long before things came to an end with his fiance. In the aftermath of this trial, he found his vocation, one I never expected and yet one that didn’t surprise me. I knew that few men would make a better father, but perhaps fewer still would make a better priest.

Jim entered Mount St. Mary’s seminary in 2003, and I was blessed to be living close enough to him to see him regularly as he underwent his transformation. For a time, I felt that he was growing distant, but I knew that it was a necessary part of the journey toward priesthood that any serious candidate would have to undertake. I can only surmise that he was detaching himself from the world, even from the unique bonds of friendship that he so easily forged with many individuals. 

As his formation neared its end, I saw the old Jim coming back - the humor, the relaxed and disarming manner, the sense of imperturbable confidence - in short, the friend I had known. But he was different too. A new man in Christ. There’s no other way to put it. Jim wasn’t just my friend anymore. He belonged to the Church and her people, and while our friendship was still special, I could no longer expect to have the kind of times we used to have together. His duties called, and they were a stronger obligation.

That transformation was completed this past weekend. On Monday morning, as we got together for coffee, it was almost like old times. We drove together and chatted, and made our way into Starbucks joking about his signing bonus for the priesthood. As we walked in the door, he in his clerics, a woman looked up from her laptop.

“Oh! Are you one of the newly ordained?”

“Yes.”

“Congratulations! They announced it in our bulletin and…”

I looked at him, this friend of ten years who had dodged the spotlight as long as I had known him, who ducked out of the room every time a camera was present, and the look in his eyes as this woman spoke to him could only be described as pastoral. He took in her congratulations with the small half smile that he so often wore on his face, the look of a man who finds joy in even the smallest things.

“You’re famous now.” I told him, after we moved back into line. “It’s never going to be the same.”

And it won’t. But it will be better than ever before, because he has followed the call and is now doing what God made him to do. And I’m so excited for my friend who has begun this new life at such a dynamic time in the Church’s history. He always dismisses it when I say it (and will do so again if he reads this) but I am convinced that he’s bishop material. The kind of Bishop you’ve always hoped for. I have a profound fraternal love for Fr. Jim Flanagan, and I’m honored to call him my friend.

It’s a strange feeling to be proud of a man who is both older and wiser than I, but I am. And I found myself hoping and praying that God would bless me with such a son.

Please, if you have a moment, offer a prayer of thanksgiving and support for Fr. Flanagan. The Church is blessed to have gained such a priest.