Catholic Diocese of Spokane, Washington

From the

Official News Magazine of the Diocese of Spokane

(From the Sept. 29, 2005 edition of the Inland Register)

Even in retirement, Msgr. William Van Ommeren – “Father Van” – continues his ministry at St. Joseph Parish, Rockford, and at Immaculate Heart Retreat Center, Spokane. (IR photo)

In 1952, prior to his ordination and while still in residence at St. Edward Seminary, near Seattle, young William Van Ommeren, a native of Holland, filled out a questionnaire for the Inland Register, for an article to be published upon his ordination. On this form, with the purple lettering characteristic of the old mimeograph machines, he typed that his middle name is “M. (for Mary).” In the space for “Extra-curricular interests in the seminary” he wrote, “-a little bit of everything – I do some pendrawing [sic] (not very good) and hobby with Chemistry.”

Among the activities he engaged in during his summers at St. Edward: “Welfare worker for the St. Vincent De Paul Society, also assistant bookkeeper – worked on a mink ranch one summer – raising minks.”

Invited at the bottom of the form to “Write on the back any further information you wish to give . . .” the soon-to-be-ordained Van Ommeren neatly typed a couple of revealing paragraphs:

“There is not much to say about the years of preparation – that went gradually and without too much trouble. The war caused a little trouble but that came all to a good end ... a very severe winter and great shortage of food. Peasoup [sic] for breakfast dinner and supper for quite a little while – but that came all gradually so we got used to it and did not think that it was too hard though that is the one part of my seminary days that I would rather not do over again....”

Although his English wasn’t completely up-to-speed, the young man who would spend his entire priestly life in the Diocese of Spokane already revealed his modesty and inclination to cast a wide net in the accumulation of knowledge and experience.

Starting out at St. Augustine Parish, in Spokane, “Father Van” – the name almost everyone calls him by – eventually served at parishes in Spokane, Clarkston, and Medical Lake. Along the way, he also became Spiritual Director and Diocesan Supervisor at Marycliff High School, which closed in 1978, and worked on the diocesan Marriage Tribunal. He was Chancellor for Bishop Bernard Topel, Superior at Bishop White Seminary, Chairman of the Seminary Building committee, Rector at BishopWhite Seminary and Mater Cleri Seminary (the former high school seminary in Colbert, Wash., closed many years ago), and Moderator of the Diocesan Council of Catholic Women. He was named a monsignor in 1967 and later became diocesan Vicar General for Administrative Affairs.

Clearly, Father Van has put in his time behind a desk. But today, after more than 50 years as a priest, he insists that his most satisfying experience has been “the last 15 or 16 years here at the retreat house.” Immaculate Heart Retreat Center, in Spokane, has been Father Van’s home since 1990. “It’s a peaceful place, and it’s a good place to live,” he says. “It’s a good place for me to look back and see all the good things that have happened. There are lots of good people here, and it’s much better than living by myself, holed up somewhere in an apartment. I do some work here, and I still have a little parish I look after, in Rockford. It’s very little, but it’s fun.”

As a boy, Father Van says, “I had wanted to be a missionary, but I wound up here as a pseudo-missionary, I guess. They needed priests here, and I came as a student because I wanted to see the world, and do great things, discover great things, and that’s what brought me here. Then I was sent to study canon law, and that put me in an office.”

Father Van completed minor and college seminary in Holland, plus two years of philosophy. During those years he belonged to the Mill Hill Fathers, a missionary community. “They’re British, but most of the members are Dutch,” he said.

World War II remains a vivid memory for Father Van, who was a teenager at the time. “I was in Holland, and I saw a piece of the war twice: when we were occupied [by the German army] and when we were liberated. I think that left lifelong impressions, some good and some not good.

“I had just gone to the seminary when the war broke out,” he said, “and I was ready for philosophy when the war was over. They didn’t stop the seminary, but they took our buildings, the Germans took the buildings that the seminary was in, both in my hometown, and we went to another place where they had a seminary, and they took that for military purposes. So we patched, the whole war was five years of patching and substituting. They found buildings where we could get in, older and smaller buildings. And the student body shrunk.”

Father Van’s memories of World War II include his recollection that the church in Holland “stood up for what was right, even though it was dangerous to do that. Maybe I was looking for excitement, and I got some, some of which I wasn’t looking for.”

As with all the senior priests in the diocese, Father Van belongs to the group that was ordained and in ministry prior to Vatican II, in the mid-1960s, and had to make the transition to the post-Vatican II church. With regard to the Mass, for example, Father Van says that “we lost something with the changes; we lost some of the solemnity, and we lost this history part of it. I like languages, always did as I grew up with a lot of languages – five, six different languages we had to study as kids. And I like Latin, but it still was a foreign language.

“I like English, and I liked when I could use in the liturgy the language that we used in daily life. It made God, maybe, closer. You didn’t pray in Latin very much. We, as priests, were supposed to for years, but it was always through a dead foreign language, so your own prayer tended to be in your own language, and God spoke back in your own language. If I prayed in Dutch then God spoke Dutch to me, I think, or whatever things that I thought God might have said. So in the liturgy I liked the English, and I liked facing the people, so you prayed with the people more.”

For Father Van, the changes that followed Vatican II were welcome and exciting. “We had so much that we kept, and the doctrines stayed the same, but the approaches were fresh, so I was excited about it. I by nature am very quiet, somewhat shy, I meet people slowly. I like to get to know them and let them get to know me, and I think that helped because underneath I think I became a priest for the sake of people and God together. I just had a sense that [the church] was just like an old store that had always been doing the same thing that’s nice. But after a while that store slows down and the customers don’t go anymore because they don’t sell anymore what the customers were looking for. So I saw that happening. That’s my view, anyway, a prejudiced view, but that’s where I was coming from.”

Asked what he enjoys most about his present life at Immaculate Heart Retreat Center and his part-time parish activity at St. Joseph in Rockford, Father Van is emphatic: “It’s always been the same: It’s people. I think here I have more of a chance to get to know people, deeper and more closely than you can do in a big parish. I like the smaller parishes better because I got to know people better and they got to know me better, not just from a distance. The goodness of people, and the struggles that people have, to struggle with them a little and to just be with them. I feel since I retired that pretty much everything I do is volunteering, so I don’t have to do it, and I don’t have to earn my daily bread anymore, but I certainly get paid in many ways being here because it’s satisfying. Good things happen.”

The most challenging thing for him, Father Van says, has always been himself. “(M)y own weaknesses, my own things that I would like to grow beyond, all the different stages of aging or maturing. Getting old is in some ways not fun and in some ways it is great fun! Since retirement I have had a good dose of getting old, but life is good, it has been good for me – not always easy, but looking back I liked parish life, the smaller ones, because of the people. I think Jesus came into the world for the people, and I think that’s what we are supposed to be about, too.”

If, however, a newly ordained priest came to Father Van asking for advice, here is what he would offer: “I’d tell him to make sure that he keeps up friendships, that he has people he can trust, and talk to, and share his life with, that he not be anxious and wrapped up in his own fears and anxieties, that he get out of his shell a little bit; that he look for not all work, work, work, and no play or recreation or letting your hair down a little once in awhile. But above all, I think, good friends that are honest with you. Obviously, as a priest you need prayer, but I think that implies that you have some sort of relationship with God, and I think for most people that comes in their relationships with other people. They hear the voice of God through the people who are straight forward and honest with them.”

Bottom line for Father Van is his hopefulness. “We have some messes, but I believe,” he says, “the world is a better world today than it ever was before, I really do.”