Alumni Spotlight: Patricia Chase

Responding to the Wilderness Call
by James R. Koelsch
MOSAIC, Summer 2010

  
The growing number of lay people responding to the cry to "prepare the way of the Lord in the wilderness" (Is 40:3) has certainly been a sweet fruit of the Second Vatican Council. But like all sweet things, it also presents a problem.

Who is going to organize the multitudes showing up to straighten the highway of the Lord? Who is going to coordinate the local crew in filling valleys and making mountains low here in our archdiocese (cf. Is 40:3-4)?

One of those people is Patricia Chase, a parishioner at St. Joan of Arc Parish in St. Clair Shores and graduate of the Master of Pastoral Studies program. Since April, she has been working in the archdiocesan Office of Evangelization and Catechesis as the new coordinator for catechetics in the central region. She will be supporting the region's directors of religious education, vicariate representatives, and pastors with formation and resources.

Having worked as a freelance interior designer for more than twenty years, Patricia is an expert in organizing people. She helped General Motors and other companies to design office space that promotes good communications and streamlines interaction between people.

"After working with people to find out what their needs were, I then developed a space plan that would best suit the company and the individuals," she says. Instead of doing this for a corporation, she is now deploying her skills for the Church.

As is usually the case, especially for lay experts, her own response to the wilderness cry entailed a journey. Although Patricia had taken part in parish activities while she was in school, she did not really start doing church work until she married her husband Hank in 1978. Settling into family life, she volunteered as extraordinary minister of the Eucharist and lector. Then, in 1988, she and Hank began helping the Marriage Institute at St. Joan to prepare engaged couples for marriage. "It just made me hungry to grow in my faith," she says.

Because this desire only intensified when she also served later as an RCIA sponsor, Patricia returned to school here at Sacred Heart in 1998. "The seminary drew me in," she recalls. "The more I was exposed to the truth, the more I wanted to learn."

Later, she entered the MAPS program, where she found more than a great pool of knowledge. "It is such a wellrounded program that I developed a deeper sense of my own spirituality," Patricia says. "I really wanted to share my excitement with other people. It was like a burning in my heart."

It was the Lord calling her to prepare his way in the desert. The call would become more explicit one day in 2000 after weekday Mass, when Chase came across a copy of the Michigan Catholic blowing around one of the side entrances of her parish church. While folding it up to return it to the rack, she noticed an advertisement for a religious education coordinator at Our Lady of Good Counsel Parish in Detroit.

She had not been looking for a position because she was already busy with her four active children, who were in the fourth through eleventh grades at the time. When, however, she found the ad open two more times that day, she thought, "Lord, are you trying to tell me something?" She wound up taking the job in early 2001, but left two and a half years later to finish her MAPS degree.

In the July after her graduation in April 2005, Patricia went to work full time for Fr. John Riccardo at St. Anastasia Parish in Troy as director of religious education. Her job was to pull the people working in the various catechetical and evangelical ministries together as a team and to inspire others to respond to the cry.

Because she was successful, she has been able to direct many to the seminary. "The knowledge and excitement generated by the learning and spiritual environment there is contagious," she explains. At her new post with the archdiocese, she hopes to replicate these results.

"We're all called to be those voices crying in the desert, calling people to holiness."