By Laurie Hansen Cardona of the Catholic Herald Staff

ST. FRANCIS - Martí Colom, who will be ordained a priest of the Milwaukee Archdiocese this weekend, hopes to contribute to local Catholics' awareness that the Catholic Church extends beyond their parish boundaries.

Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland will ordain Colom, a native of Barcelona, Spain, at 11 a.m. Saturday at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, 802 N. Jackson St., Milwaukee. Colom will celebrate a Mass of Thanksgiving at St. Mary Parish, 1260 Church St., Elm Grove, at 11 a.m. Sunday.

Colom, 29, has been appointed to serve as associate pastor at Prince of Peace/Principe de Paz Parish on Milwaukee's near south side beginning June 20. The parish's congregation is largely Hispanic and Asian. Colom speaks Spanish, English and Catalán, a language spoken in northeastern Spain.

The slender, spectacled Colom, in an interview for the locally-taped TV program "Face to Face," said he decided to become a priest after joining the international Missionary Community of St. Paul the Apostle, which has had its U.S. house of formation in Racine since 1992, when Weakland welcomed the missionary community to the archdiocese.

Colom's community has 119 members, including 15 ordained priests, as well as seminarians, women committed to missionary life, novices and aspirants, and 10 married individuals. Missionaries from 11 countries, including Spain, Kenya, Colombia, Italy, Ethiopia, Bolivia, Venezuela and England, will celebrate Colom's ordination Saturday and hold an annual meeting in Milwaukee.

Fr. Robert Stiefvater, archdiocesan vocations director, also interviewed for the TV program, said this type of mixed lay-clerical community has been gaining prominence since the end of the 1940s. "I thinks it's the way the church and religious life are responding to the special needs of the 20th and 21st centuries. I think we'll see more and more of this in the future."

Colom said the ethnic diversity of parishes in the Milwaukee Archdiocese appeals to him.

"It would be very boring if we were all the same. Different people bring different visions of the He is church, depending on the places we come from. Otherwise we would not be the Catholic Church; we try to be universal.

"Sometimes it's not that easy for everybody to get along; there are difficulties. But in the long run, I think it's just a wonderful experience we're having of having different peoples in the same parishes trying to be together," he said.

The Archdiocese or Milwaukee continues to become more and more diverse, commented Stiefvater. "We have Spanish-speaking Catholics in the diocese, Vietnamese-speaking, Hmong, as well as (Catholics speaking) some of the traditional European languages."

He noted that the archdiocese currently does not have enough Spanish-speaking priests to meet needs of growing Hispanic population. According to a news release distributed by the archdiocese, the Hispanic population in the 10 counties of southeastern Wisconsin has grown by 34 percent during the past 10 years, from 71,060 to an estimated 107,648 this year. The release said 19 archdiocesan priests are fluent in Spanish, while 41 parishes in the archdiocese minister to Hispanics.

"Nowadays it's fair to say that almost about every parish in the archdiocese has a Hispanic presence," commented Colom, noting that Hispanics bring a different experience of church.

They bring "a sense of religion as being an integral part of everyday life," Stiefvater agreed. He recalled being at the home of a Venezuelan seminarian, who asked his mother to give him her blessing before he left the house. "That sense of parents blessing children, wishing them well and praying for them, and making it very visible and public, is something I think we from northern Europe are just a little bit shy to do," Stiefvater said.

Colom said he sees few differences between church life in Spain and in the United States. U.S. parishes have bigger, salaried professional staffs, he said, and church involvement is spotty in traditionally Catholic Spain, where for historic reasons the church is not always viewed favorably.

But Catholics in both places need to be more aware of their fellow church members in Latin America and Africa, Colom said. He said he and other Spanish-speaking members of his community here hope "not just to tend to needs of people here in Hispanic parishes, but try to raise awareness in the archdiocese in general to what's happening today in the church in northern Kenya, in Ethiopia, in places that are removed from our consciousness."

In this era of "the global village," he said, it's important to have groups of people from this country traveling and visiting parishes in developing nations. "I think a mutual exchange can happen."

Colom and his community members have already changed Saint Francis Seminary, Stiefvater commented. They have given their fellow seminarians "a wider understanding of what the church can be," he said, noting that some of their classmates have never been outside of the country.

Colom said members of his far-flung missionary community make a great effort to maintain communication despite the miles between them. "The phone bills sometimes are quite high. E-mail is great, and we have a rhythm of writing letters. Every month a community in the world writes the rest of the communities, explaining what's going on, (who are the) new people," he said.

Colom said his path to the priesthood began with a nine-month confirmation program at his home parish in Barcelona, where he met a seminarian who later went on to be ordained a priest and join the Missionary Community of St. Paul the Apostle. Together they developed a parish youth group in the low-income neighborhood surrounding the parish. The effort, which involved tutoring students and outreach to elderly, moved him. "Several members of that group became part of the missionary community," Colom said.

Travels to Kenya, where the missionary community also has a presence, before coming to the Milwaukee Archdiocese in 1994, also influenced his decision to become a priest. "I quickly realized that even though there may be miles between countries, people are not really that different. We have the same issues, the same problems," he said.

Colom said he thinks most priests are priests because they have met another priest who has given them an example of being normal and happy in the priesthood. "In my case, I first thought I wanted to be a member of the community, before even considering priesthood. I thought I like what we're doing here and I like the sense of trying to live the Gospel, only later on did I think priesthood would make sense for me."

He said he thinks most people who look into the priesthood are in some sense unhappy with the societal status quo and looking to change the world.

"There is a certain healthy sense for dissatisfaction about how things are out there - when you see poverty, when you see people with all kinds of needs, not just material things, but certainly material things (as well).

"Priesthood is a desire to do something and change the world around you. And to do it with others, in the context of the church," he commented.

Colom said vocations tend not to thrive in the wealthiest countries nor in the poorest countries, where people are too busy trying to survive. "But those countries where people are in contact with injustice and yet have enough means to make a living ... are producing vocations. That is the situation of India and certain Latin American countries. "

Colom thinks he personally chose priesthood because he was unconsciously "searching for something out-of-the-ordinary, looking for doing something real with other people, and not being 65 and looking back and wondering what I had done."

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