How a biochemistry major found his priestly calling

He was on his way to becoming a doctor, husband and father.

Bishop-elect W. Shawn McKnight had been accepted into the University of Kansas in Lawrence to major in biochemistry and prepare to study medicine.

But his uncle and godfather, Dr. Peter O’Reilly, who was visiting from Irving, Texas, told him about a small, Catholic, liberal-arts school with a high percentage of graduates being accepted into medical school.

So young Shawn decided to visit the University of Dallas in Irving.

“I went there and was very moved by what I saw,” said Bishop-elect McKnight. “It was very small. And it was Catholic.”

The would-be Jayhawk decided to become a Crusader.

Intensely motivated to get accepted into a good medical school, he decided to take his Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) a semester early.

He spent the summer before his junior year working three jobs and studying for the MCAT.

He continued prepping for the eight-hour exam in the fall while taking a full course load and serving as a resident assistant in his college dorm.

Exhausted and starting to fall behind in his classwork, he saw a flier advertising a university chaplain’s retreat the weekend after his MCAT.

“The only way I could get out of duty as an R.A. was to go on this retreat,” he said. “I thought to myself, ‘This is a wonderful opportunity to get out of R.A. duty and get caught up on my homework and my sleep.’”

That retreat was where the future bishop’s call to Priesthood asserted itself for the first time.

“It came out of nowhere,” he recalled. “I certainly wasn’t looking for it. Perhaps I had to be that exhausted in order to be open to it.”

The last day of the retreat, he told himself, “You’ve got to get this out of your head. You’re going back to your girlfriend. You have your classwork. You have your regular life to get back to.”

He got back to his dorm, dropped off his luggage in his room and headed to his mailbox.

At the top of a stack of mail was a letter from Father James Billinger, associate director of vocations for his home Diocese of Wichita, Kansas.

It began: “Have you thought about being a priest?”

“I was stunned, especially in light of what had happened on the retreat,” Bishop-elect McKnight recalled. “I had just gotten rid of the thought, and then here’s this letter.”

It turns out, Bishop Eugene J. Gerber, now retired, had asked people throughout the Wichita diocese to fill out a postcard with the names of young men they thought could make a good priest.

“Someone turned my name in,” the future bishop stated.

He tried to get back to life as usual, but the Priesthood kept nagging him.

“It was not what I wanted,” he said. “It didn’t fit my plans.”

Finally, he set up an appointment with Fr. Billinger over Winter Break.

“And as soon as I did that, I had peace again.”

The collegian was confident that once the assistant vocation director found out about his girlfriend and his plans to become a doctor and family man, “he’d obviously tell me I don’t have a priestly vocation,” said Bishop-elect McKnight.

But Fr. Billinger told him, “That’s the kind of man we want to ordain as a priest.”

Somewhat disappointed at not getting let off the hook, he began praying like never before: “God, what do You really want me to do?”

“I didn’t want to drop all my plans and come to find out later that it was just a crazy notion,” Bishop-elect McKnight recalled. “But the closer I moved toward following that call, the more I loved it. The more at peace I was. That’s how it began.”

His parents were delighted when he told them he was going into the seminary. Friends, peers and other family members responded similarly.

“They said they were not at all surprised,” he said. “That really floored me, because I just didn’t see it myself.”

For one thing, he could barely proclaim the readings at Mass without getting flustered.

“Speaking in public — I was a SCIENCE major, for heaven’s sake! — I just didn’t know how I was going to do it,” he said.

God gave him the desire to persevere and grow.

“I went from feeling that it was an external call — not my will, but God’s will for me — to a call that I loved and wanted for myself, too,” he said.

He studied at the Pontifical College Josephinum in Worthington, Ohio, driving back and forth from time to time to visit his family in Wichita.

“I passed through the Jefferson City diocese on I-70 all those times, having no idea where my priestly formation would eventually lead me,” he said.

On May 28, 1994, in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Wichita, Bishop Gerber ordained the future bishop to the Holy Priesthood.

Twenty-three years into Bishop-elect McKnight’s priestly ministry — about half spent in parish ministry in his home diocese, the other half studying in Rome, teaching at the Josephinum and heading up the U.S. Catholic bishops’ Office of Clergy, Consecrated Life and Vocations in Washington, D.C. — Pope Francis appointed him bishop of that same stretch of I-70, along with the rest of the Diocese of Jefferson City.