Fr. Daniel Merz — 25 years of helping people get closer to God
One night while Father Daniel Merz was in first grade, he prayed in the dark before bed: “God, I just want to see you. Show me your face just once.”
“To some extent, that’s never gone away,” he recently stated. “There’s been that desire, that acceptance that God is real, and I want to see him.”
Fr. Merz, pastor of St. Thomas More Newman Center in Columbia, was ordained to the Holy Priesthood 25 years ago — July 11, 1998, the Feast of St. Benedict, in St. Clement Church in St. Clement.
“What I remember most was when all the priests came forward and laid hands on my head,” he said. “That felt very powerful. Every pair of hands felt different. Different spiritualities, different personalities, different gifts. I could really sense that.”
He wasn’t just becoming a priest. He was becoming a member of the Order of Presbyters, all working and praying on God’s behalf for the salvation of souls.
“Why did I enter the Priesthood?” said Fr. Merz. “To be there to be help people with their faith — helping them grow closer to God in good times and in bad times.”
“Slap upside the head”
Fr. Merz is the fourth of five siblings — three brothers, two sisters — in his family.
Their parents ran a dairy farm near Bowling Green.
The Merz children worked hard on the farm, went to St. Clement School, attended Mass with their parents and learned from them to be Catholic.
Fr. Merz’s interest in spiritual matters intensified when Father Edward Doyle, a gregarious young priest from Ireland, was assigned to St. Clement.
“I found him to be someone I could look up to and be inspired by,” Fr. Merz recalled.
Fr. Doyle, now deceased, frequently invited the boys of the parish to think about whether God wanted them to be priests.
Several of Fr. Merz’s friends went to St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Hannibal for high school, but Fr. Merz didn’t think he was ready for that.
He wound up having an unhappy freshman year in the local public school and missed his friends.
“I think God knew I needed a slap upside the head to get me to go,” he said.
Joining his pals in Hannibal the next fall, he immediately felt at home.
“The experience of fraternity that I encountered there has never left me,” he said. “It has continued to buoy me along.”
Monsignor David Cox was his spiritual director.
“That was a very positive experience for me,” said Fr. Merz. “He had a special role in my formation.”
The discernment process continued at Conception Seminary College in northwestern Missouri.
“Being out in the middle of the nowhere with the monks at Conception — that’s where I really learned to fall in love with God,” he recalled.
Drawn to the deep sense of community and the monastic spirit he witnessed among the monks, he considered entering the Benedictine novitiate.
He also felt a tug to marriage and family life.
“There was something genuinely beautiful and powerful about falling in love,” he said, “but I still couldn’t let go of this love for God and this fraternity I had in the seminary.”
“Beautiful Church”
Bishop Michael F. McAuliffe of Jefferson City, now deceased, sent Fr. Merz to Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in St. Louis to study theology for two years, then to the Pontifical Athenaeum of Sant’Anselmo and the Pontifical Gregorian University, both in Rome.
“I wanted all along to study in Rome,” Fr. Merz noted. “But when I got over there, I was in over my head. I was learning the language and culture while working on my degree.
“That first year in Rome, not a day went by where I didn’t stop and say, ‘What’s this farm boy doing an ocean away from home?’” he stated.
Time and hard work brought comfort and familiarity, “but there was always a readiness, a longing to get back home.”
He got to travel to places throughout Europe and the Middle East, most notably Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Israel.
He attended several of Pope St. John Paul II’s weekly audiences and Sunday Angelus prayers in Vatican City.
“It was always neat to see the universality of the Church reflected in people from all over the world,” said Fr. Merz. “It felt great to be able to be proudly and unapologetically Catholic.”
“It’s a beautiful Church!” he said. “Not perfect, but beautiful.”
A priest forever
Bishop McAuliffe ordained Fr. Merz a transitional deacon in the spring of 1997.
“That was a beautiful ceremony,” Fr. Merz recalled. “It was powerful for me and the people of St. Clement. I think a few people started coming back to Church because they had such an experience at the ordination.”
He spent that summer assisting Father Edwin Cole, now deceased, at Sacred Heart Parish in Columbia.
It took a few months for Fr. Merz to get used to helping to lead public worship and preaching occasional homilies without getting a knot in his stomach.
He got to serve as a deacon at Bishop John R. Gaydos’s (now retired) ordination as bishop of Jefferson City.
He attended a Holy Thursday Mass with the pope and got to shake his hand, and meet him again during Bishop Gaydos’s and Bishop McAuliffe’s ad limina visit to Rome in 1997.
The following July, in St. Clement Church, where Fr. Merz had received all of his other sacraments and where he would offer his Mass of Thanksgiving the following day, Bishop Gaydos ordained him to the Holy Priesthood.
The new priest spent his first two years as associate pastor of Cathedral of St. Joseph Parish in Jefferson City.
Father Frederick Elskamp was the rector.
“He’s a wonderful guy,” said Fr. Merz. “A great pastor. A good friend.”
The parishioners welcomed Fr. Merz and helped draw him into the life of the community.
He was surprised in 2001 when Bishop Gaydos asked him to return to Conception Seminary College as a member of the faculty.
“The monks wanted a diocesan priest to be on the formation staff, and they wanted someone who could teach Latin, and they knew me,” Fr. Merz noted.
He spent 10 years in Conception, the last four as the seminary’s first non-Benedictine vice rector and dean of students in its history.
He believes the structure and commitment to communal prayer that are part of the Benedictine charism helped him become a better priest.
So did the teaching, organizing and mentoring responsibilities he undertook.
“Because of all of that, I feel a lot more comfortable saying yes to leading retreats, giving talks, leading Bible studies and the like,” he said.
“Theology in action”
After completing a doctorate in Sacred Liturgy through the Pontifical Institute of Liturgy in Rome, Fr. Merz was ready to return to his home diocese.
Instead, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops invited him to apply to be associate director of its Secretariat of Worship in Washington, D.C.
Bishop Gaydos and the diocesan Presbyteral Council encouraged him to pursue the opportunity, saying the experience will help him serve the diocese better.
“I was out there three and a half years,” Fr. Merz noted. “The people were great, and I loved the people I worked with, and for the most part, I enjoyed the work I did.”
He helped implement the new English-language translation of the Roman Missal in 2011.
Working with the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL), he helped fine-tune the new translations of other Catholic rites and resources.
He also continued serving as chairman of the Diocesan Liturgical Commission.
Liturgy refers to the Mass and other universal prayers, rituals and sacraments of the Church.
“For me, liturgy is a fountain of spirituality,” Fr. Merz said. “Some people see liturgy as a bunch of rubrics. I see it as a source of theology — theology in action.”
“In our DNA”
Upon Fr. Merz’s return to Missouri, Bishop Gaydos appointed him to lead St. George Parish in Linn and Our Lady Help of Christians Parish in Frankenstein.
“I was very excited about that,” Fr. Merz recalled. “I was so happy to be able to just pour myself into these parishes and get to know the families and the people and get to know them and see how we can grow the faith there.”
Both parishes have Catholic grade schools.
“Going over and visiting the kids and hanging out with them — that was just great!” he said.
He oversaw an extensive renovation of St. George Church, integrating artwork from the previous church that was built in the 1890s.
On July 1, 2020, Bishop W. Shawn McKnight appointed him pastor of St. Thomas More Newman Center in Columbia.
Bishop McKnight also tapped him to serve as diocesan director of the Permanent Diaconate, working with two deacons to oversee diaconal formation before and after ordination.
The Newman Center parish is one of the youngest, most energetic, dynamic and diverse parishes in the diocese, serving Catholic students and faculty members from all over the world, as well as an established year-round resident population.
Fr. Merz arrived to encounter a student community that had been invigorated by the Dominican priests who preceded him, as well as the missionaries of the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS).
He has been working with parishioners to make the Newman Center chapel more conducive to sacred worship.
“The Liturgy — communal worship — it’s the essence of who we are,” he said. “Without the sacraments, we’re adrift. They form us into the Body of Christ and keep us connected.
“Being Catholic is in our DNA because of the Eucharist,” he noted. “We consume Christ and we become Christ to each other. Without that, a huge part of our reality is missing.”
He emphasized that the Old and New Testaments give clear direction for how God wants to be worshiped.
“He cares deeply about that,” Fr. Merz stated. “As we pray in the Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer, ‘It is right and just, our duty and our salvation to give you praise.’
“How we do that is a matter of our salvation,” he said. “If Liturgy is done well, on a practical level, it informs but it also inspires.”
Here and now
Twenty-five years into Priesthood, Fr. Merz is a lot more comfortable with God’s mysterious ways.
“I’ve come to experience and accept that God works through sinful and imperfect people to do great and beautiful things,” he said. “And I humbly include myself in that.”
He sees his role as a priest as to be of service to the Priesthood that all people are called to in Baptism.
“It’s not about me,” he noted. “I always want it to be about helping people to grow in the faith.”
He remains eager to help people understand that they are as much a part of God’s plan as Jesus’s first followers.
“It’s not just history,” he said. “We’re all part of this. Our faith is about Christ still doing the things today that he did himself and that he did through Peter and Paul and the Apostles and the whole early Church.”
As his silver jubilee approaches, Fr. Merz asks for prayers for more men to hear God calling them to Priesthood, and for more men and women to hear the call to religious life.
“We need generous hearts!” he said. “We need to encourage and inspire people to listen to the Lord and pursue it. I’m sure the Lord is calling them.”
A year after his ordination, he became part of a small group of priests in the diocese that meets monthly to encourage and support each other.
“I want to thank them for helping keep the Priesthood alive and wonderful over these years,” he said.
Fr. Merz is filled with joy and gratitude.
“Thanks be to Jesus Christ for sharing his Priesthood with me!” he stated. “And to all the other people who have been a part of this journey, who have helped and supported me, who support the Church and the Priesthood.”
