Fr. Wayne Boyer retires just in time for 35th priestly anniversary
“Why do you want to be a priest?”
“Actually, I’m just in it for the money!”
Father Wayne Boyer thought he was being droll, but the seminary psychologist didn’t even smile.
“So I got serious and gave him the right answer,” Fr. Boyer recalled. “‘To preach and teach the Good News ... dispense God’s grace through the Sacraments ... show love to children and the elderly ... to get to heaven and help get other people to heaven.’”
A year later, Bishop Michael F. McAuliffe of Jefferson City, now deceased, had a visit with the future priest.
He read from the report of that psychological evaluation, a prerequisite for all who seek admittance into priestly formation: “Mr. Boyer seems to lack sincerity. I don’t think he’ll last a year in the seminary.”
“I think we can tear this up,” the bishop told him. “You’re going to be great.”
That was a pivotal moment for Fr. Boyer, 75, who recently retired from active ministry after 35 years of Priesthood in this diocese.
“I have to admit, some parts of the story are amazing to me still,” he said.
Fr. Boyer was ordained to the Holy Priesthood on Dec. 12, 1987, the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Since then, he served as associate pastor of Holy Family Parish in Hannibal, St. Thomas the Apostle Parish in St. Thomas, St. Andrew Parish in Tipton, St. Joseph Parish in Martinsburg, Church of the Resurrection Parish in Wellsville, St. Clement Parish in St. Clement, St. Francis Xavier Parish in Taos, and for the past five-and-a-half years as pastor of Immaculate Conception Parish in Owensville and St. Alexander Parish in Belle.
“Throughout my time as a priest, in every parish I served, I’ve had wonderful, great people,” he said.
And whenever things didn’t go as smoothly as he wanted, Fr. Boyer recalled something a spiritual director once told him: “Jesus is the Way, and He found the going rough some of the time. If you don’t find the going rough, you’re not on the Way with Jesus.”
“What concern is this?”
Ordained at age 40, Fr. Boyer served on the diocesan Vocations Committee and helped mentor men who were following a nontraditional path to Priesthood or were answering a priestly calling later in life.
“At Mass, we often pray for the Lord to inspire ‘good young boys’ to be open to the Priesthood,” he once noted. “I like to add, ‘... and maybe some good old boys, too.”
Fr. Boyer grew up in the same South St. Louis parish as Bishop Emeritus John R. Gaydos and received encouragement from some of the same priests.
Among them were Rhineland native Father Arnold Bruckerhoff and St. Thomas native Father (later Monsignor) Bernard Boessen — both from the territory that is now the Diocese of Jefferson City.
Fr. Boyer remembers Sister Mary Fides of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet teaching him and his second-grade classmates the story of Jesus changing water to wine at the Wedding Feast at Cana (John 2:1-12).
The boy’s Great-Aunt Daphne once overheard him say to his mom, “Woman, what concern is this of mine?”
She was shocked that he would speak to his mother that way.
“I told her it’s what Jesus said to His mom,” Fr. Boyer recalled. “She didn’t believe me, so I looked it over and showed it to her.”
That’s when Aunt Daphne started praying that he would become a priest.
“The fact is, I’ve always had a great relationship with my mom and great devotion to my spiritual mother, the Blessed Mother, whose Son presented her as a gift to all of us,” he noted.
Fr. Boyer was also fascinated in discovering how things worked. He entered the telecommunications field after graduating from the old St. Francis de Sales High School in St. Louis and completing a degree in philosophy from Holy Redeemer College in Waterford, Wisconsin.
For 18 years, he specialized in engineering, design, layout, installation, service and supervision of telecommunications systems while based in St. Louis; Denver; Houston; Warsaw, Wisconsin; and Quincy, Illinois.
At age 25, he decided to pray a novena at what was then a Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration Chapel near St. Louis.
“My prayer was, ‘What should I do? I like what I’m doing, but I think I should be doing more,’” he recalled.
After offering the ninth day’s prayer in the chapel, he spotted a card that read, “Job opportunity! Apply at your local seminary.”
“Of course, I didn’t do it right away,” he said. “But that card never went away. Whenever I’d move to a new place, I’d find it while unpacking.”
Quiet refuge
Fr. Boyer and his brother and sister-in-law bought 180 acres and a farm house near Morrison. He worked in Quincy during the week but made the farm his home.
“It was a good place to get away,” he said. “It was a place of quiet for me. I could tune out the noise of my job.”
One Sunday after Mass, he went to visit Father Fredrick Elskamp, who at that time was pastor of the Chamois and Morrison parishes.
“Fr. Fred steered me in the right direction,” said Fr. Boyer. “He encouraged me to pursue my true vocation.”
Fr. Boyer said he was “impressed by the witnessing of the people of God in this diocese.” He could also see the need for priests in central and northern Missouri, so he applied for permission to enter priestly formation for the Jefferson City diocese.
Four days after mailing the letter, he was working on a construction site in Danville, Illinois, near the Indiana border.
“There was only one phone on the site,” he recalled. “How the heck he found that number, I don’t know. But it was Bishop McAuliffe. After hanging up with him, I figured, ‘Maybe they can use me, after all.’”
The future priest enrolled at Sacred Heart School of Theology near Milwaukee, a seminary primarily for men who discern a priestly calling later in life.
After suppressing his initial impulse to turn around and head back to life as he knew it, he stayed and kept building on his priestly aspirations.
“This isn’t my ‘second calling,’” he noted. “It’s my first calling. It just took me some time to tune out the distractions and stop running from it.”
“Old as the hills”
As a seminarian, Fr. Boyer was assigned to serve on the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) team at a parish in the Milwaukee archdiocese.
“There were some heavyweights in that group,” he recalled. “I got really enthused about the teaching part of it.”
He never lost that zeal for catechesis — especially with children in Catholic Schools and religious education programs and with people entering the Church through RCIA.
“I use guidelines that are official and approved, but I add my own insights into the teaching,” he said. “I just enjoy doing that.”
On Dec. 12, 1987, the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in the Cathedral of St. Joseph, Bishop McAuliffe ordained Fr. Boyer and Father John Henderson priests of the diocese.
Since that day, Fr. Boyer has cultivated a deep devotion to the Blessed Mother as she is especially revered by Catholics in Mexico, under the title, Virgin of Guadalupe.
“I rediscovered the Rosary when I was in my adult years,” he said. “I carry mine around as an old friend every day.”
He served for a year as associate pastor of Holy Family in Hannibal before the bishop assigned him to a parish with a familiar name.
“Fr. Boessen always talked about this place that sounded like heaven — a place called St. Thomas,” Fr. Boyer recalled. “I remember thinking sometime in my mid-teens, ‘I really need to go there sometime.’
“And sure enough, I wound up going there,” he said.
Fr. Boessen, who had grown up in “that little piece of heaven by the Osage,” was filling-in at St. Thomas the Apostle Parish and preached all the homilies the weekend before Fr. Boyer arrived as pastor.
“He really built me up,” Fr. Boyer recalled. “A homegrown boy said I’m okay, and I think most of them believed him. I went there and could do no wrong.
“Every priest should have that happen to them just once in their ministry,” he added.
Fr. Boyer returned the favor by preaching the homily at Msgr. Boessen’s 40th priestly anniversary that year.
“I dug up every story about him I could think of,” said Fr. Boyer. “Afterward, he said, ‘Wayne, those stories are old as the hills!’ I said, ‘Well, you’re the only one who’s been around long enough to remember them!’”
It is to laugh
Puns and pranks have always been part of Fr. Boyer’s persona.
“I’ll run down and pick that up,” one of his former employees was fond of saying.
“No need to run,” he would reply. “It’s okay to walk.”
Whenever he visited one of his favorite aunts, a nurse in Denver, she would decide where to go to church and where to sit based on where she would be least likely to shake anyone’s hand.
She came to visit him once in Martinsburg, and he introduced her at Mass and invited everyone to come forward and greet her at the Sign of Peace.
“She made a fist at me, like, ‘You’re going to get it for this!’” he recalled. “But her prayers and encouragement had a lot to do with my becoming and staying a priest.”
A first-day-of-school photo in The Catholic Missourian once showed Fr. Boyer on one side of a see-saw on the school playground while children on the other side kept the balance.
One time, he returned to a parish where he had been pastor for the funeral of an organist who had accompanied generations of blessed events in church.
“I think Mary Jane was the organist at the Wedding Feast at Cana!” he quipped.
Slower pace
Members of the Owensville and Belle parishes sent Fr. Boyer off with a farewell luncheon the Sunday before Thanksgiving Day.
His last day as their pastor was Nov. 30.
While preparing to move, he found a tattered photocopy of that “help wanted” card from his retreat in St. Louis.
“It was one of the last things I packed,” he said. “One of the things it talks about is ‘people to share your love and laughter with.’ Has that ever been the truth!”
Fr. Boyer plans to say in the area and continue his priestly ministry — minus the meetings and administrative responsibilities that come with being a pastor.
“I need to take some time to remember how to relax,” he said. “It’s good not to be running all the time.”
He plans to go to Florida to visit his brother, who’s very sick, and help his sister-in-law.
“Long-term, I want to continue to celebrate Mass,” he said. “And I’d like to continue teaching — especially in grade school and RCIA. How’s all of that going to work out? I guess we’ll see.”
In the meantime, thinking back to his first-grade catechism class, he asked for prayers “for me to continue to ‘know, love and serve God’ and to keep ministering in persona Christi — the Person of Christ.”
