Rest in peace, Lake Ozark pastor Father Michael Penn, 68
Combined humor, candor and spiritual depth
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Father Michael Penn counseled a brother priest who was in the late stages of a debilitating illness, despondent that he could no longer minister.
“The way you’ve been preaching with your life has made you a good priest, a good servant,” Fr. Penn told him. “When you’re away, you don’t get to see the good influence you’ve had on other people. But mark my words: you’re still being remembered and loved.”
Years later, Fr. Penn made his own advance through the dark valley of life-threatening illness, alternating between time in and away from his parish.
“It was both heartbreaking and inspiring watching him say Mass at Our Lady of the Lake, even though he was obviously not feeling well and in pain,” said parishioner Mike Schmidt. “Such a love of his faith and the good Lord. He knew he was in good hands, being Christ’s hands to all of us.”
Fr. Penn, 68, pastor of Our Lady of the Lake Parish in Lake Ozark, died on Feb. 14 in Jefferson City, of complications from brain cancer.
He had previously served in Columbia; Glasgow and Slater; Monroe City and Indian Creek and Palmyra; Canton, Ewing and LaGrange; Shelbina and Clarence; and Taos.
He had been pastor of Our Lady of the Lake Parish since 2022 and the bishop’s delegate for the Cause for Canonization of Venerable Father Augustus Tolton since 2011.
The Mass of Christian Burial was celebrated on Feb. 21 in the Cathedral of St. Joseph, with Bishop W. Shawn McKnight presiding and Father Gregory Meystrik, Fr. Penn’s former pastor and long-time friend, preaching the homily. The priests of the diocese concelebrated.
In his homily, Fr. Meystrik thanked Bishop McKnight for allowing Fr. Penn to remain the pastor of Our Lady of the Lake during his illness and treatment.
“His hope was always to get better, but if he didn’t get better, he wanted to be the pastor of Our Lady of the Lake when he died,” said Fr. Meystrik, pastor of Holy Family Parish in Hannibal. “That was his dream, to die with his boots on.”
Among the people
Friends, priests and current and former parishioners remember Fr. Penn as a gregarious and driven pastor who used humor and sports talk — with a special passion for the Kansas City Royals and Chiefs — to connect with people and to segue into deeper ministry.
“He believed big-time in the power and potential of people,” said Fr. Meystrik. “And others believed in him.”
Fr. Meystrik emphasized that Fr. Penn had discovered his priestly calling “in the marketplace,” among the people.
He was working at the customer service counter at a Hen House grocery store in Kansas City and picked up extra hours at Kelly’s, a bar in the city’s Westport neighborhood.
“He would say that really, the source of his vocation, in terms of hearing it, listening to it, responding to it, came from the people and the patrons and his coworkers at Hen House and Kelly’s,” Fr. Meystrik noted.
Fr. Penn was born on March 15, 1957, in Kansas City, a son of Claggett and Margaret Penn, who are now deceased.
His parents and friends, especially priests and religious sisters, began encouraging him at a young age to consider the Priesthood.
He spent time in and out of a high school seminary before studying at a community college and then going to work as a parish liturgical and pastoral ministry director in Kansas City.
He moved to Edina in 1993 to help care for his father, who had moved there with his mother after retiring.
His Knox County family connections were extensive, with numerous ancestors at rest in the St. Joseph Parish Cemetery.
Fr. Penn began actively discerning Priesthood after his father died, attending Conception Seminary College in northwestern Missouri and Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in St. Louis.
His mother died a month before he graduated from Conception in 1999.
Fr. Penn once said that his life experiences helped him develop a more human, less idealized notion of the Priesthood.
“I hope to bring a stability to the people who come to me, not just with their religious problems, but with secular problems as well,” he stated before his diaconal ordination in 2002. “I want to be as available to them as I can be.”
He emphasized that being a priest means more than being a functionary dispenser of the Sacraments. Bishop John R. Gaydos ordained him a priest in 2003 at the Cathedral of St. Joseph in Jefferson City.
“As a priest, you gather the people at the Lord’s table,” he said right before his priestly ordination. “You feed the people with the Lord’s Body and the Lord’s Blood. But, you are also the one who points his community in the direction of God and leads them there.”
Like M&Ms
Fr. Meystrik said it was appropriate for Fr. Penn to find his calling among the people, because that’s where he tended to minister.
“He was a person of the marketplace. He was kind of involved wherever people were,” he said.
He said Fr. Penn had a lot in common with M&Ms, his favorite candy — “hard on the outside, soft on the inside.”
“Actually, he was kind of like a marshmallow wrapped in barbed wire!” said Fr. Meystrik. “But that barmed wire was made out of the thinnest possible pasta that you could find. The second you touched it, it fell apart.”
Longtime friend Father Philip Niekamp said Fr. Penn was “a normal guy who became a priest.”
“Mike was also one who always saw the good in everybody,” said Fr. Niekamp, pastor of the Hermann, Rhineland, Owensville and Belle parishes. “He was one who knew how to ‘dish it out’ but also how to take it.”
Father Jeremy Secrist, pastor of the Brunswick, Salisbury and Wien parishes, knew Fr. Penn from their high school seminary days and served with him for many years as a master of ceremonies for diocesan liturgical functions under Bishop Gaydos.
He noted that Fr. Penn cultivated a sometimes-rough and brusque persona, “but I came to know and appreciate him as a seminarian and as a brother priest as one who genuinely loved the Lord, loved being a priest and loved his brother priests.”
“Just like one of those tree pods, he was kind of prickly on the outside, but there was a genuine care and concern on the interior,” he said.
Working with Fr. Penn and diocesan Masses and celebrations of the sacraments helped Fr. Secrist recognize Fr. Penn’s gift for “winging it.”
“Whether it was at ordinations or at the Chrism Mass or all those diocesan ceremonies that Fr. Penn and I worked, it was always that sense of, ‘Hey, we have to keep going, and sometimes you have to improvise,’” said Fr. Secrist. “If someone gets sick or something breaks, you just figure out how to keep going.”
Fr. Secrist believes that’s how Fr. Penn lived his life and Priesthood.
“I don’t know if part of that came from his previous life experiences, but no matter what has come apart or what has been handed to you, you just have to pick it up and offer your very best to the Lord,” said Fr. Secrist. “Imperfections included.”
Fr. Secrist said Fr. Penn tended to mitigate his sometimes-brutal honesty with a well-timed sense of humor.
“He had a manner of expressing true realities in life that weren’t always neatly packaged,” said Fr. Secrist.
“He prayed for us”
In the midst of his own battle with illness, Fr. Penn administered the Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick to people in need of it on the World Day of the Sick in 2023.
He noted in his homily that the sacrament bestows a gift and distinct vocation on the people who receive it, and it is meant to be shared with everyone in the Church.
“This anointing is setting YOU aside for a sacred purpose,” Fr. Penn preached that day. “And the purpose is this: to unite yourselves in a more special and a more perfect way with the suffering, the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
“When you receive this Sacrament, because you are seriously sick, you are set aside to experience the healing love and comfort of God, the Father, as Jesus experienced during his passion and during his death,” he said.
Fr. Penn was undergoing treatment and hoping to return to parish work in February of this year when it was found that his cancer had spread extensively.
With his friends and care team, he decided to enter hospice and comfort care. Bishop McKnight expressed his sincere gratitude for the parishioners in Taos and at Lake Ozark, as well as diocesan Wellness Coordinator Danielle Freie, for caring for Fr. Penn during this time.
“I know how important it was for him to have this goal to get better, so that he could come back to you,” Bishop McKnight told the people of Our Lady of the Lake Parish at the visitation service there. “Know that he very much loved you and enjoyed being your pastor.”
Fr. Niekamp said it will be easy to pray for the repose of the soul of his friend, Fr. Penn, “because he prayed for us.”
Bishop McKnight called to mind Fr. Penn’s passion for the sainthood cause of Venerable Father Augustus Tolton (1854-97), a Missouri native who went from slavery to becoming the Roman Catholic Church’s first recognizably Black priest in the United States.
“We can only imagine where he has gone now and what he has seen, and where he has helped lead the way for us,” the bishop stated.
Fr. Penn was buried at St. Joseph Catholic Cemetery in Edina.
