A few years before Led Zeppelin’s 1971 hit song, “Stairway to Heaven,” the 13 children in Enzler family had their own version at their house in Bethesda, Maryland.
Celebrating his 50th anniversary as a priest this year, Msgr. John Enzler remembered how he and sisters and brothers sometimes all knelt on a different stair in their home, praying the family rosary together in the evening, especially during the months of May and October.
“We’d pray one decade of the rosary every single night… We’d all kneel down by our picture,” the priest said, noting that portraits of the eight girls and five boys in their family were displayed on the wall by each step.
In a recent interview, the priest – who is retiring at the end of June after 12 years serving as the president and CEO of Catholic Charities of The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington – spoke about how lessons in faith and love growing up in his large family provided a foundation for his priesthood these past five decades.
After stepping down from leading Catholic Charities, Msgr. Enzler will serve as the agency’s mission advocate and support its fundraising efforts. This fall, he will serve as a chaplain at his alma mater, St. John’s College High School in Washington.
Over the years as a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington, he served as pastor of the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Washington, Our Lady of Mercy Parish in Potomac and Mount Calvary Parish in Forestville. In administrative roles for the Archdiocese of Washington, he served as director of the archdiocese’s Catholic Youth Organization/Office of Youth Ministry and as the Vicar General for Planning and Development.
Reflecting on the roots of his vocation, Msgr. Enzler praised the example of his parents – Deacon Clarence Enzler, a native of Iowa who worked as a speechwriter for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and was ordained as a permanent deacon in 1972, and Kathleen Crowley Enzler, who grew up in Washington, D.C., and was a stay-at-home mom until the children were grown, and she assisted and later succeeded her husband in leading the archdiocese’s Family Life Office.
“Their faith exuded who they were… God, the Church, the sacraments were part of their life,” he said.
John Enzler was the first boy in the family, following five older sisters. From the time he was 5 years old, he starting tagging along with his dad every day to early morning Mass.
“I just wanted to be with dad. We had a father/son special relationship,” said Msgr. Enzler, who remembered a time when a poor man asked for help, and his father took his coat off and handed it to him.
The priest noted that their father drove an old Volkswagen to work. “We’d hear him coming, and we’d be out waiting for him,” he said.
Explaining the family dynamics in their home, Msgr. Enzler said, “Mom ran the house. But if you got out of line, you had to deal with Dad.”
Sometimes with 13 children at the dinner table, things got a little chaotic, and Deacon Enzler would ask for five minutes of quiet so he could speak with his wife. The Enzler children worked in teams each week clearing the table and washing and drying dishes.
Growing up in a large family, the priest said he saw how “we’re all different, with different gifts, different talents. But I also learned about putting others first. We learned to be loving toward each other… Still today, nobody fights in my family.”
The priest added, “What I learned from my family was relational skills, love for other people, not judging people because they’re different or have different views, to be open to other perspectives, and to realize a leader is a servant leader, being a leader is one who takes care of others’ needs and not your own. We learned a lot of things about helping each other out.”
Msgr. Enzler said having eight sisters gave him important insights about women in the Church. “I saw their value and their smarts. They were all smarter than me,” he said.
A few times each year, the Enzlers invited priests over for dinner at their home.
“My mom and dad had great respect for priests,” he said, noting that they had three priests in the family. His father’s older brother, Msgr. LeRoy Enzler was a priest in Iowa and taught engineering at Loras College in Dubuque. Msgr. John Enzler’s first cousin, Father Tom Rhomberg, headed Catholic Charities in the Archdiocese of Dubuque. And Father Quinn Weitzel, a second cousin to Kathleen Enzler, was a Maryknoll priest who later became a bishop in Samoa.
“You saw how much respect they had in our family… We all loved these guys,” said Msgr. Enzler, who also praised the priests at their home parish, Our Lady of Lourdes in Bethesda. “I had great role models as priests. They just lived good lives. They all had different personalities, but they all lived very faithful lives in the priesthood. That surely affected me.”
The Washington priest also praised the example of the Franciscan sisters who taught him at Our Lady of Lourdes School and the Christian Brothers who taught him at St. John’s College High School.
When John Enzler was an eighth grader, he told his mom that he wanted to enter the seminary. She encouraged him to attend regular high school and college first. “You’ll be a better priest then,” she said.
“It was great advice,” said Msgr. Enzler, who entered Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg in 1969, the year he graduated from Loras College with a degree in political science.
The next year, his dad began studying for the diaconate, and Deacon Clarence Enzler was ordained as a deacon in 1972, one year before his son, Father John Enzler, was ordained to the priesthood.
Msgr. Enzler noted how his father had a “terrible stutter,” but was able to overcome that when it came time to read the Gospel and preach as a deacon, even though he had trouble talking on the phone and couldn’t read announcements at Mass.
“I remember his perseverance… The spirit of God was in his heart. He was a spectacular preacher,” Msgr. Enzler said.
So Deacon Enzler was the natural choice to preach at Father Enzler’s first Mass in 1973, and Msgr. Enzler said that might have been one of the first instances in modern times when a father preached at his son’s first Mass. (The permanent diaconate, an early ministry of the Church, was reinstituted in 1967.)
In his homily that day, Deacon Enzler told a story that he had never shared with his son before, that after having five daughters, on the day of his Baptism, “I held you up to the Lord as our first-born son and offered you to Him, somewhat as Abraham did with Isaac.”
Msgr. Enzler said that when his dad finished the homily, “the whole congregation started clapping,” at a time when nobody clapped at church.
After Deacon Enzler died in 1976, Kathleen Enzler continued his work as the director of the archdiocese’s Family Life Office, which offered programs for marriage preparation, and outreach to married, separated, divorced and widowed Catholics. “She (Mom) was really a superstar after Dad died,” Msgr. Enzler said, noting how she wrote columns for the Catholic Standard on family life, just as her husband had. Msgr. Enzler writes the award-winning “Faith in Action” column for the Catholic Standard to honor that tradition of his parents.
In the interview, Msgr. Enzler noted how along with his own family, his ministry has been shaped by the families he has served. When he was pastor of Our Lady of Mercy Parish and a mother with a daughter with significant disabilities expressed to him how the Church should help families in that situation, he met with family members at the kitchen table, and that meeting led to the founding of Potomac Community Resources, which provides recreational, social and respite care programs for teens and young adults with developmental differences.
The priest said his motto, “Say yes,” came from saying “yes” to those families and seeing the difference that made. That “yes,” he said, helped inspire him to join others in founding the Shepherd Foundation in Washington, which provides tuition assistance to families so their children can attend Catholic elementary and high schools, and the Mercy Health Clinic in Gaithersburg, which provides health care services to medically underserved, low-income people.
Reflecting on how his life as a priest originated in his family home and has been inspired over the years by families, Msgr. Enzler said, “Every parish is a family for me. Every program at Catholic Charities is a family to me. Our clients are family to me. Our staff is family to me.”
And perhaps fittingly, the priest calls himself “Father John,” and that is how everyone knows him.
“I’m living the family tradition in my priesthood. What my family did when I was a kid, I’m trying to do on a broader perspective now,” he said.
