Meeting People Where They Lived by Fr. Joe Nassal, c. pp. s., Provincial Director Fr. Ben Diekhoff, c. pp. s. March 11, 1921 – January 7, 2017
On the Friday before Fr. Ben Diekhoff died on January 7, 2017, I was in St. Joseph, Missouri, to visit our three missionaries ministering at St. Francis Xavier parish. This was the last parish Father Ben served before moving to St. Charles Center in 2002. When he moved there as senior priest in 1990, he noticed the other three priests on staff— Frs. Jim, Lac, and Joe— each had three letters in his name. So even though many of us had grown up in the community calling him Bernie— and most of his family knew him as“ Fr. Bernard”— he let it be known that for the sake of consistency, he would now be known as“ Ben” rather than Bernie or Bernard.
During the twelve years he served at St. Francis, Fr. Ben visited more than 1200 family homes in the parish. This was his mission: to get to know people where they lived. Fr. Bill Walter told me that many families still recalled Fr. Ben’ s home visits and spoke of his compassionate presence, even though he left the parish fifteen years ago.
He did this throughout his almost sixty years of active ministry as a priest. From the time he was an assistant in Hamilton, Ohio, through the years he was pastor in Syracuse, Kansas; Linton, North Dakota; and Nebraska City, Nebraska; to his days as senior priest in Park Falls, Wisconsin and St. Joseph, Missouri, Fr. Ben did not wait for people to come to meet him at the rectory, he went to their homes. He sat in their living room. He extended the table of Eucharist to the kitchen table in the domestic church of the family’ s home where faith is first taught, learned, and practice. Whether they knew him as Fr. Bernie, or Fr. Ben, or Fr. Bernard, his kindness and gentleness left a deep and lasting impression.
It was not a surprise, then, that Fr. Ben wanted this passage from John’ s gospel proclaimed at his funeral:“ In my Father’ s house there are many dwelling places. If there were not, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be.” Fr. Ben may have wondered why Jesus waited so long to fulfill that promise to him and take him home to his Father’ s house where he has prepared a room for him. And yet as his health declined dramatically
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these last few years, he was ever so patient, a patience born of prayer.
For 95 years, Fr. Ben practiced the quality of patience and perseverance that can only come from the knowledge that St. Paul conveyed in the second reading he chose for his funeral. He knew that“ nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” As a Missionary of the Precious Blood, Fr. Ben preached the practiced the truth that Paul proclaims:“ If God is for us, who can be against us?”
A Passion for People and Life
Though Ben was well known in the community for his passion for golf, he was more of a bowler when he was ordained on Ascension Thursday in 1947. Those years at the two-lane bowling alley in the basement of St. Charles Seminary in Carthagena honed his skills, so when he arrived in his first assignment at St. Joseph’ s Parish in Hamilton, Ohio, Ben joined the parish bowling team.“ When I came home at night,” he told me in 2007,“ the pastor could tell immediately whether I had a good or bad series by the way I crept up the stairs or leaped up the stairs two by two.”
It was Fr. Walter Junk, c. pp. s. who introduced Ben to golf during his five and a half years in Hamilton. Fr. Junk was pastor at a nearby parish and one day