October 21, 2020
Heather Kinney’s parents married in a Newman Center. Now Heather’s mentoring Paulist Fathers’ seminarians–many of whom are likely to work in a Newman Center or other campus ministry.
Heather is the Paulist Fathers’ Associate Director of Formation for Academics and Pastoral Placements. She works on a team with experienced Paulist Fathers to help guide the seminarians in their ministerial, spiritual, intellectual and human formation.
“She has a very pastoral presence,” says Paulist Father Stuart Wilson-Smith, who, as the head student in the seminary in 2016 had a voice in hiring Heather as well as receiving her guidance. “She’s someone looking for details of your life and receiving what you’re saying in a way that demonstrates care and concern.”
Heather’s first connection with the Paulist Fathers came back in the early 2000s when she was in graduate school at Washington Theological Union. There she met Paulist Father Charlie Donahue, who was then a seminarian.
Fr. Charlie says he was impressed that “she wanted to dedicate her life to helping others to find solace and purpose in the Gospels.”
For her part, Heather says that when she met Fr. Charlie and other Paulist seminarians, as well as a female Paulist associate, she was taken by the community’s emphasis on the Holy Spirit, “and specifically how the Holy Spirit, the power of God in the world, is empowering all of us to help to transform the world, to make God’s vision a reality, to make God’s dream a reality.”
It was before that, in her undergraduate years, that Heather started noticing God’s vision for her.
“A friend in my dorm decided she was going to get more involved” in the Newman Center, Heather says. One night she was going to late mass and appealed to my sense of safety, asking me to walk across campus with her. Then she invited me on a particular retreat, known as Awakenings. And it–it’s a bit of a cliche, in that I walked in and I never looked back.”
At the time, she was studying to become a journalist. That changed In her sophomore year. She was working at a city newspaper and was assigned to write an obituary for a 15-year-old boy who died of cancer. She reached out to his family.
“I remember his mother’s profound gratitude that I wanted to know about her son, whom she loved so dearly,” Heather says. And yet, as the two women spoke, Heather found herself “not wanting to be the reporter who had to call this boy’s mother, but wanting to be the person who sat with her when the reporter called.”
Heather says that the experience” planted the seeds for what would enable me to accompany people of all ages, you know, as they’re wrestling with life’s ultimate questions of faith and meaning and belonging and purpose.”
For 20 years she ministered on campuses and in parishes.
While weighing a career transition, Heather caught up with Fr. Charlie.
At the time, he was leading the effort to seek a candidate for the community’s formation team. “One of the aspects within ‘human formation’ (of seminarians) is the ability to be confident yet humble. As I was discerning how best to gift our fellows in formation with that characteristic I knew we needed someone like Heather Kinney. It struck me: let’s ask Heather herself.”
A laywoman working in seminary leadership isn’t completely unheard of, but it isn’t typical. Wilson-Smith says that it’s “critically valuable to have a diversity of voices” in formation.
“In the Paulist foundations (parishes and centers), your business manager, faith formation director, and other ministers” will likely be lay people, Wilson-Smith says. And many will be women. “If you don’t relate to women well, it’s not going to gel.”
Heather echoes his statement.
“Our future priests are going to interact with women as colleagues, as parishioners,” she says. “I have been blessed that the Paulists have recognized that as an important part of the work of formation–that a woman’s voice is a voice to be included and to be heard.”