Faith without borders: Father Ken's legacy at St. Charles

Father Ken Whittington arrived as the new pastor of Morganton’s St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church in 1992, nearly 34 years ago.

President George H.W. Bush was in the White House.

The internet was but a fledgling, used by few and its potential power grasped by even fewer.

And in Burke County, a wave of immigration was just beginning — an influx of young Hispanic men looking for work in furniture, in textiles, and, most commonly, in the chicken processing industry.

In time, their families would follow them here, profoundly impacting the culture of what had been an overwhelmingly White, largely insular community.

No church in the county reflects that change more vividly than St. Charles, which has grown from a population of some 200 families when Father Ken arrived to more than 700 families today.

Much of that growth has come from Hispanic and Hmong families, families that have not only been accepted into the church but who have been fully welcomed into its spiritual life.

The force behind that welcome and acceptance: the gentle spirit of a man who did not enter the priesthood until he was in his 40s and who retired earlier last week after nearly four decades of service.

MOVING DAY

Father Ken sat down with a reporter from The Paper for a lengthy interview on the morning of Thursday, Jan. 8, just under a week before he was to celebrate his final mass at the church on Jan. 13.

Unable to find the priest in the church at the scheduled time, the reporter wandered outside to see Father Ken supervising the removal of items from the rectory for transport to his new apartment just up Union Street.

Dressed in a bright red and black plaid flannel shirt and a pair of baggy blue jeans, the retiring priest looked ready to join a coffee klatch of similarly retired senior citizens at the local Hardee’s.

As he settled into a chair in the church library, Father Ken seemed quiet and reflective, a mood that perfectly fit the man who, at 84, was poised on the very cusp of retirement.

When asked where he grew up, Father Ken answered, “Toms Brook, a tiny community in northern Virginia, home to fewer than 300 people.”

The reporter settled back for what he expected to be a lengthy discourse on the idylls of country life when Father Ken said simply, “I did not like it. I instinctively did not like it. Simply too small.”

When high school was finished, Father Ken utilized his prodigious musical talents — he began playing the piano at age 5 and started organ studies in seventh grade — to transport him away from the tiny, rural community of his birth.

The prestigious Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, Md., beckoned and there he earned both his bachelor’s and his master’s degrees.

“I left home and I never looked back,” Father Ken remembered. “I loved my studies and I loved living in the city.”

FORMATIVE YEARS

After completing his master’s degree in performance, Father Ken had the opportunity, via a Fulbright Scholarship, to continue his studies at the Staatliche Hochschule fur Musik in Frankfurt, Germany.

After leaving Germany, Father Ken returned to Virginia, where he served as head of the music department at Chatham Hall, a girls’ preparatory school in Chatham, Va.

Later, Father Ken left Chatham Hall to become the organist and choirmaster at an Episcopal church in Connecticut. He was working there when a physical issue with the fingers on his right hand cut short his playing career.

“That was a tragedy in my life,” he remembered. “It sank me into quite an emotional funk.”

Counseling and the passage of time led Father Ken out of that funk but he also began to reconsider his own spiritual journey and what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

Although raised a Lutheran, Father Ken found himself increasingly called to the central doctrines of Catholicism. After his conversion, he also decided to take the next step and enter the priesthood.

“I love the theology of the Catholic Church,” he said. “I loved my four years in seminary (Sacred Heart School of Theology in Milwaukee, Wis.) and I love being a priest.

“But,” he went on, “I could not have done it when I was even one second younger than I was. I don’t think I would have survived. I simply was not ready until I was ready.”

After seminary, Father Ken spent four years at the Cathedral of St. Patrick in Charlotte before being assigned to St. Charles.

A CHANGING TOWN, A CHANGING CHURCH

Remembering his first few weeks in a new city and a new church, Father Ken candidly admits that he found his new environs, “a little small” and a few of the people with whom he dealt, “a little too small-minded.”

But, faced with an influx of both Hispanic and Hmong families, he also witnessed both a city and a church willing to change, to grow, and to accept their new neighbors.

One of the things he is most proud of, Father Ken said, was learning enough Spanish and Hmong to become confident in performing the Holy Eucharist in all three languages spoken at his church.

More importantly, he is proud of his flock for joining with him in building a community in which everyone is considered worthwhile regardless of their background or country of origin.

“I’m proud of that sense of community that we have here,” he said. “This church has proven itself very adaptable. We have younger people, younger couples. It is as if the floodgates have opened. The future is bright.”

That future will come, of course, with a much-reduced role for the man who has helped set its course for the last 34 years.

“I will still attend here, but I will be very scrupulous about not being involved as a pastor or interfering with the new pastor.”

So how will a retired priest spend his time?

“I’ve got a pile of books to read,” he responded. “I’ll have time to concentrate on music also. I may not be able to play much anymore, but I can still listen.”

Now, as St. Charles prepares to turn the page to its next chapter, it does so firmly grounded in the values Father Ken has lived daily: faith without borders, community without conditions, and a belief that the church, like music, is at its best when every voice is allowed to be heard.