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Foreground: Father Leonard Gilman, O.Carm., the new pastor of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Tenafly, New Jersey, at the conclusion of his installation mass. The Most Reverend John Flesey, Auxiliary Bishop of the Diocese of Newark, follows Father Leonard.
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Martin Luther tacked his beliefs on the door of Germany’s Wittenberg Cathedral in 1517. A half a millennium later the world remembers the messenger if not his theses or the city of their origin.
Carmelite Father Leonard Gilman harbors no pretensions about being remembered for eons or starting a reformation, but he would like his new parish of Our Lady of Mount Carmel to be a welcoming home to generations of Catholics in Tenafly, New Jersey. Gilman became pastor of the 1,350-family congregation September 10.
One of his first acts was to hang a plaque in the church’s entry. Its words are as much a preview of Gilman’s pastorate as an invitation to all who enter to become engaged in the life of the church. It reads:
No matter who you are, no matter what you do, no matter where you’re from, no matter where you’re going, no matter how good or bad things may seem, please know that here at Our Lady of Mount Carmel you are always welcome.
In a service overflowing with worshippers, Newark Auxiliary Bishop, the Most Reverend John Flesey, installed Father Leonard Gilman as pastor on a bright Indian summer morning. The bishop, Gilman, six fellow Carmelites, Father James Boyce, Father Peter Byrth, Father Sam Citero, Father Emmett Gavin, Father Dan O’Neill and Father Robert Wolfe were in attendance along with the parish’s two deacons, its two trustees and several Eucharistic ministers, lectors and altar servers. They all processed into the church to the joyful strains of “The God of All Grace.”
The anthem—sung by the combined parish choirs, accompanied by piano, trumpet, violin and organ— was composed by Gilman’s friend, Paulist Father Ricky Manalo of San Francisco.
In his homily, Bishop Flesey pointed to Father Gilman’s near 20- year-career in corporate America, using his MBA and management skills which were renown in the aerospace industry. “It’s easy to have your head in the clouds and to get lost in space,” the bishop said, recalling the priest’s work life, which had included tens of thousands of air miles annually with business trips across the country, to Europe and the Middle East and many other perks.
But the Gilman who had changed jobs and lifestyles was very visible on the church steps before the Mass began, Bishop Flesey noted. While the pastor and prelate were talking, a small child waved and shouted: “Hi, Father Leonard.” Immediately “he walked away from me, and went over to where the child and his parents were, squatted down to the boy’s level and gave the lad his full attention,” Bishop Flesey said.
“That’s the role of a pastor—to be the servant of the people, all the people,” Gilman said in an interview at Mount Carmel rectory, where he has been parochial vicar for two years. “It’s easy for a pastor to get head strong and get caught up in the idea that it’s his parish and he can do the things he wants.”
But Father Gilman intends to use a different approach. “My entire life has been one of collaboration. It was my management style and it will be my pastoral style,” he said.
“The pastor is to help people get closer to God. My role is to listen.” Gilman is already collaborating with the parish’s deacons, trustees, music minister, school principal and its two sisters who direct religious education and pastoral outreach to the sick, homebound and bereaved. The parish school with a faculty of 25 offers pre-K to eighth-grade education to 237 children while another 430 attend CCD classes.
The parish resides in one of the greenest and wealthiest towns in Bergen County New Jersey. Located six miles from New York City with a local public high school that has been rated tops in the state, Tenafly has garnered a diverse citizenry—including Catholics from Asia and Latin America. While the parish has many members who work in the professions, it has also attracted families from across the economic spectrum.
Gilman hopes to engage “the whole parish, especially young people from elementary to college and beyond,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be great if Mount Carmel could be a beacon to all people; that they would want to come back here when they’re in town?”
That’s why he designed the plaque in the church entry.
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A young parishioner gives Father Leonard a bouquet of flowers at the conclusion of the Installation Mass.
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The new pastor said he was most touched by the warm welcome he received at his installation and the reception that followed in the church auditorium. Father Leonard Gilman succeeded Father Ashley Harrington, who was at the church 16 years, most of them as pastor.
“Father Ashley was so well loved here that I think other Carmelites were afraid to apply,” when he announced his plans to leave in 2005. “I’m not Father Ashley. I’m never going to be Father Ashley. I’ll be Father Leonard,” Gilman said.
What many parishioners are only beginning to learn is that their new pastor, ordained in 1998, almost managed not to become a priest. Only in his 40’s did he consider religious life seriously—the Carmelites a last search among many orders.
Raised in an inter-religious household, Gilman’s mother and parish priest did not urge him toward the seminary at the end of high school when he felt he might have a call to priesthood. Such a career was not a likely choice for the son of a Jewish father. Leonard went to college instead.
Looking back, Gilman recalled how at 14 he visited a shopping mall in Peabody, Massachusetts, close to his home. The Carmelites had just opened a chapel in the mall and he enjoyed browsing their bookstore.
After reading No Man Is an Island, he grew fascinated with its author, Trappist monk Thomas Merton. “It seemed he was making friends with Dorothy Day and people in the Catholic Worker Movement who were doing works of social justice that really appealed to me and his life was a continual process of conversion,” Gilman said. “Merton became my mentor even though I never met him.”
Years later when he was discerning his own priesthood, Gilman traveled to Merton’s home in Gethsemane, Kentucky, where he made a 30-day retreat. The abbot allowed Gilman to enter the monk’s enclosure—his hermitage. “I stood on Merton’s front porch looking at what he had seen daily—a flag pole, sun sets. I recalled how he had found the presence of God in the wounded.” Gilman remembered the surroundings as filled with the ordinary stuff of everyday life. “My previous thinking was you had to be very holy to live a saint’s life.”
The priest recounted the years in which he had gotten “caught up with the power of success, with his three cars, two homes, many friends, overseas travel and 200 people under him as vice president of marketing for a California aerospace firm. The spiritual component of his life, ‘of who I was’ took a back seat even though “I always had a personal relationship with God. He was always part of my life.”
That relationship often expressed itself in the form of “a little voice in my head,” he said. “I told myself I have to listen to that voice.” At the same time Gilman wondered, “How do I listen to that voice?”
The voice grew more insistent, even nagging, reminding him as he boarded a plane for yet another trip that he had not made up his mind about becoming a priest.
Besides Merton, Gilman credits a second mentor with helping him get on the path that God had long intended for him. His name was “Al,” an 85-year-old man, who like Gilman, was volunteering at a local hospice. One day Al asked Gilman to help him find God. Why me? Gilman wondered. Wasn’t he on his own search? But Al assured him that when they first met, Al thought that Gilman was close to God.
Al followed Gilman on a threeday retreat that weekend during which the old man went to confession after a near 60-year absence from the sacrament. Gilman saw the joy on Al’s face that weekend and heard him say, “I found God through you.”
Three days later Al was found dead in his bed and Gilman was “blown away by what God was doing” through him even if he could not understand it. Gilman decided he needed a vacation and flew to Australia and New Zealand where he spent a month listening intently to that tiny, but powerful voice.
All during his discernment process, he never considered the diocesan priesthood. Instead after leaving his job and former lifestyle behind in 1989, he opted to try several religious orders, visiting 20-30 of them over several months. Some of the ones he liked would not consider him because he was over 40. The thought that he might have a calling to monastic life sent him first to Gethsemane and later to a second Cistercian abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, where he made another 30-day retreat.
Back home in Salem, he wandered once more into the chapel in the mall in nearby Peabody. “I suddenly had the idea, ‘Why don’t you ask these guys?’” Gilman recalled. The next day the Carmelite vocations director drove from New Jersey to visit Gilman. Soon he was attending a discernment weekend at Whitefriars in Washington, meeting several Carmelites and others in formation.
“I realized these were ordinary guys coming from diverse backgrounds who shared a spirituality that was real,” he said. The vocations director noticed that the Carmelites had also found Gilman a good match.
After six more months of reflection, Gilman said he began to trust that “if I could do the initial part, God would do the rest.” But he found the novitiate a huge switch after life in the fast track. “Twice I had my bags packed, but for some reason I stayed.”
Gilman, who recently completed five years as vocations director for the Carmelites—Eastern Region and Canada, called the novitiate “an extremely healthy experience” in the end. “If you have faith and if you work to develop that faith and can take comments and critiques as part of the process, you not only get ordained; you learn a lot about yourself.”
The new pastor said he likes to share his story—especially with young people and those contemplating a career change—because with God’s help, “anything is possible.”
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