BY PATRICK CROWLEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Rev. Thomas Sacksteder is the new pastor of Mary Queen of Heaven Roman Catholic church.
(Tony Jones photo)
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HEBRON -- The Rev. Thomas Sacksteder celebrated his 25th anniversary as a priest earlier this month as the new pastor of Boone County's Mary Queen of Heaven Roman Catholic church.
"It was great. I had 600 of my closest friends for my installation, which happened to coincide with my 25th anniversary," Father Sacksteder said Friday, his baritone voice breaking the silence of the empty church.
"It was a great way to come into the parish."
For the first time in his quarter-century of service to the Diocese of Covington, Father Sacksteder is running his own parish.
A shortage of priests, a dilemma not unique to Northern Kentucky, has forced Bishop Robert Muench to deploy one of his key staffers into service running a parish.
A decade ago, the bishop had 10 priests on his staff. Today, Father Sacksteder said, he has three.
For most of the past 18 years, Father Sacksteder, 51, a Campbell County native who attended St. Joe's school in Cold Spring and the old St. Thomas High School in Fort Thomas, has been the spokesman for the diocese.
He'll continue to serve in that capacity, as well as running the 44-year-old parish of about 240 families on Donaldson Road near the Cincinnati - Northern Kentucky International Airport. The adjacent Mary Queen of Heaven School has about 225 students.
The parish is considered midsized among Northern Kentucky Catholic church congregations. By comparison, St. Pius in Edgewood and Fort Mitchell's Blessed Sacrament each have about 2,000 families, while Immaculate Heart of Mary in Burlington -- once even smaller than Mary Queen of Heaven -- has about 1,000 families.
Still, the school is crowded, and one of Father Sacksteder's first projects as parish priest will be to oversee an expansion that will likely begin in August. The project includes a multipurpose room.
"We don't have any place in the school where we can meet as a student body," he said. "It's a real need, and I'm glad we're going to be able to proceed with this expansion."
Like most priests, Father Sacksteder has held a variety of assignments and posts over the years.
He taught school at St. Anthony's grade school in Bellevue and at St. Patrick's High School in Maysville, where he also was associate professor for six years.
There was a short stint at St. Mary's in Alexandria before he took the dual assignment of spokesman and head of youth ministry for the diocese in 1980.
"At the time, the Covington Diocese covered the eastern third of the state, so there was a lot of travel . . . and a lot of speaking engagements, but I really enjoyed it," he said.
Since he has been working at the diocese's Catholic Center on Donaldson Road in Erlanger, Father Sacksteder's move to Mary Queen of Heaven was essentially across the street.
"This isn't a neighborhood parish, like a lot of parishes in Northern Kentucky," he explained. "We're kind of out here by the airport and the race track and some other things, but we have a strong congregation and we draw from a lot of areas.
"It's sort of a commuter congregation."
Father Sacksteder is just the third pastor in the church's history.
He was preceded by the late Rev. Paul Ciangetti, who served from its founding in 1955 to 1986, and the Rev. Jack McGuire, retired this year.
