Cistercian priest welcomed to Diocese as spiritual director

This was a recent article about our cousin Father Mark Kirby in The Eastern Oklahama Catholic.
He will be leaving for his new assignment August 1st.We will miss him and wish him all the best!! He has been a wonderful part of our family!!!!!!!!



Cistercian Father Mark Kirby has been invited in to
the Diocese of Tulsa to serve as a spiritual director for
the priests and deacons as well as to implement plans
announced by Bishop Edward J. Slattey June 8 to establish
a Eucharistic Cenacle of prayer and adoration
for priests.
Through Father Kirby’s ministry within and for the
presbyterate, Bishop Slattery hopes to expand Eucharistic
Adoration throughout eastern Oklahoma while
helping our clerics rediscover that “the secret of their
sanctification lies precisely in the Eucharist … The
priest must be first and foremost an adorer who contemplates
the Eucharist.” (Pope Benedict XVI, Angelus,
Sept. 18).
Born in Connecticut and a monk of the Cistercian
Abbey of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome, Father
Kirby has been a priest for 22 years. He is expected
to arrive by Aug. 1st and will make his residence in
midtown Tulsa, near St. John Medical Center, where
he will be able to assist in St. John’s program of 24-
four Adoration and Intercession.
At some point in the future, work will begin on the
Cenacle of Prayer, although the Bishop has not disclosed
the probable location of the cenacle, which the
Vatican’s Claudio Cardinal Hummes described as being
“a kind of Eucharistic shrine.”
Read more about Bishop Slattery’s plans on Page 3;
Father Kirby’s first-person account of his life and ministry
can be found on Page 12.