Born Again at 57 as ‘God’s Man’

As his wife, Patricia, lay dying of brain cancer, Bruce Baker confided in her that he wanted to become a Roman Catholic priest.

Patricia, who had been his heart’s companion for 28 years, wasn’t surprised.

Even as they raised their eight children in Woodland Hills, Patricia knew that Baker had always longed, in his words, “to find a way to be God’s man.”

On Jan. 30--almost nine years after the death of his wife--Baker was ordained into the priesthood at St. Mel Church in Woodland Hills.

It was the same church where a broken-hearted Baker and his children had gathered in 1990 to mourn the death of Patricia Baker at the age of 50.

This is Baker’s first Easter as a priest, and the season’s promise of renewal and rebirth is reflected in his story. In the space of a few decades, Baker has been husband, father, filmmaker, businessman, deacon, widower, Carmelite friar and now Carmelite priest.

Holy Orders is a sacrament, and Baker’s ordination was a solemn event. The air was perfumed with incense, the church packed with people who had known Baker as a family man. Perhaps because ordinations are less common in the 1990s, more than 30 priests joined in the rite.

Waiting for the ordination to begin, the 57-year-old candidate sat in a pew surrounded by all eight of his children and three grandchildren, who fidgeted quietly. His 82-year-old father-in-law, John Vogt Jr., had flown in from Louisiana to share in Baker’s remarkable transition from one life to another.

It was Baker’s 38th wedding anniversary.

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“God has worked in Bruce’s life in extraordinary ways,” Gerald Wilkerson, auxiliary bishop for the archdiocese of Los Angeles, told the congregation shortly after ordaining Baker. “He’s known life and love. He’s known death and suffering.”

The direction that Baker’s life has taken is unusual but not unprecedented. More and more older men--many of them widowers--are being accepted for ordination by a church that once disdained them.

In the 1950s seminaries were crowded, and men older than 24 were rarely accepted. But that changed in the early 1960s as men began to leave the priesthood and vocations dried up.

Twenty thousand American priests have forsaken their vocations since the 1960s, and seminary enrollment plunged 85% between 1966 and 1991, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.

Older candidates look increasingly attractive to an American church that projects it will have only 21,000 parish priests by 2005. Those priests will serve a Catholic population of 74 million, up from 45 million in 1966, in large part because of immigration from Latin America.

Baker is also an example of an all but universal phenomenon, one that transcends a single religious denomination. In his early 50s, Baker felt the desire that overwhelms almost any thoughtful person in middle age: to abandon the trivial and create a better self.

Life as a Carmelite priest was Baker’s answer to the urgent challenges of midlife, or as Baker articulates them: “How do I live my life in relationship to ultimate questions? How do I live my life in relationship to God, however I define God?”

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Baker’s first clerical models were not even Catholic.

They were the three Episcopal priests in his family, an uncle and two cousins.

But Baker put that dream aside and married Patricia in 1961. Born Episcopalian, he converted to Catholicism, Patricia’s faith, the next year. Set on a career in filmmaking, he got a job making commercials for a Dallas ad agency.

Then, in 1965, the young couple packed up 2-year-old Ashley and the baby, Meredith, and drove to Los Angeles. Baker became senior filmmaker at the L.A. movie studio of the Franciscan order.

Although, Baker said, “the desire to be a priest always stayed with me,” he concentrated on his marriage and supporting his growing family. He was ordained a diocesan deacon in 1982.

Unlike a priest, a deacon can’t say Mass, give absolution or anoint the sick. But a creative deacon can minister in his own way. Baker found many ways to serve God and his fellow congregants at St. Mel, including co-founding a men’s club.

By the early 1970s, Baker had started his own film production company. It was a stressful time for him and his wife. He had given up the security of a regular paycheck and was sometimes away on location for four weeks at a time, leaving Patricia to parent alone. But the need for more money had become increasingly pressing as the children grew up. The Bakers not only had a lot of mouths to feed, they had a lot of minds to educate.

All the children graduated from college, including the U.S. Military Academy, Smith and UCLA. Two attend Harvard Business School.

Baker finally left the film business in 1982 to become president and CEO of Pachmayr Ltd., a sporting goods firm based in Monrovia.

One day in 1989, Patricia Baker was having lunch with her sister when she began to choke. For 12 hours, she couldn’t speak. Fourteen months later, Patricia Baker’s devastated family was celebrating her Mass of Resurrection.

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After Patricia’s death, Baker was increasingly drawn to the idea of becoming a Carmelite (he had worked with a Carmelite priest on a video project and alongside several Carmelites at St. Mel).

Founded in the Holy Land about AD 1200, the Order of the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel is one of what Baker describes as “active contemplatives,” spiritual brothers who have separate rooms or cells but come together to eat, pray and celebrate the sacraments. The order has about 3,000 members worldwide.

But there was a catch. Baker knew that the Carmelites have a cutoff age and normally do not accept men older than 38. His Carmelite friends encouraged him to apply even though he was 52.

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Today, the Baker children see the joy that being a Carmelite priest has brought to their father, and know he did the right thing. But, Baker recalled, “in the beginning it was difficult for my children. After losing their mother, I think they felt they were losing me.”

The ordination brought tears to the Baker children’s eyes as they remembered their mother. But it is clearly a comfort to them to see their father well and happy after so many hard, sad years.

As a Carmelite, Baker took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. He says he misses nothing of his old life, that celibacy is not a special burden.

“I’ve found that very deep friendships satisfy your need for intimacy,” he said.

“She’s always present to me in a sense,” Baker said of his late wife. “There’s hardly a day that goes by that I don’t think about her and pray for her. And I still dream about her.”

But, Baker said, he loves his new life. Where he once wore his wedding ring, he now wears a “covenant ring” symbolizing his commitment to God.

Baker lives in a Carmelite “house of studies” in Washington, D.C. In June he will go to Niagara Falls, Canada, to become a spiritual director, conducting retreats and helping people scrutinize their lives.

Ordination changed Baker in some profound way.

“Something has shifted in me, and I don’t know what it is. I can’t articulate it yet. Part of it is a great sense of responsibility. Part of it is a sense of being loved by God.”

The day after his ordination, Baker woke up and realized: “I’m a priest! I’m a priest, after all these years. . . . To be God’s man, that’s what I always wanted to be.”