St. Peter Welcomes Our New Pastor, Fr. Eric Clark

Here at St. Peter Catholic Church, we are happy to welcome Fr. Eric Clark as our new Pastor! While all priests are called to tend to God’s flock here on earth, Fr. Clark has firsthand experience as a shepherd, thanks to his family’s cattle farm. Taking to heart the Lord’s call to Peter to feed his sheep, Fr. Clark finds great joy in serving the spiritual needs of his parishioners.

“I’ve never been a pastor, but I’ve been a shepherd for cattle,” Fr. Clark says of his early life experiences on the farm. “As a shepherd, you need to protect, feed and heal. In order to protect my parishioners, I want to speak truth with charity. I want to feed them with the sacraments, and I want to heal them with the sacraments.”

Fr. Clark, who is the second of five siblings, was raised in a Catholic home in McCool Junction. Family meals and Sunday Mass attendance were an instrumental part of life for the Clarks. When Fr. Clark graduated from high school in 1999, he went on to pursue a degree in agricultural economics and animal science from the University of Nebraska. He became engaged to be married and had planned on one day taking over the family cattle farm.

God had other plans for Fr. Clark, however, and he instead spent the four years after his college graduation serving with FOCUS campus ministry in Fargo, N.D. He had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with the priests there and realized that he, too, was being called to the priesthood.

Fr. Clark began his seminarian studies at age 28 and was ordained at age 33, on May 24, 2014.

“It was pretty surreal,” he says of the ordination Mass. “The liturgy is so beautiful, and the thing that struck me the most was when they started doing the ‘Lord, have mercy.’ I just started crying, knowing how many times I’ve rejected God, and He’s always been merciful to me. I have a devotion to the Divine Mercy. We’re all saved, and it’s incredible He chose a sinful man like Peter and a sinful man like me to be His instruments.”

Fr. Clark’s first assignment as a diocesan priest brought him to St. Michael for three years, followed by another three years at the Cathedral of the Risen Christ. After several years of chancery work as the Director of the Diocesan Appeal and Master of Ceremonies for diocese, Fr. Clark is excited to return to parish life.

Fr. Clark once had a spiritual leader at seminary talk about the importance of caring for the most vulnerable of God’s people — the oldest and youngest parishioners. This exhortation rings particularly true for a shepherd, and Fr. Clark has found that he has a great love for serving these groups.

“I love working in the elementary schools,” he says. “The kids bring so much joy. And I really enjoy going to nursing homes, sitting with the elderly and listening to their stories. There is so much wisdom we can gain from them. On the pastoral level, I’ve really enjoyed those two things. On the sacramental level, I enjoy Baptisms. I encourage people to celebrate their baptismal day, and I pray for those I’ve baptized by name every single day.”

As Pastor at St. Peter, Fr. Clark hopes to help our parish live out the four characteristics of the early Church described in Acts 2:42. He desires to increase Mass attendance, bring a renewed focus to adult and family faith formation, work with the adoration and prayer teams to increase parishioners’ daily prayer, and find more ways to fellowship and “share life” together as a parish.

As every good shepherd knows, the best relationships are built on trust. As we move toward these goals as a parish, an abiding mutual trust will continue to bind us together.

“The most important thing is trust,” Fr. Clark says. “First, we have to trust God and trust that He sent His beloved Son for us and that the Holy Spirit is working through our brokenness. The more we can trust, the more parishioners can trust their pastor and the pastor can trust the parishioners. I think trust is the number-one thing that needs to be established both in our society and in our personal lives.”

Fr. Clark is thrilled to be our new Pastor and can’t wait to get to know all of God’s faithful here at St. Peter.

“I look forward to it,” he says. “I look forward to learning. I’ll try to do a lot of listening to understand what the needs are. I want to hear and see the parishioners! I’m an extrovert, so I don’t want to be locked away in my office — I want to be out with them. The reason I wanted to be a priest was to be with the people.”