Seminarian gave up success to answer call
The call, when it came, was unmistakable.
Transitional Deacon Wade Bjerke had to leave Hollywood to follow Christ.
Today, about a decade later, Bjerke, at age 54, is about to become one of the newest priests of the Archdiocese of San Francisco. The San Francisco native is looking forward to serving people in need in a vocation that seems far more concrete, more real, to him than his plush old occupation as a Hollywood studio financial analyst ever did.
Bjerke’s ordination June 26 will culminate a journey that began in childhood with his mother as his model. Sheltered in a convent during the Nazis’ World War II blitz of her hometown of Manchester, England, she passed on to her son a strong and traditional, yet comforting and nurturing, Catholic faith.
Young Bjerke had positive impressions of the faith. “It was something that made internal sense to me,” he said. “That was the way the life was supposed to be.”
Growing up, Bjerke (pronounced Bee- yur' –key) never felt called to a vocation. The call came, ironically, after he achieved worldly success.
After graduating from UCLA with a political science degree, he went to work as a computer database expert for a television network’s entertainment division. He kept track of stars’ pay and other financial data.
Good pay, nice cars, fancy restaurants and parties were his, yet Bjerke found himself unhappy with the lifestyle. The more he saw of it, the more insubstantial it looked. One almost surreal episode sticks in his mind: a celebrity event where a decked-out Burt Reynolds and Loni Anderson stepped around a corner into the flash from what seemed like hundreds of cameras.
“‘What have they done to warrant this?’” Bjerke remembers thinking. “All they’ve done is be wealthy and famous. That’s about as phony as it gets, and it has no bearing whatsoever on Burt Reynolds or Loni Anderson.”
Bjerke was more at home going to daily Mass and praying before the Blessed Sacrament at St. Victor Church near his office.
As he sat with the Blessed Sacrament, his Hollywood career “became more of the path not to take,” Bjerke, said during a recent interview at St. Patrick’s Seminary and University, where he was one final exam from finishing seven years of studies.
“There was nothing in it for me,” he said. “I finally came to see this is what God was calling me to. The verse from Scripture, ‘The harvest is great, the laborers are few,’ kept going through my mind.’”
Bjerke politely declined Christ’s invitation at first, but that strategy didn’t work. “He never takes no for an answer when it’s something he wants,” he said.
He described the call as “very much a voice in your head, saying, ‘This isn’t real, this isn’t what life is about.’”
The call grew more insistent until Bjerke decided to train for the priesthood, rejecting his employer’s enticements to stay. He chose St. Patrick’s because it brought him back home: He was born in San Francisco and grew up in Marin County.
“I thought, if I’m going to be somewhere for the rest of my life, I was going to come back home,” he said. “Cardinal (then-San Francisco Archbishop William) Levada was kind enough to take me in. Here I am.”
Bjerke’s mother was ecstatic about her son’s decision. His dad wasn’t sure.
“My dad thought, why would you want to give all that up to become a priest?” Bjerke said. “My dad lived through the Depression, picking fruit to send money back home. To give up a job like that was ridiculous.
“My sister was pretty neutral,” he said. “She says she refuses to call me father. My family is pretty enthused about it generally. My dad has come around – he thinks it’s a pretty good idea.”
During his priestly formation, Bjerke developed a strong sense of his pastoral strengths. He enjoyed detention and hospital ministries.
“I take a lot of guidance from the parable of the sheep and the goats, Matthew 25,” he said. “We should be feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and the imprisoned and sheltering the homeless. Too often, Catholicism gets hit with a bum rap, that it’s just another worldly religion. Yes, it is another worldly religion, but what else would you want? Atheism is not going to offer anything even remotely better. But we still need to take care of the people here. There are a lot of people who just have trouble getting by, for whatever reason; it’s not really ours to ask. It’s just to help them in whatever way we can. And so as long as I can continue to do that, it doesn’t really matter what parish I’m in.
“You’re serving God’s people,” Bjerke said, “that’s the bottom line. That’s the only thing that’s important.”
Editor’s note: Transitional Deacons Wade Bjerke and David Schunk will be ordained to the priesthood for the Archdiocese of San Francisco on June 26 at St. Mary’s Cathedral. This story is the first of a two-part series. Next week, Catholic San Francisco will profile David Schunk.
By Rick DelVecchio
From May 21, 2010 issue of Catholic San Francisco.
