By Joanne Griffith Domingue

Percell

The Rev. Lawrence Percell talks about his family - his wife, his children and his grandchildren - in his sermons at St. Nicholas Catholic Church in Los Altos. The notion of a priest with a family puzzles some people. One Sunday a woman stopped him after Mass.

“Is this a Catholic church?” she asked. “Yes,” Percell answered. “A Roman Catholic church?” “Yes.”

Parishioners are fascinated with the idea of a married priest with children and grandchildren, Percell, 58, said.

The first thing Percell points to in his office is a framed picture of a younger Percell with a lovely woman and two handsome children.

“My other life,” he said.

In his other life Percell was married to Joan for nearly 30 years before she died of cancer in March 2000.

“I’d had thoughts of the priesthood in my heart for most of my life,” Percell said. “As a kid, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I always said, ‘a priest.’”

As a young man in seminary he still wanted to be a priest, but he did not want to be single. He left St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park in the 1960s and transferred to the University of California at Berkeley to figure it out, he said.

Eight months later he met Joan.

Both grew up in devout Catholic families, he in San Francisco, she in San Mateo. Both had considered a religious life. She had already left the convent when they met.

They were married in 1970. Percell earned a doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of Arizona and then practiced for the county of San Mateo as a clinical psychologist with the criminal justice system.

He retired six months after Joan’s death. “My desire to be a priest had never left,” he said. By January 2001 Percell, with his bishop’s blessing, was in the seminary, where he left more than 30 years earlier.

There has never been a prohibition against widowers becoming ordained, Percell said. In the diocese of Santa Clara there are currently four priests who have been married.

“At age 25 I was not able or ready to choose a single life,” Percell said. But after the benefit of a happy 30-year marriage, he was ready. In May 2003 he was ordained a Roman Catholic priest.

His first assignment: associate pastor of St. Nicholas, a parish of 1,400 registered families. When the Rev. Gary Thomas’ two six-year assignments were up as pastor in 2005, Percell became the pastor.

Mitzi Konevich, 56, a Los Altos resident and lifetime member of St. Nicholas, has praise for Percell, or “Father Larry,” as his parishioners call him.

“He is the consummate shepherd,” Konevich said. “And to top it off, he has experienced fatherhood and grandfatherhood.”

Konevich said she is happy and proud of where she worships, and she said she thinks Percell is “extraordinary.”

St. Nicholas is located at 473 Lincoln Ave., Los Altos. For more information, call 948-2158.