MOUNT AIRY — Parishioners of Holy Angels Church will say goodbye to Father Larry Heiney, their pastor of nine years, when he retires at the end of June. Father Heiney celebrated 46 years of priestly ministry last April.
He is a native of Harrisburg, Pa., who grew up Catholic and entered a minor seminary in high school run by the Sulpician Fathers and located at St. Charles College in Baltimore, Md. He completed his studies for the priesthood at St. Meinrad Seminary in Saint Meinrad, Ind., which was run by the Benedictines.
He was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Harrisburg on April 26, 1975, by Bishop Joseph T. Daley.
In his retirement interview with the Catholic News Herald, Father Larry, as he prefers to be called, shares that he went into the minor seminary after seeing two other friends enter the previous year.
“I saw the others (who had gone a year before) and I thought I wanted to be a priest,” he recalls.
Father Larry completed his priestly studies at the Benedictine seminary but says he never felt drawn to monastic life.
Now an avid researcher in the area of genealogy, he loved how the Benedictine theology was presented all through a historical prism. “I love history and love telling history,” he says.
Father Larry served as a diocesan priest for the Diocese of Harrisburg for 20 years before coming to the Diocese of Charlotte in 1995.
Initially, he served at St. John the Baptist Church in Tryon for three years before becoming incardinated into the Charlotte diocese in 1998. Since then he has served at St. Michael the Archangel Church in Gastonia, Our Lady of the Annunciation Church in Albemarle, St. Benedict Church in Winston-Salem and Good Shepherd Mission in King before becoming pastor of Holy Angels Church. He recently oversaw the parish’s 100th anniversary celebrations.
Father Larry says that to him, the most important aspect of his priesthood has been pastoring his flock.
“My philosophy is always to be involved with people, to try to have events with them,” he explains. “I have always been promoting the liturgy and the Ordinary Form of worship of the Church, and how it works in each person’s life.”
What has he enjoyed the most over his 46 years of priestly ministry?
“It’s always been the people,” he notes. “As a parish priest I think, ‘How can I move people to be closer to God, to open the people to the liturgy?’”
He says that his homilies, which are also translated into Spanish, are “the breaking open of the Word of God that is proclaimed in that circumstance… so that everything is more of a meditation on the Scriptures.”
Father Larry plans to spend more time on his beloved genealogy research in his retirement, attend genealogy workshops and travel to visit family.
He will reside at Pennybyrn at Maryfield in High Point where he can concelebrate daily Mass with the other priests in residence.
“Now I’m ending up at a Catholic retirement home, I am really going to be a lifer!” he jokes.
— SueAnn Howell, Senior reporter