Harold Thiel knew early on that he might be heading into ministry. In fact, he was only 3 or 4 years old at the time. Sitting in church with his mother one morning, the youngster stood up and made a loud declaration.
"I was standing on the pew next to my mother, and she was very devout with her hands folded, head bowed," he said. "All of a sudden, I screamed out at the top of my lungs, 'I want to be the man at the altar!' [i.e., priest]. And she was saying, 'Would you shut up?'"
Now, more than 70 years later, Thiel celebrated the 50th anniversary of his ordination last month at Sacred Heart Parish in Lower Queen Anne.
"Quite a few invitations [were] sent out, and there's been some elaborate ceremony prepared," Thiel said. Two of his remaining five classmates were also on hand.
Thiel, 76, was born in Rainier Valley and eventually moved to Queen Anne. At one point he even had a job delivering- what else?-the Queen Anne News.
Eventually he went off to Holy Redeemer College in Oakland, Calif., and also to the major seminary in Oconomowoc, Wis.
Soon after being ordained in July 1956, he took off for Thailand, where he spent most of the next 45 years ministering to the people there.
"There's a lot of refugees around here, the Hmong refugees, so I worked with them-both evangelization and social development for about 36 years of the 45 that I was in Thailand," he said.
Along the way, Thiel adopted three sons from the country.
"It was kind of a mixed thing. No. 1: I was lonely for a family," he said. "And No. 2: I'd ran across these very needy kids who needed a home and a father-they were orphans."
And his years in Thailand were not easy on his own family, either.
"It was hard on the family, of course - mostly my mother," said Dorothy Usher, Thiel's sister. "He and I had always been close, and it wasn't easy to communicate, either, because all we could do was write a letter; it took two or three weeks to get there."
After Thiel's mother visited the country for herself, she began to become more comfortable with the situation.
Nevertheless, things in Thailand could be challenging, and Thiel remembers some particularly difficult times.
"The communist takeover was [a tough situation]-that was about 1967, '68," he said. "There was a time there that the communist infiltrators, guerillas, in the mountains took over the area I was in, and things looked pretty bleak."
Disease was also a problem for Thiel, who was occasionally sick with malaria, dysentery, typhus and other illnesses.
During his long years of ministry, Thiel has seen many changes within the Catholic Church.
"The Church has changed tremendously, for the good I would say, because we were probably a bit stagnant when I was ordained and went over there," he said.
During those early days Thiel had a few doubts about what he had gotten himself into. As a priest, he lives by the three staples of poverty, chastity and obedience. Although the first two did not trouble him, the latter one did.
"Human beings do stupid things, and I wasn't such a smartass that I said, 'I'm right and they're wrong,' but there were certain things that were being done which I thought were, well, less than successful [in the Church]," he said.
After Vatican II-a series of renewal actions in the Catholic Church-the church began to hold services in the vernacular of the people, rather than Latin. The changes cured many of Thiel's doubts and helped him greatly because they allowed him to avoid having to teach Latin to the people in Thailand.
Despite the difficulties, the reverend truly enjoyed his time there.
"I was challenged, [and] the people were most receptive to everything that you did for them," he said. "I could say there was a great deal of success, not so much because of what I did, but just because of what I stumbled into."
When he came back to the United States in 2002, Thiel planned on returning to Thailand when his health was stronger, but that never happened. Instead, the priest now resides in the monastery at Sacred Heart and helps out a bit at the parish and a few other churches in the area.
Most of his time is spent caring for the Hmong Catholic refugees who attend Our Lady of Mount Virgin Church in Rainier Valley. He also travels to different areas of the country.
And despite his health, Thiel does not plan on slowing down any time soon.
"I intend to continue working as much as I can until, well, until Gabriel blows," he said with a chuckle.
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