Fr. Michael McCabe
Fr. McCabe came to St. Joseph from being Pastor of St. Mary Church in Nebraska City where he served for 20 years. His duties included serving as Superintendent of Nebraska City Lourdes Central Catholic K-12, Chaplain at St. Mary's Community Hospital and the endowment committees for Lourdes and Falls City Sacred Heart. Prior to Nebraska City, Fr. McCabe spent five years as Pastor of St. Mary in Dawson and St. Anne in Shubert. Berfore that, he was Assistant Pastor at St. Mary in Nebraska City and at St. Teresa Church in Lincoln.
He has been a member of the Bishop's Finance Committee since 2004 and was a board member for the Crossing the Threshold Endowment from 2004-2008. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Creighton University in 1982, and his Masters in Business Administration from University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He continued his education as Mount St. Mary Seminary, where he earned a Master of Divinity. He was ordained on May 27, 1989.
Fr. McCabe is honored to serve God's people at St. Joseph Parish. Some of his outside interests are musicals, trains, investments, and a good round of golf.
Fr. Louden Redinger
Fr. Redinger and his family moved around the state often through the years, but he considers St. Michael Parish in Hastings to be his home parish. Growing up, Fr. Redinger was very involved at Camp Kateri Tekakwitha near McCool Junction, attending Sky Camp and Leadership Camp. “It was a really big part of my life before junior high and planted the seeds of vocation.”
Fr. Redinger says he had a “pretty typical Catholic background” growing up, but didn’t have a personal relationship with Jesus. An encounter with a priest when his family lived in Crete changed all of that. The pastor at Sacred Heart Church (St. James Parish) was Father Paul York, who fell ill when Fr. Redinger was a freshman in high school. During a visit to Fr. York in the hospital, Fr. Redinger went to the hospital chapel to pray and found himself being totally convinced of Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist for the first time in his life. From that point on, he was convicted in his vocation. “I went through high school with that in the back of my mind. I couldn’t get rid of it.”
After graduating from Shelton High School in Shelton, Fr. Redinger attended St. Gregory the Great Seminary before moving on to St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Wynnewood, PA. There, he took a spiritual year then entered into his first semester of classes in the fall of 2019.
Now, Fr. Redinger is looking forward to being a priest and accompanying people on their journey through life, whatever that may entail, and being someone they can talk to, so they know they’re not alone. After living in so many different places, Fr. Redinger is excited to come home to Nebraska.
Fr. Joseph Bernardo
Fr. Bernardo is the priest in residence at St. Joseph Church and serves as the Campus Chaplain and a Theology teacher at Pius X High School.
Deacon Matt Hecker
Matthew Hecker, Ph.D., is the chief administrative officer of Lincoln Diocese Schools. He is the first permanent deacon from the Catholic Diocese of Lincoln, ordained on May 28, 2021 by Bishop James Conley. Deacon Hecker discerned the call to the diaconate in the Diocese of Lincoln which has no formal permanent diaconate formation program, so he entered into the program offered through the Archdiocese of Omaha. On the subject of permanent deacons, he said, “It is an ancient role in the Church from the wisdom of the apostles, and ties back into the earliest understanding of the Church. It is not something new, it is something old.” Deacon Hecker and his wife, Dani, have three daughters and two grandchildren.