Fr. Mike 

My Life by Fr. Mike Cunningham

My life began on May 9th, 1945 the day after Victory in Europe. Mom went to Immaculate Conception Church to offer prayers of thanksgiving for VE Day, then to the hospital to bring me into the world. I am the youngest of her six sons, with four sisters to follow me, plus our oldest sister. All eleven of us graduated from Immaculate Conception Grade School and Bishop Heelan High School of Sioux City, Iowa.

After graduating from high school in 1963 I moved to California and worked at Montgomery Ward’s Mail Order House in Oakland, Ca. It was during this time that by getting involved in teaching, in what was then called CCD, at St. Leonard’s Parish in Fremont, that I first started to consider education as a profession. I had just been accepted by the Marianist Province of the Pacific four days before I received my draft notice into the Army. The Vietnam War was escalating and I am sure I would have been sent over there. Life would have turned out very differently had that happened. Instead, on July 1st, 1965 I reported to the Marianist Novitiate in Santa Cruz, CA.

This was followed by two years in Honolulu for the first two years at Chaminade College and then it was off to the University of San Francisco to complete a BA in Theology with a minor in Psychology. I went on to teach religion for five years at Chaminade College Preparatory in the LA area. During the summers, I came back to USF to work on a MA in Theology. Once I had completed my MA in 1976, I was sent back to Honolulu to teach at St. Louis High School. From there I taught at St. Joseph’s in Alameda from 1978-1980 and then to Archbishop Mitty High School in San Jose, CA in 1980-1982 for my last years as a Marianist. It was sixteen years to the very day (August 19th, 1982), while at Mitty that I decided to pursue the priesthood. I had a chance to go to China because my first cousin was Counsel General in Shanghai, China. When I came back from China, I prepared to enter St. Patrick’s Seminary in 1982.

On Sept. 5th, 1986 I was ordained into the priesthood of Jesus Christ. I then served two years at St. Augustine’s in Pleasanton, one year at St. Anne’s, Union City, two years at All Saints in Hayward and for three years at St. Philip’s in Alameda. I found my real home away from home here at Queen of All Saints in June of 1994, where I have been for the last seventeen years. It was not the teaching of religion or all the years studying Theology that deeply opened me to the mysterious presence of Christ in the Eucharist as much as our renovation process here at Queen of All Saints. Being in the midst of a People, who are fully, actively and consciously exercising their lay priesthood and thereby intentionally offering their own lives to the Lord for all that He is doing for them, by the power of the Holy Spirit, has spoken the most to me. Gathering in Christ and hearing the Word, they offer their lives at the altar. To be the one who, in the person of Christ, receives this offering has come to mean everything in terms of my sharing in the interior life of the Church.

I have been blessed greatly and never looked beyond Queen of All Saints. Special thanks to all who have shared my journey and have helped to make the person I have become.

Gratefully,

Fr. Mike

Please read Fr. Mike's article on " A Brief History of the Restoration and Renewal of Queen of All Saints Church" in the page of Church Renovation.