Parish Priest: Father David Gruschow

On 14 December 2010, Father David Gruschow, the priest here at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish and moderator of Sacred Heart Parish in Takaka celebrated his 25th anniversary jubilee in the priesthood.

Father David became a Marist brother and teacher, having taken an interest in the Marist lifestyle when he attended college in Lower Hutt. He was the eldest of nine children in a typical Catholic family.

While he was teaching, he did a little bit of parish work and really enjoyed that, so he felt the Lord was calling him to do that work more frequently.

Father David had the opportunity to reflect in that call while teaching in Fiji and in 1985, at the age of 31, he was ordained as a priest. Having served as an army chaplain for eight years Father David came to Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish early in 2006 after six years in Petone near Wellington. In that role he has been serving the congregation in Richmond as well as those in Wakefield and Waimea West. At the beginning of 2009 he took up his position as Moderator in Takaka as an additional pastoral duty.

Pastoral work and being a leader at worship, says Father David, are the joys and rewards that make the priesthood satisfying and worth the sacrifices and stresses. Most of his job is being with people and often it is an important time in their lives - birth, baptism, marriage, sickness, death and funerals.

Father David sees it as part of his role to educate our Catholic people because there are lots of people who aren't Catholics and have all sorts of different ideas about what Catholics believe or don't believe and do or don't do, which are often incorrect and impinge on our Catholic people.

Ultimately, Father David says, the Eucharist, symbolising the body and blood of Christ is the essence of the Catholic faith and a priest's reason to be.

We wish Father David many more years as an active member of the priesthood.