One of these days atop a 14,000-foot peak in Colorado, you might just spot two men in white robes, the wind blowing those vestments, their fingers cold on the chalices that are smaller than those typically seen on an altar — smaller for the pack on the way up.
That’s Father John Nepil and Father Sean Conroy, of the Archdiocese of Denver.
“There’s nothing I love more than Mass on a fourteener summit,” Nepil said.
That explains why the St. John Vianney Seminary vice rector has celebrated Mass on all of Colorado’s 54 fourteeners.
Nepil marked the journey complete in October — fittingly atop Mount of the Holy Cross. Alongside him was Conroy, his priestly pal similarly mountain-crazed.
Conroy, Our Lady of Lourdes parochial vicar, has climbed with Nepil for several mountaintop services. Joined by anywhere from a few friends and parish members to more than a dozen, Mass at 14,000 feet has played out just as it has in sanctuaries: the introductory prayers, the readings, the consecration of bread and wine.
The sermons are shorter — sometimes dictated by the weather — and the themes often similar.
“Creation and the summit experience of God,” Conroy explained. “That whenever we encounter God, it’s always a summit experience. And how fitting it is to be on the summit of a mountain to experience this source and summit of the faith.”
That’s how the Eucharist is known: the “source and summit” of the faith. The Eucharist is celebrated through communion.
Which brings Nepil to a story on Little Bear Peak, one of Colorado’s most fearsome fourteeners. It’s a story involving the communion hosts, those holy wafers.
“I was with a couple of buddies,” Nepil said, “one of them who was raised Jewish but kind of an atheist. So the whole Catholic Mass thing, he’s just like, ‘This doesn’t make any sense.’ Which is totally fine.
“So we get all the way to the top of Little Bear, and I realized my hosts were still in the bear canister at camp. I was like, you gotta be kidding me. ... And he put his arm around me and said, ‘Man, I’m sorry you forgot your biscuits.’”
There are other stories.
About the young nuns Nepil led up Mount Democrat, all of them in full dress. “We were quite the scene,” Nepil said.
About the perfectly square, elevated block of granite atop Snowmass Mountain — “like God built this altar up there.”
About a mother and father atop Mount Belford. They were spreading the ashes of their daughter.
“It was just a very beautiful, providential moment,” Conroy said. “They may not have been Catholic or even Christian, I don’t know. But, you know, we offered Mass for the repose of her soul.”
Across the fourteeners, souls have been caught off-guard by the clergy.
“It’s always funny when we get to the top of a mountain,” said Nepil, who alongside Conroy has arrived like everyone else: boots, hiking pants, whatever upper layer is needed for the elements, sometimes gloves, sometimes a helmet. Then comes time for Mass.
“And all of a sudden it’s like, ‘Whoa,’ you know, ‘these guys are putting on vestments.’”
Nepil had summited every fourteener before completing the full list again for Mass. He winces at that word, “list.” Just as he and Conroy would hate to say they’ve “bagged” all the fourteeners — a common phrase in the state’s mountaineering world.
“A phrase we both really detest,” Nepil said. It hints at “this conquest of nature,” he said, “instead of this reverence for the gift of creation.”
That is why Nepil and Conroy share their stories across the fourteeners: to spread a message on glorious creation.
“No one really uses the word ‘creation’ anymore, because ‘creation’ signifies that there’s a creator,” Conroy said.
The two are young, bearded faces of a faith that they see in crisis, lost in a fast-paced world gripped by technology.
“I think that the world is in a state of profound spiritual crisis,” Nepil said.
“And the church has to understand herself as intimately connected with that crisis. Not above it, not beyond it, not separated from it.”
It was something he observed as a chaplain around college kids in Boulder: “There were a lot of kids who didn’t want to come to church, or didn’t feel comfortable talking to a priest. And we can either sit there and be upset about that, or we can take them into the mountains and just have a great conversation.”
Not that the priests want those young people to miss church and the relationships that can grow there.
“I don’t want it to sound like we’re trying to do something better or different from the church,” Conroy said.
“It’s that we’re trying to evangelize in a new, unique way I would say.”
And perhaps there is power, too, in simply showing up.
Power in that scene you might just spot one of these days atop a 14,000-foot peak: men like any other you might’ve seen along the trail, now suddenly throwing on vestments at the summit.
“Living in an urbanized, technological world, God doesn’t seem real, and so priests are somehow not real,” Nepil said. “Usually people are really disarmed when they’ve just met these normal guys, and you have a love that you share like the mountains. All of a sudden there’s a connection. There’s a relationship.”
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