In this inspiring memoir, Rev. Joseph A. Heim, MM recounts the transformative relationships and events of a lifetime of faith and service. From growing up in Philadelphia to the challenging years of St. Charles Seminary to three-plus decades of missionary work in Venezuela, Heim examines those moments which shaped him as a priest and as a human being, acknowledging and dissecting his own struggles and transformations along the way.

"My theological education was very formal," writes Heim, "my pastoral training, in as much as it existed at all, was rather ritualistic and my spiritual formation very legalistic. Life and events... opened me up and forced me to re-think much of what I had simply accepted." Transformation: The People and Events That Changed the Thinking of a Priest, then, is more than autobiography: it is a chronicle of living faith, of the strength that can be found in challenging one's own beliefs.

About the Author

Rev. Joseph A. Heim, MM was born on April 21, 1933, in Washington, D.C., the fifth of six children. At eighteen years of age, he felt a call to the priesthood and eventually enrolled in St. Charles Seminary of the archdiocese of Philadelphia. Ten years later he was ordained and assigned to St. Andrew's parish in Newtown, Pennsylvania, where he served for four years until volunteering to work with the Maryknoll Society in Venezuela. Heim spent the next thirty-five years as a missionary in Venezuela, helping to found a medical clinic in the city of Barinas in addition to many other services.

Now in his eighties, Heim is retired but still helping those in need in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania.