Sharing the spirit
New center director wants to appeal to a broader audience
A new director of St. Anthony’s Spirituality Center, Marathon City, hopes to provide offerings that will appeal more to the general public once the center is fully open with the conclusion of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jackie Kellner, an Athens native, said Monday that St. Anthony’s has Catholic and, specifi cally, Franciscan roots, but, as a spirituality center, as opposed to a religious institution, she wants to see the old Capuchin seminary meet the needs of a broad swath of people.
“Religion is the organization,” she said. “You can be Catholic or Lutheran or Evangelical. But spirituality goes deeper.”
Kellner said a new director of programming, Adelle DiNatalie, is working on offerings that head in this new direction. These include sessions on social justice and mental health.
Kellner, a former dairy farmer in the town of Rietbrock, trained at Northcentral Technical College, Wausau, for health insurance coding after her job at a Wausau manufacturing plant was sent to Mexico. She said she had advanced in the health insurance business and was “managing people and things” when she felt her career “did not feel right.”
Kellne, who benefited from a private retreat at St. Anthony’s, decided to become a development director at the center in September 2019 and, after director Lori Randall returned to academic teaching, she agreed to be her successor.
Kellner said her path to her current job started with her retreat experience. “I fell completely and totally in love with this place,” she said.
Kellner said there is a role for St. Anthony’s at this point in time.
“We see a need for the work we do,” she said. “The news is hard to watch. Life has gotten really bad. You see a lot of bad behavior, people reacting to COVID-19 isolation and depression. We want to be a place where you can get away from all of that and learn that life is really good. We see people come here whose lives were broken and leave with their heads held high.”
Kellner said St. Anthony’s is “doing well” but that budgets are “tight” given reduced use of the center during the COVID-19 pandemic. The facility can sleep around 100, but retreats are limited to around a quarter of that number as a matter of prudent caution.
St. Anthony’s was built 102 years ago as a Capuchin seminary. The religious sect sold the facility to its current board of directors in 2013.
