From good to the best

David Klunk gave up a career in public safety he loved for a calling to the priesthood he says he just couldn’t shake.

At age 44, Klunk walked away from a high-profile position as a hazmat specialist with the Santa Fe Springs Fire Department to spend six years living in a Roman Catholic seminary.

“I was once in charge of an entire division, and overnight, I found myself in charge of the bathrooms at seminary,” Klunk said. “It was a very humbling experience.”

Now 50, Klunk was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest on Saturday at St. Columban Church in Garden Grove.

He’ll begin his second career in the priesthood as a parochial vicar at Our Lady Queen of Angels church in Corona del Mar in July.

“We’re very happy to have him — he’s a very compassionate and considerate individual,” said the Rev. Kerry Beaulieu, pastor at Our Lady Queen of Angels.

Klunk’s former co-workers at the Santa Fe Springs Fire Department remember him as a good boss who also had a sense of humor.

He would torment his co-workers with a realistic-looking fake rat tied to a string, remembers Steve Koester, who has known Klunk since junior high school and later went onto work with him at the fire department.

“He would wiggle it from far away and people would think it was a live rat,” Koester said. “We became desensitized to it over time and said ‘aw,’ that’s just Dave.”

When he told his co-workers he was entering the priesthood, “he did it with a big smile on his face,” Koester said.

“We were very supportive — it just seemed like a good fit for him. Dave didn’t do it as a reaction to something; it was a gradual progression,” Koester said.

Klunk loved his job in with the fire department.

“That was one of the hardest parts,” Klunk said, reflecting back on his years with the department, where he worked to lay the groundwork and expand its environmental division.

“All of that is good, but what God wants us to do is our vocation,” Klunk said.

Klunk was 33 and going to a non-denominational Christian church with his long-term girlfriend at the time, when a conversation with his father drew him back to the Catholic faith he grew up with.

“We were in the garage and I told him I wasn’t going to a Catholic church anymore, and there were tears in his eyes,” Klunk said.

He began revisiting his Catholic faith, and eventually broke up with his girlfriend.

Klunk became more and more active in his church, doing youth ministry at St. Bonaventure church in Huntington Beach, thinking perhaps volunteer work would be enough to fulfill what others saw in him as a calling to priesthood.

“Many people saw something in me that I didn’t yet see in myself,” he said.

As he continued to wrestle over whether to enter the priesthood, a nun he knew gave him some key direction.

“‘Don’t let good get in the way of best,’ she said — it really stuck with me,” Klunk said.