ROCKLAND – The Rev. Mark Reinhardt stopped in the middle of his weekly homily to tell a story.

His parishioners leaned forward in anticipation.

The pastor of St. Bernard’s Catholic Church was preaching on a beautiful fall Sunday morning about the need for prayer. As he retold the story of Jesus’ time at prayer in the olive garden, he looked up from his sermon and smiled.

“Last night after Mass, a little girl about 5 tugged at my chasuble,” he said, referring to his vestment. “She looked up at me and asked, ‘What did Jesus eat at the Olive Garden?’ I don’t think I’ll ever be able to read that passage in the same way again.”

The parishioners laughed along with their priest as he went back to his sermon.

Reinhardt and his congregation cite that sense of humor as one of the reasons he’s good at his job.

It’s a job in his hometown, which is comparatively rare for contemporary Roman Catholic priests. It’s also a job for a man who didn’t enter seminary until after his 30th birthday, which is becoming common for new clergy – Protestant and Catholic alike.

Reinhardt, 42, grew up in Rockland, where his father, William J. Reinhardt, was a hospital administrator. When Mark Reinhardt was a boy, his family attended an Episcopal church.

He began attending activities at St. Bernard’s while in high school and converted to Catholicism his senior year. After graduation from Thomas College in Waterville, Reinhardt worked in Massachusetts, managing hotel-restaurant complexes and institutional dining facilities.

As the 1980s drew to a close, he decided to return to Maine and was working at a Waterville car dealership when he began to consider a major career change.

“I was attending Mass weekdays before work,” he said. “One morning as I was leaving, Father George Goudreau [brother of the priest who had overseen his conversion] asked me if I had ever considered the priesthood. I hadn’t thought about it before that, but I did over the next year.”

In 1991, Reinhardt entered a seminary founded to train priests with delayed vocations. At 31, he was one of the youngest members of his class. He was ordained at St. Bernard’s by Bishop Joseph J. Gerry in 1994.

He spent his first summer at churches in Wells and Ogunquit before being assigned to Holy Cross in Lewiston. “I had to learn to say the Mass and hear confessions in French,” Reinhardt recalled with a hearty laugh. “It was difficult. I hadn’t used my French since high school.”

He was assigned to his hometown parish in July 2000 to replace the retiring pastor. It was an unusual, although not unheard of, appointment. Priests aren’t often sent to lead a church where they have deep roots, according to Reinhardt.

“To be placed here was uncommon,” he said. “But I was not that well known in the community. People knew my father or my brother [a local contractor], but they didn’t really know me when I first came here. Since I’ve been here, however, I have married some people that I went to school with years ago.”

The growing parish is made up of about 800 families from 16 towns. More than 70 children are enrolled in confirmation classes, 25 teen-agers are in the high school youth group, and baptisms outnumber funerals.

With population increases in Waldo and Knox counties, the Rockland, Camden and Belfast parishes are studying the possibility of starting a Catholic school in the area.

“He’s gentle, open and warm,” said Judy White of Rockland, whose return to the Catholic Church coincided with Reinhardt’s appointment to the parish. “He has a special holiness, but he’s also real.”

Reinhardt oversees the St. Bernard’s complex, which includes five buildings, a mission church in Thomaston, two cemeteries and an ecumenical soup kitchen that offers noontime meals five days a week in the parish hall. Previously, two priests were assigned to the church, but because of the shortage of Roman Catholic clergy, Reinhardt is the only priest serving the parish.

“I spend about 80 percent of my time in administrative duties I wasn’t really ordained for,” he said. “There was no parish management course at the seminary. My management background has helped me tremendously.”

Reinhardt said he finds the midcoast area a much more secular community than Lewiston. Because of the large numbers of French-speaking Catholics who came from Canada to work at Lewiston’s mills decades ago, the Roman Catholic Church is part of that community’s cultural heritage. That’s one of his biggest challenges as pastor of St. Bernard’s, he said.

“We are dealing with so many people here who don’t know the Catholic faith and are unchurched,” he said. “If I walk into a restaurant and have my collar on, people aren’t quite sure how to address me.”

But his “secular” life becomes an asset in such circumstances. “My background is a kind of ecumenical gift that allows me to deal with that atmosphere,” he said.

“I love people. I love bringing the word of God to them, especially the sacraments,” Reinhardt said.

Parishioner White said Reinhardt’s passion for the church is infectious, especially the way he interacts with children in the parish. She added that her adult daughter and granddaughter are in catechism classes.

“We’re truly honored and blessed that God sent him here to us,” she said.