EMMITTSBURG — EMMITTSBURG -- A veteran of video production, the Rev. Leo Patalinghug hates having to film a second take. So as he was preparing his recipe for fajitas before the Food Network cameras, he was so focused on getting the shot right the first time that he didn't see the man standing, arms crossed, directly in front of him.
It took a producer to point out the surprise guest: celebrity chef Bobby Flay, who had come to Mount St. Mary's University to challenge the priest to a cook-off.
Patalinghug, the director of pastoral field education at Mount St. Mary's Seminary, had been lured in front of the cameras for a supposed feature on his ministry. When he recovered from his shock, he looked directly into the cameras and adopted a tone of mock outrage: "Food Network, you lied to a priest!"
Deception or no, the resulting episode of "Throwdown With Bobby Flay," set to air tonight, provides the grandest platform yet for Grace Before Meals, the ministry Patalinghug created six years ago to encourage people to cook, eat and talk with each other.
"Food isn't the end; it's really a means," says the 39-year-old Patalinghug, who learned to cook growing up in his mother's kitchen in South Baltimore. "It brings family and friends together around a dinner table. And in that, you find faith."
It's a message - Patalinghug calls it a movement - that the priest has spread in presentations throughout the country, and as far away as Italy, Australia and Japan. Gracebeforemeals.com, on which he posts recipes and professionally produced webisodes, gets 10,000 hits daily; he is talking with PBS about airing a series. His self-published cookbook, "Grace Before Meals: Recipes for Family Life," has entered its second printing, and he is in talks with Random House to produce the third.
All of it, he says, is an extension of his work as a priest.
The Catholic Mass is centered around the Eucharist, a re-enactment of the Last Supper in which believers are nourished by the body and blood of Christ. The Gospels tell of Jesus turning water into wine at a wedding feast, and of feeding the multitudes who followed him.
"I'm inviting people to the table," Patalinghug says. "I'm doing what Jesus did. Before he started teaching theologically, he fed them loaves and fishes. I don't want to separate people and only address their spirit."
