LAS VEGAS -- In less than a month, Robert Ballecer will be ordained as a Jesuit priest, but this week he will use his skills as an engineer to lead the monitoring and management of one of the world’s largest temporary networks.

Ballecer’s presence behind the scenes of the InteropNet, the network that powers the Interop conference, may seem a curious one in a world where scientific knowledge and religious belief are often considered at odds. In fact, Ballecer says his first application to volunteer for the InteropNet was turned down, because organizers were afraid of scandalizing the future priest.

But technology and religion go hand-in-hand for the 32-year-old Ballecer, who has spent much of his life traveling around the world to build telecommunications networks for the Catholic Church.

“People ask me all the time, ‘How can you be an engineer and a priest at the same time?’” Ballecer said Monday in the Network Operations Center (NOC) that runs Interop. “I say, ‘Well, yeah, my religious order has a very long history of doing that -- scientists, engineers, philosophers, theologians, astronomers.’”

Pushing the Catholic Church into the age of technology is still challenging despite that history, he says. Ballecer works at the Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church in San Jose, Calif., and runs its Center for Apostolic Technology.

“What the Center for Apostolic technology tries to do is help our brothers and sisters . . . embrace [technology] rather than run from it screaming and saying it’s the devil and blasphemy, etc. Which we have a very proud history of doing as well,” Ballecer says.

After 14 years of training, Ballecer is scheduled to be ordained in Los Angeles on June 9.

But there are more immediate concerns for him and the other 15 volunteer engineers at Interop, as well as the 60 engineers sent by 27 vendors that are loaning equipment.

The InteropNet, which serves 475 exhibitors and nearly 20,000 attendees, has to provide a stable platform for vendors to demonstrate their technologies, and Internet connectivity for attendees, says lead network engineer Glenn Evans, one of three full-time CMP Events employees who oversee the network for the Vegas and New York Interop shows. Evans started volunteering for Interop in the mid-1990s in Australia, which hosted an Interop show until 2002, he says.