The Vocation to the Priesthood

Here is a column I wrote this morning for the upcoming ENDOW (Education on the Nature and Dignity of Women) Newsletter. Hope they don't mind me publishing it early!


I love being a priest. In fact, it is a far greater reality and joy than I ever imagined while in the seminary. It has its challenges: being overworked, fatigue, frustrations with spiritual apathy in myself and others, scandals within the Church, negative influences within the culture, and my own inadequacies and sins among other things. But after five years of priesthood, I continue to discover that God is in charge, it is His Church and that He is able to make up for all that is lacking in us.

I didn’t always want to be a priest. I had never thought about it seriously until I was 19 years old. And even then, it was a very difficult process of discernment with many mental and spiritual obstacles to overcome over the course of the next seven years. To explain all the influences and the winding path of my discernment would be a long story, and tedious reading. But a few things are worth mentioning in this context. I grew up in a Catholic family that faithfully attended Mass on Sundays and Catholic schools. I was surrounded by Catholics and Catholic culture. Yet, I deeply misunderstood the Catholic Church. I thought it was an institution, albeit an extraordinary one, but still just an institution.

Two events changed this for me and contributed mightily to my embracing of my vocation as a priest. The first was my mother’s prayers, or rather my discovery of my mother’s prayers. Like St. Monica, she prayed for her wayward son every day; that he would embrace the Catholic faith more deeply and find his vocation. When both of these things began to happen in my life, my mother simply said to me, “I have been praying for this every day.” Unfortunately, due to the overly-privatized nature of Catholics with regard to their faith, this was news to me. I often wonder if I had known this earlier it might have saved me from many bad decisions. Be that as it may, when I heard this it changed my life. I finally had a sense of the “communion of saints,” the interconnection and sharing of spiritual goods we possess because of our belonging to Christ. In other words, I realized that the Church is not merely an institution but something far greater, namely, the “Mystical Body of Christ.” God heard my mother’s plea, my mother’s prayers had deeply impacted my life, brought about a complete change of direction. Finding about them did as well.

The second event is similar. During my sophomore year of college I took a class called The Theology of the Church whose main textbook was Henri de Lubac’s Splendor of the Church. This book opened my eyes to something I had totally missed: the Church was not primarily an “it,” the Church was a “she,” the Bride of Christ. I finally realized Christ “gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her…that he might present the Church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle…that she might be holy and without blemish” (Eph 5: 25-270). With this discovery came others. Namely, it is this same spotless bride that is on pilgrimage through history, mud-stained by the tumults of history, by persecutions and by the sins of her own members. Furthermore, I realized that to be a priest is to be a bridegroom of the Church for Christ. When I realized all of this, I fell in love with the Church, with her beauty and her plight, and wanted to give myself to her, to marry her, to serve her and only her on behalf of Jesus.

At present, I find myself as the pastor of the University of Colorado-Boulder with thousands of young Catholics in my care. Some of these young people have enthusiastically embraced their faith while others have drifted away or even rejected Jesus and His Church. It is an enormous gift and task to try to bring the Catholic Faith to the university; it is filled with great joy and much sadness. Despite the sadness and challenges, I am very grateful to Jesus for the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ and His Bride, for my mother’s prayers, good theology classes and for the share in his priesthood that he has given me.