Right after waking up at 5:15 a.m., I grab the “Breviary of the Liturgy of the Hours,” a book of daily Catholic prayers, and pray the day’s first prayer. After I’m done, I start getting ready for school, showering, getting dressed, all the chores of an average teenager preparing for school. I leave around 6:30 a.m. for Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church for the 6:45 a.m. daily Mass.
While I am at Mass praying, my friends are just waking up.
Once the school day starts, I blend in with everyone else, going to classes like AP Statistics and Ceramics 1 and spending time with friends. But, while other people check college acceptance letters, I check my email to see if I passed my psychological evaluation for seminary. While other people are planning dates with their girlfriends, I am sending an email to schedule spiritual direction. While everyone else eats lunch in the cafeteria, I eat lunch and say my midday prayer in a classroom. I am just like everyone else, except my life is completely different. I have decided to live a humble, poor, celibate life, and I’m more than just content with it: I’m thrilled.
This lifestyle might seem odd to the average person, but a year ago my life changed. I felt a call to go to seminary and study to become a Catholic priest.
Catholic priests live celibate lives at the churches they work at. They cannot be married or have a romantic relationship with another person. Often, they work 10-12 hours a day, meeting for spiritual direction, conferring reconciliation, saying Mass, presiding over funerals and making hospital visits. This is the future of my life.
The calling from God came as a surprise. I was and still am a wretched, horrible and sinful individual. I make mistakes and hurt people. How could I be called to this? I knew I had to change and be a more virtuous person if I was going to live up to this calling if I was going to be a man of Christ. I started meeting with a priest from my parish regularly, who helped me grow spiritually and become a stronger follower of Christ. I began to pray more often and try to be a holier Christian, which led me to my unconventional day-to-day schedule today.
I was raised Catholic and was often told that I should consider being a priest. It wasn’t until the middle of my junior year of high school that I started seriously considering it. I went on a trip to Saint John Vianney College Seminary at the University of Saint Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the seminary and school I will be attending this upcoming fall. I felt a strong conviction in my heart that I was called to this, and I was admittedly scared. But over several months, that call was confirmed by many extraordinary experiences. As time went on, I started telling my friends, all of whom responded with support and encouragement, but also confusion and questions: Why would you choose to never get married? What makes you want to do this? Are you sure you will be happy doing this your whole life? I had wrestled with these questions since the beginning of my journey, but hearing them asked out loud allowed me to answer them with certainty.
I’m frequently asked what it takes to be a seminarian. There are four steps to applying to seminary, the first being initial interest and formation, which entails meeting with people, spending time in prayer, improving your prayer life and growing in faith. The next step is the paper application, which is 23 pages worth of questions, including multiple choice, short answer and true-false questions as well as three essays. This application took me a month to complete even though I worked on it every day during my free time. Next is the interview process, where I sat down for three interviews spread across two weeks, each discussing a different topic: faith, relationships and work ethic. Following that is the psychological evaluation, an eight-hour test of ethics and mental stability meant to weed out those with malevolent intentions or those who are not prepared for such a role in the Church. But most importantly, I must continue to deepen my faith and love for Jesus.
Most days, I go to the gym after school, and on my way home, I stop by the chapel to say my evening prayers. Then, I do homework for the rest of the afternoon. While other people are scrolling on social media, watching a TV show or talking with their friends on the phone, I get ready for bed and say the final prayers of the night. Most nights, I’m asleep by 9 p.m., an earlier bedtime than my grandma’s.
I may have a different life than many, but I am also just as normal or weird as everyone else. I love spending time with my friends. We play video games, hang out, play sports and drive around aimlessly. I feel the same things that other people do, and I have been in romantic relationships. I naturally desire to get married and have kids, but I have decided to give all that up for the sake of Jesus and His Church. During the summer, I met Father Max Behna, a priest at the local Saint Margaret Mary parish. I discovered that he also went to Naperville North and graduated in 2010, so I decided to reach out to him to ask about his experience. I found that our stories were nearly identical. Fr. Behna gives a wonderful articulation of why priests must be seen as normal people.
“Jesus’s humanity helps people grow closer to God. And the beautiful thing about priesthood is that it’s sort of an extension of that, even though priests are flawed human beings, and they’re sinners like anybody else, God can still use the humanity of the priest to help people grow closer to Him,” Fr. Behna said.
The call to the priesthood is not answered for the sake of living a comfortable life, nor is it answered by perfect people. The life of a priest isn’t comfortable; it is tough, but it brings about meaning through suffering. It is about becoming Christ and bearing His cross. The meaning is found in the total self-sacrifice of yourself for the sake of the Glory of God.
Fr. Behna states that, ‘Saint John Vianney, the patron Saint of Priests, defines the priesthood as, “the love of the Heart of Jesus.”’ It is the complete laying down of oneself in sacrificial love for Jesus. In the same way that a married man or woman is called to give themselves fully to their spouse, a priest is called to give himself totally to Jesus for his parishioners.
While other people look forward to living with their wives and kids, I look forward to saying Mass and confecting the Eucharist. While other people dream of wealth, fame and power, I dream of poverty, chastity and obedience. While my fellow students may have different ideas than me for their future, we all chase a common goal: that whatever we do in life will provide us with fulfillment and happiness. Ultimately, the complete devotion and dedication of my life to Christ has brought me profound joy, peace and meaning that I have not found in anything else. Fr. Behna details a sage claim from Pope Benedict, one that was made at the 2011 World Youth Day and became a hallmark for his papacy and that helps guide both Fr. Behna and me.
“The world offers you comfort, but you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness,” Pope Benedict XVI said.
