May 18, 2018

New priests begin ministry with personal gifts from their experiences

NATIONAL
By Dennis Sadowski, Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) — There was a time when Deacon Minh Vu wanted to be a politician in his native Vietnam. Then he met the kids living in Ho Chi Minh City, popularly known as Saigon.

Stopping to talk with the youngsters, he saw they had serious questions about the world and profound insights into how the adults around them scurried about doing “immoral things” with seemingly little direction in their lives.

“I began to think that I may have a lot of power, I may have a lot of money, but I may not be able to enable one single person to make a difference in their lives,” Deacon Vu said.

So Deacon Vu, as a layperson, kept going back to the kids, befriending them and learning what was on their minds.

“Here, by sitting down and listening with them and being friends with them sincerely, I give them hope that someone from the upper class is willing to sit down with them and willing to be their friend,” he told Catholic News Service.

“I spent three months, 3 p.m. to 3 a.m., taking bread to them and listening to their stories,” he recalled.

Their stories led him to the priesthood.

Deacon Vu, now 35, is to be ordained in the Archdiocese of Louisville, Kentucky, May 26.

He is one of 430 identified ordinands in the class of 2018, according to a report released by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The report is based on an annual study that the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University conducted for the USCCB. In the Diocese of Springfield, Mass., Transitional Deacons Frank Furman and Michael Kokoska will be ordained by Bishop Mitchell T. Rozanski on Saturday, June 30 at 11 a.m. at St. Michael’s Cathedral in downtown Springfield.

Deacon Vu’s encounters occurred in 2003, when he was 20 years old. He later studied philosophy and then was accepted by the Louisville Archdiocese to study theology in preparation for the priesthood at St. Meinrad Seminary in Indiana.

He said he wanted to be a priest to serve people like the street kids and to listen to people who have no one else to listen to them.

“Whenever I think about them, my heart starts dancing and I want to be a priest for them,” he explained.

The 2018 ordination class is 27 percent smaller than a year earlier, when 590 men joined the priesthood. The CARA study analyzed responses from 334 ordinands, a 78 percent response rate.

The findings reveal that the average age of new priests was 35. The average has fluctuated slightly over the years since 1999.

The group of new priests includes men from all walks of like, including one who worked as a deckhand on large Great Lakes shipping vessels, one who roamed the New Mexico range as a cowboy, one who owned an insurance business and one who argued cases in court as an attorney.

Another, Deacon Nicholas Adam in the Diocese of Jackson, Mississippi, is a former television news anchor.

Deacon Adam was working at WTOK in Meridian, Mississippi, after graduation from the University of Alabama with the goal of making the big time at ESPN, covering sports. In the east Mississippi town, he decided to return to Sunday Mass at St. Patrick Church after having stopped practicing his faith in college, like many young people.

“Literally, I went to Mass one day and just felt this enormous peace, this joy,” he said.

He then began talking with Father Frank Cosgrove, a missionary priest from Ireland who was pastor. Father Cosgrove helped strengthen Deacon Adam’s faith and guide him through the two years of discernment that led to his decision to study for the priesthood.

“He just really inspired me. He showed me that priests are normal people, but they provide access to things that are not normal. He said we need good priests that were joyful.”

Deacon Adam’s discernment took two years and in 2012 he enrolled at St. Joseph Seminary College in Covington, Louisiana, for two years of pre-theology courses. He completed his studies at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans and is to be ordained May 31 at St. Peter the Apostle Cathedral in Jackson.

It was during a football game between his alma mater, the University of Alabama, and the University of Florida at famed Bryant-Denny Stadium that Deacon Adams realized the priesthood was calling.

“It was a huge night game, and ‘Bama was killing them,” Deacon Adam said. “I was sitting in the stadium, which is my favorite place in the world, and I was thinking I’m really going to miss being at the parish this weekend. I realized I desired more to be there (at Mass) than at this place, at the mecca, I thought I loved,” he said.

“I thought what is God calling me to? It was little moments like that over and over again. All the challenges that come with it. All of the sacrifices you make, there’s just been this deep-seated peace that’s been with me every step of the way,” he added.

Deacon Hector Arvizu-Mancilla, who is to be ordained June 9 in the Diocese of Tyler, Texas, discerned his vocation while working as a truck driver for a beer distributorship. He said he would pray about what God had in mind for him at the end of his route as he returned to the warehouse in Henderson, Texas.

As a young man after moving from San Luis de la Paz, Mexico, to east Texas to be with his American-citizen father, Deacon Arvizu-Mancilla, 39, admitted that he made fun of priests — sometimes right to their face.

“Even if I went to Mass, I always thought that priests were lazy people who did not have anything to do but celebrate Mass,” he told CNS. “I always paid attention to what they were wearing, what kind of a vehicle they were driving. I paid attention to all the external things. It was because of my ignorance I didn’t know what the priests were.”

As a teenager in Mexico, Deacon Arvizu-Mancilla maintained his Catholic faith, but didn’t always attend Mass. He arrived in Texas without legal documents in 2001 and his father helped him to secure U.S. citizenship. Within a year, he was a regular churchgoer.

Deacon Arvizu-Mancilla took a low-wage job as a floor sweeper for a company that manufactured trailers to carry racing cars and then moved to Houston to work in construction. But he returned to Henderson to be with his family in 2005, obtained a commercial driver’s license and found the trucking job.

Along the way, people here and there would encourage him to consider the priesthood because they found him a good listener. When he visited other parishes, the priests often asked if he was a seminarian.

“They saw the characteristics in me. I don’t know why,” Deacon Arvizu-Mancilla said.

The 90-minute return trip to the warehouse at the end of his daily route gave him time to think about becoming a priest.

“During the years I was working and thinking, working and praying at the same time, especially when I was driving back to the warehouse,” he said. “There was times I cried in the truck, just trying to find out what was going on in my life, if I wanted to be a priest or not.”

In 2010, he entered Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans and began preparing for the priesthood.

He said he hopes to be the good priest that the people around him envisioned.

(Editor’s note: Profiles of the soon-to-be new priests in the Springfield Diocese will be featured on an upcoming edition of the weekly newsmagazine, “Real to Reel,” and in the July/August issue of the diocesan magazine, The Catholic Mirror.)

Also contributing to this story was Rebecca Drake in Springfield, Mass.

Follow Sadowski on Twitter: @DennisSadowski