I think it is easy to say that when most people go off to college, their life changes. I definitely put myself in that category. Becoming a priest never really crossed my mind when I was young. When I left home for college, I remember thinking to myself I would surely meet my future wife by the time I graduated. However, as I have discovered since then, God had plans different from mine.

Though I attended Sunday Mass regularly when in college and occasionally participated in campus ministry events, that was the extent of my faith life. Most of my time was spent with school related work. That was my freshman year. After that, things began to change. During the course of my sophomore year, I began to hear the call of a vocation to the priesthood. Though the exact manner in which this call came about would be too difficult to explain in this short essay, I am able to say it was unexpected and caught me off guard. Soon it was a preoccupation in my thoughts, something I thought about every day. Knowing that becoming a priest would mean not being married, the dating situation was something particularly tearing me apart. I found it difficult to ask women out and go on dates. In my mind, it felt like I was cheating on the woman in front of me because I was also heavily considering another possible relationship in my heart with God and the Church. Then after four years of college, I graduated and joined millions of my peers helping contribute to the GDP. No decision yet…

The next year, I worked while continuing my discernment of a vocation. I had talked to my pastor in college and the vocation director of Archdiocese a couple of times but I still had questions in my heart. The vocation director gave me some information on the vocational “come and see” weekend held at the Archdiocesan seminary, St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park. Though I was nervous because I didn’t know what to expect, the weekend was a big boost for my discernment. I was able to listen to all types of vocational stories from the other men on retreat and the seminarians themselves. I returned from the weekend knowing I was not alone in my discernment and that there were other men like me going through some of the same struggles trying to listen to God in their lives. Being able to go on the retreat was one of the final barriers in my discernment that I felt I had faced and now I felt ready to apply to enter formation for the priesthood.

A few months after this affirming experience at the discernment weekend, I again got in contact with the vocation director. After discussing how things had gone and where my discernment was, we began the process of the application. Because it was too late in the year to begin and finish the application, I continued working that next year finishing the application and doing interviews with various people for the Archdiocese.

That following fall of 2003, I entered St. Patrick’s pre-theology program for the Archdiocese. I was at St. Patrick’s for two years of the pre-theology, an intensive philosophy program, at which time I was given the opportunity to attend the Pontifical North American College (NAC), the American seminary in Rome, for the theology portion of my formation. While at St. Patrick’s I made good friends with men from all around the Bay Area, California, and other western states. At the NAC, I have made friends with men from all across the United States and the world. For me this is part of the great gift of being able to study in Rome, to come to know how the faith is lived in other places in the U.S. and in the world. Also, to see the faith in a context that is very ancient, 2000 years old rather than about 350 years old. The faith and the lives of many saints have touched Italy, Europe, and the Mediterranean region and this breathes a certain life into the people who live here. This year I am entering third theology with next year being a pastoral year in San Francisco and fourth theology to follow back in Rome. If it is God’s will at the end of those two years, I will be ordained a priest in 2010.