Here’s something I’ve realized: there comes a point where nobody asks you about your vocation story anymore.
When you’re in seminary, you have to have this polished elevator pitch ready to go at any moment — every retreat, every high school visit, every kitchen table conversation. Tell us your story. And you do. But somewhere along the way, after you’ve been ordained a while, people just stop asking. Maybe they assume they already know. Maybe they think it’s rude. Maybe they’re worried you’ll actually tell them.
But I think it’s important that people know where their priests have come from. Pope Francis, in one of his funnier lines, once said that priests do not sprout up out of the floor of the cathedral like mushrooms. We come from a place, a family, a life. And I think that matters. So here’s mine.
I was seven years old, growing up in Oswego, Illinois — a small town back then, maybe 2,500 people. No Catholic school, so I went to public school all twelve years, which is why I’m so gritty and tough. (I had to be. The mean streets of Oswego.) I was halfway through second grade, getting ready for my First Communion, and at that point still fairly convinced I’d be the first American pope. I’ve since made my peace with that.
My mom woke my brother and me up that Monday morning and said: Come on, look out the window. Do you see that smoke?
Sure enough, rising high over the houses and trees across town — billowing black smoke. It was our church. St. Anne’s in Oswego was on fire.
The fire started in a supply closet behind the cry room at the back of church. (Which is, for what it’s worth, a contributing reason why I remain philosophically opposed to cry rooms.) Whether it was an electrical malfunction or a cleaning rag too close to a heater, no one ever knew for certain. What they did know was that the fire spread through a heating duct that ran straight down the center of the building, and the entire church was made of wood — walls, ceiling, everything — with no windows. It was, as the Chicago Tribune reported that day, essentially a bonfire waiting to be lit.
The roof was so thick and the building so impossible to ventilate that the only alarm was raised by a runner out on an early morning workout, pounding on the rectory door at six a.m. The pastor, Father Dan Stempora, almost didn’t answer. He thought it was a joke — until he stepped outside and saw the smoke billowing out of the top of the building.
The church was a total loss.
Even as second graders in a public school, there was a lot of talk about the fire that day. By the next morning, our class had decided we would hold a bake sale to raise money to rebuild. We raised about $250. If you visit St. Anne’s today and look at the donor wall — the little bronze plaque thing in the lobby — you’ll find it: The Second Graders of East View Elementary School.
My mom picked us up early from school that afternoon and took us to the site. This would never be allowed today, but somehow they let people inside what remained of the building. We had all just been there the Sunday before, singing, the church beautiful and still dressed for Christmas. Now there were puddles on the floor, broken glass everywhere, charred timber, melted chandeliers dangling from the ceiling, organ pipes fused together.
But the thing I remember most — the thing I keep coming back to, even now — wasn’t the ruins. It was Father Dan.
He was supposed to retire that year. He’d been at St. Anne’s for twelve years, and the fire had rather derailed his plans. But when we arrived that afternoon, there he was in the middle of the crowd, stocking cap on, gloves on, greeting people. Hugging them. Consoling them. Letting them console him.
He showed up. He stayed.
He assured us it would be rebuilt. And over the next three years, we watched a beautiful new church take shape — what we have since taken to calling, with more than a touch of pride, the Cathedral of Kendall County.
That image has never left me. A priest standing in the cold with his people, in the wreckage of something beloved, pointing toward what would be. I’ve come to think that’s about 90% of the job. Ninety percent of priesthood is just showing up. Ninety percent of life is just showing up. Ninety percent of prayer is just showing up. Literally all we have to do is be there, and the work of the gospel can begin.
It was the work of the gospel to transform our parish hall into a temporary church. And in that little temporary church is where I made my First Communion. Where others in our parish were confirmed and baptized. And where, eighteen years later, I would have my reception as a newly ordained priest.
Father Dan himself vested me at my ordination in 2018. He remains one of my closest mentors to this day.
Of course, it’s not exactly cool in public school to announce that you want to be a priest. The other kids want to be astronauts, firefighters, doctors. And then there’s me. If you’ve seen Despicable Me — when Gru is depicted as a child — that was basically me, except shorter, announcing my intention to be celibate forever. People were confused.
I also had a Presbyterian girlfriend in high school who did not understand the concept of the priesthood or why anyone would voluntarily choose it. Fair enough.
So I arrived at high school having mostly buried the idea. I decided I either wanted to be an English teacher or a high school band director — I play trombone and was the drum major of the marching band, and anything involving a large stick and a hat with a feather in it has always appealed to me. I followed my brother to North Central College in Naperville for one year.
While I was there, I kept going to Mass — partly because my mom would drive down on Sunday nights to take me, and then buy me Starbucks afterward, which is a highly effective evangelical strategy that I recommend. At Sts. Peter and Paul in Naperville, I got to know younger priests in a way I hadn’t before. And something shifted. Priesthood was presented to me not just as a spiritually rewarding vocation, but as an ordinary way of life — priests who were tired, who were hungry, who played video games or walked their dogs. Not a locked-away existence of rectory kumbaya, but real human life, with this one extraordinary difference: as a priest, you are conformed so closely to Christ that through you, Christ himself lives out his mysteries again in the world.
That takes some getting used to. But it was enough.
I left North Central after one year and transferred to St. John Vianney Seminary at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota — the first Catholic school I had ever attended. I was ordained in 2018 with six other men. Of the seven of us, only one had gone to a Catholic high school. Make of that what you will.
After seminary came my first assignment at the Cathedral of St. Raymond in Joliet, where we also served Sacred Heart Parish on the east side of the city — a self-described Black Catholic parish that completely recalibrated my understanding of the Church and of Catholic social teaching. I had preached about Dorothy Day and social justice in the abstract. Sacred Heart made it concrete, personal, and urgent. I left a different priest than I arrived.
From Joliet, I went back to Naperville — to Sts. Peter and Paul, this time as a priest. My room in the rectory faced the building at North Central where I had once decided, mid-semester, to abandon English literature forever and go to seminary. A neat little full circle. I also served as chaplain and theology teacher at Chesterton Academy in Lisle during those years.
And then I came here, to Visitation, where it’s been two wonderful, stretching, formative years.
Which brings me to the news.
In August, I’ll be heading to Washington, D.C., to study canon law at The Catholic University of America.
Canon law is something most Catholics only hear about when they really need to hear about it — usually not under the happiest of circumstances. But it’s actually one of the most fascinating corners of Church life. Think of it as the Church’s internal legal and organizational structure: the rules that govern 1.5 billion members across every continent. It’s the best history book of the Church, because almost all of it is jurisprudence — meaning something happened, and now there’s a rule.
Canon law asks questions like: Who actually owns this church building? What’s the relationship between a pastor and his bishop — who has authority over what? How does the Church regulate ordination? Why must the Eucharistic bread contain at least a trace of gluten? Why must Mass wine meet specific requirements? (The Franzia boxed wine question has a canonical answer, and also a common sense one.)
There’s a wonderful story — I say wonderful; the parties involved may disagree — in which a group of California nuns attempted to sell their convent to Katy Perry. It became a major news event. The canon lawyers swooped in and pointed out that the nuns didn’t actually own the property. The archdiocese did. The deal collapsed. This is the kind of thing canon lawyers do. They also handle marriage cases, disciplinary proceedings, and serve as legal advisors to bishops.
Three of us are going together to study. I’m genuinely excited.
One of the first things Father John said when I told him was that he’d like me to keep my room here at Visitation. I cannot tell you what that means to me — practically speaking, I don’t have to pack up my books, which is enormous — but more than that, it means that on breaks from school over the next two years, I’ll be back with you. Think of it this way: I’m your older brother, going off to college. I’ll be home for Thanksgiving. It’ll be great.
A new priest will be joining Visitation — more information about him in next week’s bulletin — and you are going to love him.
I also want to mention: Deacon Sam will be ordained to the priesthood on June 6th of this year, and while he’ll be leaving Visitation, he’ll be just up the street at Immaculate Conception in Elmhurst. Still very much in the neighborhood.
I wanted to tell you parts of my story, and you’ll have noticed that isn’t particularly dramatic. No jail time, no rock bottom, no lightning strike on the road to Damascus. Just a seven-year-old kid watching a priest in a stocking cap stand with his people in the ruins of their church and somehow make it feel like a beginning rather than an end.
That image became a method. Or maybe it revealed one that was already there in the gospels: Jesus comes to a group of people, and over years — not in a single sermon, not in a viral moment, but over years — he teaches them, lives among them, lets them know him as someone extraordinary and yet utterly ordinary. Brilliant enough to outwit the Pharisees. Humble enough to wash feet. Powerful enough to calm storms. Compassionate enough to stop for a grieving widow, for a hungry crowd, for one lost sheep.
They had never seen authority married with compassion before. They’d never seen genius and integrity allied with humility. He was, in the truest sense, too good to be true — and yet there he was.
Priests are not good at this all the time. Early in my first assignment, a woman called me a “feudal lord”. (I have tried to grow since then).
But this is the job description. These are the marching orders. And they begin, every single time, with showing up.
Please pray for more priests. Pray especially for vocations from Elmhurst, which is full of young people, and which has not ordained a priest since 1988. That’s not because God hasn’t been calling. It’s because the world is loud, and parents get scared, and the attractions of an ordinary life are real and understandable.
But if God has made you for something, if he has written a particular way life into the very fibers of your heart, you will not be fully yourself until you live it. Not because he’ll punish you if you don’t. But because your life will simply never be as full, as whole, as naturally joyful as it will be if you follow the thing he made you for.
I’ll close with a poem by Henri-Dominique Lacordaire, a nineteenth-century Dominican priest:
To live in the midst of the world without wishing its pleasures; to be a member of each family, yet belonging to none; to share all suffering, to penetrate all secrets, to heal all wounds; to go from men to God and offer him their prayers, to return from God to men, to bring pardon and hope; to have a heart of fire for charity and a heart of bronze for chastity; to teach and to pardon, to console and bless always —
My God, what a life! And it is yours, O priest of Jesus Christ.
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