I had a deep personal admiration for many of the
priests that served my home parish of Most Blessed Sacrament in
Wakefield, Ma growing up, including a cadre of retired elderly assistants
that would help out some Sundays. Later in my college years I attended
the Newman Center at the UMass Amherst, I was awe inspired by the
example given by the late Father Joe Quigley, who 80 years young
and with braces was somehow able to make it down the long staircase
to the sacristy and get completely vested by himself for Mass! What
a man I thought who at his age, was still answering the call every
single day by being available when needed to celebrate Mass and
hear confessions! He was no “has-been,” he was still
a priest, still at the top of his game even though his health was
continually eroding.
In my teenage years I began to take the Sacrament of Penance seriously.
I sought it out on my own instead of simply being dragged to the
yearly Lenten Penance Service with the rest of my CCD class. It
was in a confessional down in the Franciscan St. Anthony Shrine
on Arch St in Downtown Boston where these words spoken by this old
Irish friar ring through my ears today just as they did quite a
few years ago, “Pass this forgiveness that Christ has given
you in this sacrament to your friends and neighbors”.
I do not know what God has in store for my life. But I have been
blessed, and my deep profound love of the Church and her sacraments,
and our Lord Jesus Christ in Word and the Eucharist, I know that
I need to go to the seminary to more carefully discern God’s
call for me.