He could see it in the eyes of those about to be married: the look conveyed devotion, beauty, a wonder that was truly out of this world. He kept noticing something extraordinary. He wrote about attending the weddings of some friends just before he left. He was entering seminary to begin studying for the priesthood. A few weeks ago, I read a beautiful essay by a young man named Greg Hurst, from Boston. In love with his God.Įvery vocation story is also, at its most fundamental, a love story. Antonin, the joy of every priest, is the joy of a man in love. Speaking to seminarians in Rome, he put it simply: Joy in the priesthood, he said, comes from responsibility, a committed prayer life, a sense of sacrifice-and something else. Cardinal Dolan wrote about this some years back, when he was a seminary rector. What a blessing that is!īut there is something else. Joy brings us closer to God, closer to his Holy Spirit, and a joyful priest magnifies that by bringing with that joy a sense of the holy- a sense of God’s grace at work. Antonin, working beside him all these years, I have seen it. The writer Leon Bloy once said, “Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God.” Knowing Fr. But what marks his priesthood, I think, is more than just happiness.
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