Answering to a Higher Court : Former Lawyer for the FCC Now Does His Counseling as a Priest

Father Bozzelli wiggles his fingers in the air, flicks the lights on and off, and finally raises his voice. “Come on now, quiet down,” he implores the boisterous eighth-graders in his Catholic school class.

The boys stop jabbing one another and the girls stop whispering and fiddling with their hair. They look toward their teacher.

“What is a vocation? A vocation is something that God calls you to do,” he tells his class.

“Do you know right off what you’re born to do?” The students shake their heads no.

“That’s right, God can call you to do different things at different times.”

It is a personal lesson, drawn from the life of the newly minted priest.

Richard J. Bozzelli was poised to step into the high ranks of Washington legal circles when he heard the call, and traded the plush executive offices at the Federal Communication Commission for two rooms in the rectory of the Shrine of the Little Flower in a blue-collar neighborhood of northeast Baltimore.

“That to me is the joy of the priesthood,” Bozzelli said. “If you are open to the Holy Spirit, it will take you where it will take you, not necessarily where you think you will go.”

Bozzelli, 34, describes his decision to become a Catholic priest as a slow turning toward God.

“I would have loved to have had that vision where someone comes down and says, ‘You are going to be a priest,’ but it didn’t happen like that,” he said. “Conversion was not a one-time event.”

As he made his way through college and began legal practice, Bozzelli tried to keep religion his hobby. But he says God kept tugging at his sleeve.

While he studied political science at Johns Hopkins University, he taught children to read in the projects of east Baltimore.

In his spare time at Harvard Law School, he befriended an 11-year-old boy in need of a father figure.

And after putting in long hours as special assistant to the general counsel at the FCC, he trekked down to the local soup kitchen where he chopped vegetables and mopped floors.

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Diane Killory, who hired him at the FCC, said if Bozzelli had stayed in law, he would have been hugely successful. “He is brilliant,” said Killory, a Washington lawyer in private practice. “He is the smartest lawyer who ever worked for me.”

Bozzelli graduated from Harvard Law School in 1985, spent two years at a corporate law firm in Baltimore, then joined the FCC, where he was offered numerous promotions. He turned them down and instead, in 1989, entered St. Mary’s Seminary and University.

“Ultimately, I said, ‘Why don’t you just grow up and do what you want to regardless of what people think about it?’ ”

His decision to resign and join the priesthood came as a surprise to his family. When he called his two sisters in 1988 to tell them he had big news, they both thought he was getting married.

His father was skeptical until he saw the change in his son. “All my family and friends could see how happy I’d become,” he said.

Bozzelli graduated from the seminary in 1993 and was ordained in June, 1994.

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He scoffs at the idea that he became a priest to escape the rigors of political life in Washington.

“I didn’t escape,” he said. “God created the world to be lived in. You find God in the things you do every day.”

Bozzelli’s sermons aren’t always embraced by his parishioners. He talks about what can be done about the “For Sale” signs peppering the working-class neighborhood, and encourages his parishioners to welcome their new neighbors--most of them black families who are moving in.

“I’ve been criticized. I’ve had people come up to me and say, ‘Father, we come here to get away from this,’ ” he said.

But his greatest challenge so far is finding enough time for himself.

Bozzelli’s one indulgence is season tickets to the Kennedy Center in Washington. Occasionally he squeezes in a $1.75 movie at the neighborhood theater.

“One of the things I gave up is that I am not my own person anymore,” he said. “The community has a claim on me.

“What I show them is that I can be a faithful friend to them.”