Holy Orders

Becoming a Catholic priest, the three men will tell you, is a bit like becoming a skydiver: The prospect sounds both frightening and exhilarating, the preparation is thorough and well-grounded, and the tools of the trade are well-tested and reliable. But until you actually do it, there’s no way to know what it’s really like. It is a leap of faith.

Stephen Davoren, Dominic Hoa Nguyen and Charles “Chip” Mayer have had the honorific “father” appended to their names for more than a year. They are in the vanguard of a new American priestly archetype. They are all in their early to middle 30s, older than newly ordained priests of one or two generations ago. Two of them entered the seminary after working in other professions, something all but unheard of in the pre-Vatican II Church.

All are diocesan priests--general practitioners who staff local parishes; all attended St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, where most diocesan priests from Southern California get their education. They are intelligent and unpragmatic. All are determined to remain consistently visible and available to their parishioners--qualities not necessarily shared by the priests they knew growing up.

They freely acknowledge the struggles: long hours, heavy workloads, including wrenching emotional moments beside deathbeds, in the confessional, in intensive-care wards. They grapple with the issues of celibacy and personal freedom and must face daily a parish full of spiritually hungry people whose demands for time and solicitude at times can be greater than the priests’ capacity to give.

None have regrets. They are happy men who would be nowhere else, fiercely dedicated to their parishioners, in whom they see both a reason for being and an antidote for isolation. They are clear-eyed men who believe in the words of the Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton: “In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.”

*

St. John’s seminary sits on the side of a low hill above Camarillo, surrounded by farms and citrus and avocado orchards. It is lushly landscaped, quiet and serene. Higher on the hill is the seminary college, where the undergraduates study. The older theology campus, built in 1940, houses the four-year graduate school, where the faculty and more than 100 seminarians live. It is easy to find, lovely to visit. Gaining admission, however, is more complicated.

Applicants do not make snap decisions. The call to priesthood almost never appears with thunderclap suddenness. It can germinate as a result of a Catholic school education, a suggestion by a solicitous priest or teacher, a positive spiritual experience (or many), a growing attraction to a life of service, a deepening personal spiritual life--or many reasons in combination. And every calling is particular to the individual. In the end, it is a growing conviction that the priesthood is where one belongs, that such a life would fill a place in a man’s heart the way no other vocation could.

A priestly calling, however, is not automatic. It must be examined, prayed over, discussed. This process is what the church calls discernment. The average period of discernment is about one year, though some men may take more time. There are frequent meetings with diocesan vocations directors and, often, sessions with chosen spiritual directors--priests or other religious officials who act as spiritual counselors during an applicant’s discernment.

If a man decides to apply, he must pass physical and psychological examinations and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) and obtain letters of recommendation from his diocesan vocations director, his pastor, his last employer or a faculty member from the last school he attended. He must submit a detailed autobiography and provide thorough written answers to questions about his motivation to be a priest.

Finally, he will be interviewed by three separate panels composed of seminary faculty members.

It is a process designed in part to winnow out the indecisive, the insincere, the confused and the troubled. And much of that winnowing occurs early on. An applicant’s pastor must recommend him to the diocesan vocations director, who, in turn, must recommend him to the seminary. Most don’t make it that far. In the office of Msgr. Daniel Murray, vocations director for the Diocese of Orange, there is a library-style rack of card catalog drawers. On each card are names of men who approached Murray with the idea of becoming a priest but who did not reach the seminary--hundreds of them. Murray estimates that of all the people who entertain the idea of a priestly vocation, only 20% pursue serious discernment.

“I think in the last five years we’ve become incredibly efficient and effective in our screening,” says Father Dick Martini, vocations director for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. “Right now,” he says, “three separate people do the [initial] assessment interviews, followed by a thorough psychological assessment. We have a pretty good idea of a person’s mental health when he enters the seminary. We’re very careful to avoid allowing someone in who might in the future cause problems.

“I’m not sure there’s anyone in any other profession who’s screened as carefully. And when you’re in the seminary, you’re still under scrutiny for several years, from several sources, and also during your field education. It’s a lifetime commitment and a position of public trust. Our seminarians are under a lot of scrutiny in order to avoid scandal.”

A seminarian’s tenure at St. John’s can last from four to eight years, depending on the level of a man’s education when he enters. Some young men, directly out of high school, enter the seminary college, where they obtain a bachelor’s degree in philosophy before going on to the four-year graduate school of theology. Increasingly, older men with college degrees are entering the seminary. If their degree is not in philosophy, they must study philosophy and theology for one year at the seminary college before moving on to the four-year theologate. Theology graduates, in addition to being ordained, are awarded a Master of Divinity degree.

There is attrition. Seminarians are told that their period of discernment does not end when they enter the seminary but rather begins anew. Hard numbers are elusive, but substantially more undergraduate seminarians choose to leave than stay on to graduate, Murray says. There may be an attrition rate at the undergraduate level, he says, but it drops off sharply to perhaps 20% or less at the graduate level.

Those who stay the course to ordination are assigned to parishes as associate pastors by their respective bishops. This first assignment typically lasts four years. It can be taxing, particularly in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, where the priest shortage can sometimes be acute. Calendars are filled. Schedules are relentless. New priests learn that the job consists of a series of interruptions. Flexibility and equanimity are essential.

And every day is different.

*

The little girl in the bright yellow dress waiting for the funeral Mass to begin spots Father Stephen Davoren walking toward the church door and breaks into a sprint.

“Father Steve! Father Steve!” she shouts and nearly tackles him around the knees. Davoren reaches down to hug her. He knows her name. He knows the names of the entire family gathered at St. Raymond’s Church in Downey to attend a funeral Mass for one member who has died of cancer at age 39.

Davoren vests quickly in the sacristy and returns to chat with the group. He begins his funeral homily by addressing by name each family member in the front pew. He quotes the late Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago, who, in the last months of his life, learned to “embrace death as a friend, not as an enemy.” He tells the family that their love for their dead relative “has taught me invaluable lessons, not only as a priest, but as a human being.”

Later, Davoren stops by the family’s home on the way to a sick call at Downey Community Hospital. He doesn’t have time to partake of the lavish buffet; he’s on his way to the sick bed of an elderly man to whom he administered the anointing of the sick eight hours before, at 3 a.m. The man and his wife are from a neighboring parish, and he didn’t know their names when he arrived at the hospital in the middle of the night, so sleepy that he’d forgotten to put on his socks.

He knows their names now.

*

Dominic Hoa Nguyen had not been back to his native Vietnam since he escaped by boat to Thailand in 1981. Then, in 1994, his mother fell ill, and he took a leave of absence from the seminary one year before he was to be ordained. As a returning seminarian--the first man from his village ever to study for the priesthood--he arrived to a hero’s welcome from friends and family.

“In Vietnam,” he says, “the priest is like a little king. He’s the guy who knows everything, an educated man. The priest and the church are like the center of everything, especially in the villages. When I came back, people from different villages came and celebrated, hundreds of them, for three days.

“But the image of a priest in Vietnam is not a good idea out here. Here, [Vietnamese] people will give you respect, but not in the sense of the person who knows everything. Even in Vietnam today, the priests really work with people. They want to change people’s attitudes about the church. They work very hard.”

So does Nguyen. He is one of two Vietnamese priests at St. Columban’s Church in Garden Grove, the parish with one of the largest number of Vietnamese parishioners in Orange County. Nearly 5,000 routinely fill the large church for the three Vietnamese-language Masses each weekend. And they all know Nguyen, who chose to remain in the United States because the Vietnamese Church views pastoral education differently than it is viewed here, and because “I feel Southern California is my home.”

“A priest is the mediator between God and man,” Nguyen says. “People want to see a holy priest, someone in whom they can see God present. They don’t expect us to know everything, but they expect that quality.”

*

His five years at the seminary prepared Father Chip Mayer for many things. A former Air Force human-resource specialist who worked for a mortgage company before entering St. John’s, Mayer--like all ordained diocesan priests--attended graduate school longer than most professionals who earn advanced degrees. He has labored through classes with such arcane names as “Revelation and Faith,” “Fundamental Moral Theology,” “Christology and Trinity” and “Pastoral Liturgy.” He has had regular and frequent exposure to pastoral field work during each year of his seminary education and spent a semester and a summer as a parish intern one year before his ordination, living in a rectory and performing all the non-sacramental duties of a priest.

But nothing, he says, could have prepared him to hear confessions.

“No class, no role-playing, nothing can prepare you,” Mayer says. “There are some people who require a lot of delicate care. I had one person who came in and was screaming and yelling, using a lot of foul language. It was the first time I really felt threatened in the confessional. The scary part was that there was no one else inside the church. But most of the time it’s a very positive experience. It takes a lot in human nature to admit you’re wrong. The tears that come, the way people tell their stories and become humble and admit their wrongdoing is a very powerful situation. And being able to mediate God’s love and assure them that God loves them, to be able to say that to them . . . . It’s remarkable to see what these people go through in a matter of five or 10 minutes.”

Memories of stern priests in the confessional have inspired Mayer to be different.

“When I was a kid, you were afraid to tell your sins,” he says. “It was like the priest was judging you. There was no encouragement. The model has really changed. Now, you’re very affirmative. You take the people from where they are, whatever the sin is. You give them ideas on how to overcome that sin if it’s really become a problem. You have to think how you can guide them past it. They’re trying, and I don’t think God is going to condemn us for trying.”

*

On the night of the Rodney King verdict, Father Stephen Davoren was in South-Central Los Angeles, watching flames consume the neighborhood around him. He was then Officer Stephen Davoren, a rookie LAPD cop. It was his second day on the job after graduating from the police academy.

And it was his second foray into police work. He had become an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy at age 21 but left the department after three years to enter St. John’s Seminary College.

“There was this calling about the priesthood that just wouldn’t go away,” he says. “There was something deeper I needed to do. I prayed about it and prayed about it, and I came to the realization that I had to search this out.”

Six years later, after receiving his bachelor’s degree in philosophy and completing two of the four graduate years required for ordination, he withdrew from the seminary and entered the police academy. He found a girlfriend. It appeared that Davoren would, like his father and three brothers, end up being a career cop.

“The whole celibacy and marriage thing . . . . I was at the seminary and about to go into my parish internship, and I said no, I’m not ready. My heart was about 50% there. I said I don’t want to be a priest. I want to get married. So I went back to what I knew best.”

But the calling returned.

“I met a wonderful woman,” Davoren says, “and she really changed my life. But I had to make a decision: Am I going to marry this woman or become a priest? What was I most passionate about in the sense of what spoke most to my heart? There was just not a sense of completeness. It was the most gut-wrenching decision I’ve ever had to make in my life. But it wasn’t a question of a right or wrong decision. It was a question of what I was being called to do.”

*

Every seminarian is told that one day he will have to face a hard truth that will grate against all his instincts as a priest: He will have to learn to say no. St. Paul’s assertion that he had “become all things to all people in order to save some of them” must become a loose guideline, not a firm rule. Forget this, priests say, and expect early burnout.

“It’s really hard for me to say no,” Mayer says. “I get a lot of surprised voices when people call and I say, ‘We’ll have to set up an appointment,’ and then they’ll give me some appointment times like 8 at night or 6 in the morning. I’ll have to say, ‘I’m booked for two weeks, and that’s the soonest I can get you in here.’ It’s unrealistic, some of the expectations that people have. My calendar generally runs about two weeks out, but I know some of my classmates whose calendars run out for three or four weeks. I feel guilty about it sometimes, but it’s reality.

“I was busy during my internship, but I had no concept about how much more people want you when you’re actually a priest. There can be a ‘Father Knows Best’ syndrome: ‘Father, tell me what to do.’ And that’s hard, because I tell them I will not make a decision for them. Here’s something to think about, but you have to make your own decision.”

Shortly after the morning funeral Mass, Davoren fields a phone call in the rectory. It’s a woman whose 4-year-old nephew is dying of cancer. Can he say Mass in their home for the boy? She apologizes for the short notice; she knows he’s busy, she says. Davoren assures her that he’ll make the time. “Hey,” he says a moment after hanging up, “everything stops for this kind of thing.”

*

For many newly minted priests, facing responsibility can be a jolt. Throughout their lives as laymen, they probably considered priests figures of authority, of respect, of substantial personal dedication. And now, suddenly, the new man looks in the mirror and sees, below his own face, a Roman collar. It can take time for that collar to feel natural.

On one of his first days on the job, Nguyen was in the rectory office wearing casual clothes. “Somebody came in and asked for a priest, and I said, ‘Wait here and I’ll get one for you.’ Then I realized, hey, I’m a priest. So I turned around and said, ‘What can I do for you?’ ”

The Diocese of Orange offers a once-a-month support group primarily for priests during their first two years on the job. Those years, Murray says, are considered “the most significant. It’s the first time they’ve done a lot of things: confessions, funerals, anointing of the sick. They need to reflect on all the things that are happening, and they need to discuss the reality of parish life. You can think of it as kind of an ongoing period of formation.”

The support group, Nguyen says, is useful, but for him it is sometimes less valuable than the simple nearness of good friends.

“The new priests in the support group,” he says, “are all different. We may not know each other very well. The level of intimacy and trust is not as good there as it is in my own group of personal friends.”

*

In the corporate world, it would be called taking a meeting with the boss. In the priesthood, it’s called prayer. Seminarians learn early that it is the one single, absolute, indispensable element in their lives.

“That’s the key,” Davoren says. “It really does make a difference. It fuels everything else. Without it, you die. You die. We have a very nice chapel upstairs in the rectory, and I spend a lot of time there, at least an hour a day. Some days, there’s just not that time available, but it’s there when I need it. I look on it as a kind of bank account, a spiritual reserve.

“When I was with LAPD, I’d go to pray at Our Lady of Lourdes in Northridge before work. It made all the difference in the world, spending that quiet time there before I went out and hit the streets. Things didn’t overwhelm me, and I didn’t lose hope. And my discernment of priesthood happened at that time, too.”

Nguyen compares his prayer life to the nurturing and support one receives in a good marriage.

“Married couples, when they come home after a hard day at work, their home is their resource of strength,” he says. “For priests, we don’t have that same kind of atmosphere, but with prayer it’s a communication with God, and we derive strength from it. It’s a similar intimacy in terms of a relationship with God.”

When prayer becomes a consistent daily practice, it can become less of a monologue and more of a conversation, a word many priests use to refer to their personal prayer life.

“Prayer to me is a conversation, first of all,” Mayer says, “and to be able to deal appropriately with the many things that are happening in the life of a priest, it becomes very important to have that conversation very frequently during the day. You’re trying to understand how God is helping you in your life. And the only way that can happen is through prayer, and constant prayer.

“To me, it’s something that’s important all the time, not just when you’re in trouble. To be a priest for God is to be constantly listening and being constantly aware of what’s going on. We’re caring for souls, and how do we care for those souls without asking God’s help?”

*

On a recent day at Mayer’s parish, Our Lady of Lourdes in Northridge, Mayer held an orientation for nearly 50 high school students who would staff the parish’s summer day camp. He dressed informally, in a gray polo shirt and dark slacks. During breaks, he joked with the students and joined them in a wide-ranging game of tag. For lunch, he fetched a huge submarine sandwich from the local Subway, sliced it and served them himself. Several parents, who arrived later to pick up their children, stopped to chat and called him by his nickname. One mother invited him to dinner that night with the family.

That sort of call-me-Chip informality would not have washed with the priests whom he, and many other Catholics of his generation, knew as a child, Mayer says.

“I would say I try to be more personable, more involved with the people than some of the priests were when I was growing up,” he says. “I remember that I’d never see priests outside of Sunday Mass. They’d disappear. You wouldn’t be able to shake their hands. You’d only go to see them when you were in trouble.

“Now, I think of taking the model of Jesus. He wasn’t locked in an upper room during his ministry. He was always visible, always around people.”

Mayer says that being a more activist than institutional priest is in many ways a dividend of pursuing a decade-long secular career before entering the seminary.

“The seminary gives you the tools to solve the situations that come up,” he says. “But if you consider that information a stopping point, you’ll be in trouble. You need to put that information into the context of real life.

“Being out in the real world for 10 years really gave me a different perspective on how to utilize those tools. You can offer people book advice, but they’ll say, ‘Hey, this is life, father. Help me.’ I think I have a better perspective on that life than someone who has just come straight through the seminary without being out in the real world.”

*

A sure-fire red flag for vocations directors and seminary interview panelists is the prospective seminarian who says he believes that his promise of celibacy will be easy to live with. The issue of celibacy and the specter of loneliness are concerns that exist in the background of the consciousness of most priests. But from time to time they emerge, briefly but unsettlingly, in the foreground. When spirits are low, seminarians speak, half-jokingly, of “having a bad celibacy day.”

“I get lonely when I get sick,” Nguyen says, sitting in the garden of the St. Columban’s rectory and lighting one of the three cigarettes he used to smoke each day (he has since quit smoking), “or when everyone’s on vacation and I’m alone in a big house like this. When I get lonely, I like getting on the Internet, sending e-mail. I play my guitar, and that makes me feel better.

“As far as celibacy goes, I spent almost 10 years in the seminary, so I know very much what the lifestyle is. It goes with the package. Sometimes I don’t like it, but that’s the choice I made. It’s like a marriage. Celibacy is demanding; it’s hard. I think it’s too early to tell whether it’s going to get tougher as time goes on. Maybe when you get older and have a midlife crisis and you start thinking you haven’t produced any offspring and that you’ll die lonely . . . .

“But I’m happy with the life now. I’m satis- fied. It’s exactly what I dreamed of. I would make the same choice again.”

*

Davoren returns to the hospital bedside of the dying old man he anointed early that morning. The man’s wife of 57 years is standing by. Tubes protrude everywhere. A respirator hisses. Monitors show a low blood pressure and a rapid heartbeat. The man’s closed eyes flutter and his skin is waxen.

Davoren smiles and shakes hands with the man’s wife, makes a bit of small talk and says, “Why don’t we pray?” He steps to the man’s bedside, places his right hand gently on the man’s head, prays softly and makes the sign of the cross over the man’s face. The man makes no sign of recognition, but the monitor indicates that his pulse has dropped by 10 beats per minute.

“Last night,” says Davoren after the visit, “I said a prayer with his wife, and she just opened up her heart to me. Here’s this machine barely keeping her husband alive, and she says, ‘Honey, the priest is here.’ And he opened his eyes and smiled. You could tell he was a faithful man. It was very moving.” He casts his eyes downward and shakes his head. “And a few hours earlier, I was at Magic Mountain with 55 altar servers, having a great time.

“It’s just your presence itself that says a lot. People aren’t looking for the ecclesiology of the Church or the meaning of suffering in this world. They just want to know that somebody loves them and cares about them. You’re their priest. You walk with them, wherever they are. It’s a relationship you don’t have anywhere else. It’s amazing.

“Late last night, when I came to the hospital, I was tired, my hair was messed up and I forgot my socks, but that didn’t matter. When I got back home, I slept really well.”

*

In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything. “Ever since I was a small child,” Mayer says, “I made up my mind to get married, to have two kids and a great house and have a good job and a perfect life. But that’s not what God had in mind for me. And I didn’t fight it. And now I do have a great family, and I do live in a great house. And I have a great job.”