July 13, 2015
With a closing Mass on Sunday, June 28, The Paulist Fathers officially concluded service at St. Peter’s Church and the Catholic Information Centre in Toronto, Ontario, thereby also concluding our official presence in Canada. There will be Paulist missions, retreats, and other work done in the years ahead in Canada, no doubt, but no dedicated Paulist presence (for now).
The first Canadian Paulist to be ordained was Father John Edmund Burke, CSP, who hailed from St. John, New Brunswick. Coincidentally, the most recent Canadian to enter the Paulist Fathers is also from New Brunswick: me.
Regardless of how cute a wrap-up story it would seem to have the first and last Canadian Paulists come from the same place, I do not expect to be the last Canadian Paulist. However, it ought to be acknowledged that the way in which a vocation prospect from Canada may look upon the possibility of life as a Paulist has now changed in my mind. Joining The Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle (The Paulist Fathers) now, more definitely, means “missionary” in a pretty traditional sense: we venture, on mission, into a nation other than our own.
I am not the first Canadian Paulist to wrestle with a Canadian-American vocational tension, trying to discern as best he can whether the Holy Spirit is drawing him to a Paulist missionary life, primarily in the United States, or to, for example, the life of a diocesan priest in one’s home town. I’m sure that every Canadian Paulist has worked through this a little differently. For myself, I have some notions that have helped me in these last few weeks as our new reality sets in. I will share two.
The first is the zeal of our founder Father Isaac Hecker that I continue to share. I profoundly connect with Father Hecker’s desire to demonstrate the compatibility of American and Catholic identities. For both of our nations, the United States and Canada, many of our primary values are the same: we desire “the good” for all people, including freedom and life. I believe that Catholicism meets these values and completes them, indeed offering life “to the full.” I am excited about the new tools available to us to make this message known, as well as the creative adventure that will be involved in making the most out of them. I am further energized when I look around at the Paulists around me already doing the work, including within our own student community.
Another notion is one that I have carried with me throughout all the little adventures and wanderings of my life: I, first and foremost a disciple of Jesus, belong to the Kingdom of God, a reality which transcends my association with any nation on this earth. I have gratitude for the nation I was born into and the nation where I now reside, but neither nation was truly my beginning and neither is my end. As missionary evangelists we are always about something that is bigger than any one of us, even as our backgrounds and individual gifts are called upon to share.
I have hope that the Paulists will one day return to Canada. Still, though I know it may hurt at times (admittedly this Canada Day was hard), neither my faith nor my vocation rest on our being present there today. Each of us are called to be attentive to the indwelling Holy Spirit, and what the Spirit is calling us to. Beyond that, it is just a matter of confidence that the Spirit knows what the Spirit is doing.