The day I became a priest

“When did you feel the call?”

“What did your parents say?”

“Have you ever been in a relationship?”

“How long have you been a priest?”

These are the questions I hear most often.

But today, I want to answer a different question:

When did I truly become a priest?

Not formally, not on paper, not the date you find in a calendar, but the moment my heart became a priestly heart.

It’s a very important question. It is like asking a married person: “When did you truly become a husband or a wife? When did you really become a mother or a father, not just in fact, but inside your heart?”.

I am often told, “I’ve been a priest for 60 years,” or “We have been married for 60 years.”And of course, congratulations… But the truth is this: we can be priests for 60 years and still not have a priestly heart. We can be married for 60 years and still not truly love as a husband or wife. We can be sons and daughters and not act like a son or a daughter should. So, the real question is not how long we have been something, but when did we truly become it?

And so, I ask myself: When did I really become a priest in my heart?

The first disciples could remember the exact moment they met the Lord. In the Gospel of John, they say: “It was about four in the afternoon.” (John 1:39) A precise hour, the moment their life changed, the moment they became disciples in their hearts. I, too, remember the exact moment I became a priest in my heart,and it happened long before I was ordained.

It was night, a few days before Christmas 2003. Almost everything in my memory from that night is sharp, vivid, alive. My mother was in hospital, receiving treatments for breast cancer. She was 47. The situation seemed under control. I was in an hotel, in bed, sometime between midnight and three in the morning, when I saw the phone flashing on my bedside table. It was my aunty, Pasqualina, her sister, who was keeping her company.

Me: “What’s happening?”

Her: “Something is wrong with your mum.”

Me: “What do you mean?”

Her: “Please… come.”

I remember every single step of that night. When I arrived, I realised my mother had suffered a stroke, and before my eyes she was slowly slipping into a coma. She was confused, mumbling, and wanted desperately to go to the bathroom, but she could not move. And then, taken by a kind of despair, I lifted her in my arms, as in a reversed Pietà statue, the son holding the Mother, and I carried her to the bathroom.

The Pietá Statue by Michelangelo Buonarroti

My mum will pass away in the early morning of the 28 of December 2003.

What I understand today, after so many years, is that a part of me, a certain‘Mirko’, died that night: the mediocre Mirko, full of illusions and childish desires. The death of my mother gave birth to a man in love with what is Eternal.

Of course, I am simplifying. Between that night and my ordination there were eight years of journey, eight years of struggle and suffering, necessary for the birth of this new self. And maybe that path is not finished yet: grief never really ends!

There are other moments in which I became a priest, but for those you will have to wait for the next episode.

So, if, in some way, you have ever felt blessed through the encounter with me, then you must thank a woman you never knew and never met; the woman who became the chisel in the Lord’s hands, shaping a shepherd for His people.

Let us celebrate, my friends. Even death has its bright side, its own collateral beauty. For nothing is ever truly lost for those who trust in the Lord.

Header photo by Jared Hundermark 

Pietá Statue photo sourced from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietà_%28Michelangelo%29