O Jesus, my Savior,

You who entrusted to priests, and to them alone,

the power to celebrate the Eucharist, the principal end of their priestly ordination,

to forgive sins, to administer the Sacraments, to preach with authority the Word of God and to lead the rest of the faithful to look up to You,

through Your Most Holy Mother,

I offer You for the sanctification of priests and seminarians, during this day,

all my prayers, my labors and joys, my sacrifices and sufferings.

Give us, O Lord, truly holy priests who, inflamed with the fire of Your love, will seek only Your glory and the salvation of those whom You have entrusted to them.

Amen

Another great reason why I became a priest is my pastor, Father Roger O'Donnell; a man of God, full of humility, childlike in the evangelical sense, whom I had the privilege of accompanying by visiting the homes of the sick to bring them the sacraments, as well as assisting him at Mass and sharing his friendship. I also desired the priesthood, because I was thinking of the missions in Africa. I dreamed of the day when I could go out to evangelize.

When I was a little older, I realized that you cannot become a priest just by simple desires: you have to pay a high price for it. And so I was afraid to pay it, and I began to struggle against my conscience to kill this gift from God: the grace of a vocation. It took me some time, but I finally succeeded and annihilated my desire to become a priest. Working in the fields, I argued with God to free me from this battle. In my childish way, I tried to bribe God by telling Him that all the sons I had would become priests and all the my daughters, sisters. At last I won the battle of my freedom; my conscience calmed down and no longer bothered me. I could now be a man of the world, perhaps a husband and father, and raise a family. I had refused God's gift; but God is patient and works in silence, understanding us marvelously.

At the age of nineteen I emigrated to America. When I found that splendor, that excitement and that attraction, I thought I was in Heaven.

I arrived at the beginning of the great “depression”. Three of my sisters had already gone before me. One of them - the one who, when I was later ill, offered her life to the Lord for me - told Msgr. Paul Kelly, rector of the cathedral in Scranton (Pennsylvania), where they lived, that I was coming to America with a brother, and that as a child I had had a vocation, but had rejected it. Msgr. Kelly said to take me to see him the first Sunday evening after my arrival: he thought there might be some way to enliven that vocation. When my sisters told me, with many smiles, they didn't realize that they were creating a new conflict for me. I didn't like that, and I decided not to go to Msgr. God saw me refuse His gift a second time; but He is patient and loving, and He let me go, giving me, as we say in Ireland, “enough rope to hang myself”.

The next day I started looking for a job in Scranton, a mining town. I looked and looked, willing to accept anything for a living, but everywhere I was turned down. Finally, when there seemed to be no hope of work, I unhappily agreed to go with my sister to see Monsignor Kelly. Fortunately, when he spoke to me, he did not mention the priesthood, but offered me a job: the position of sacristan at the Cathedral.

This meant that I had frequent occasion to be alone with the Blessed Sacrament, because I was the one who opened the doors in the morning and the one who closed them at night. Then the vocation, which was dead, came alive again. The desire to be a priest became intense again, and one day I ran in and said to Monsignor Kelly, “I want to be a priest.” Monsignor Kelly asked me what was a noun, a verb and an adjective. I knew how to answer him. Then he told me to go across the street to the Brothers to enroll in high school, and to call my brother, who was working in the coal mines, to come and replace me as sacristan. Shortly thereafter he too received the grace of vocation and began his studies.

We left high school a year later and went to South Bend (Indiana), to the University of Notre Dame: there we entered the seminary of the Congregation of the Holy Cross.

Two years before my ordination I became ill: the doctors diagnosed tuberculosis. I was taken out of the seminary and taken to the infirmary of our Community.

I was sick in body and soul. My worst moment came in October 1939, when three doctors who had taken care of me said that I was useless, and that I had to leave to undergo three major operations, or give myself up to my fate, with no other hope but prayer....One of my professors at the University of Notre Dame, a priest of our Holy Cross congregation, Father Cornelius Hegarty, came to see me when he heard the bad news....For half an hour he spoke to me, giving me more richness than with all the sermons of a lifetime: he spoke to me of the Blessed Virgin, of her truth, of her reality, and of her omnipotent power when she prays. With her heart full of God, she built me a bridge over the abyss, and convinced me to ask her for my health. My earthly friends came to see me with words of affection and understanding, but they could not cure me: she had the power if I asked her. Our Lady did not disappoint the faith and trust of that great priest; from her I received my health, and her love freed me from my illness, allowing me to return happily to my vocation: I was ordained a priest. For her I would die in payment from then on, and I would give her a million worlds that I had. The Crusade for the Restoration of the Family Prayer in homes has been the means that God has granted me to manifest my gratitude to her.

(which shows us how we should pray for more religious):

Your prayers are too precious for me not to ask for them, from time to time, for myself and for the poor infidels around me. This part of the kingdom of Jesus is painfully neglected.... It is necessary to work and to beg the Father of the Family to send workers into his field... It would take, not one worker, but a hundred; with workers, and not only hermits, but also apostles, coming and going, making contact and also instructing them.

 At the moment I am in the south of In Salah; at the end of the summer I will return to Beni Abbés, near the border of Morocco, and there the spiritual misery is even greater, for many people are in even greater abandonment.... Pray for so many souls, who after nineteen hundred years have not yet received the Good News, or have lost the knowledge and the memory after so many centuries. Commend these towns to the prayers of pious souls: there are parts of the Father of Families' countryside that are well abandoned! Places where souls, deprived of our means of salvation, slaves of error and vice, fall into hell in masses.... Christ has died for each one of them..... What should we not do for these souls, whose price is the Blood of Jesus?

Pray that the Father of the Family may send laborers, good laborers into his field; and pray for the poor and miserable laborer that I am, so that I may be what Jesus wants!