Patrick Burns
College I
Hello, my name is Patrick Burns and my parish is St. Elizabeth Ann Seton in Omaha, NE. My family joined the Catholic Church in 2002. I always looked up to the priests and deacons that I knew and I thought that being one would be a pretty cool thing to do. When I was about 13 I went to a youth rally and during Adoration I felt that I was being called to the priesthood and at the time I was fine with the idea of being one.
As I went into high school I got pretty lackadaisical about my faith. I would go to mass and youth group every Sunday. But I found it hard to get into the mass, and the only reason I was at youth group was because that’s where my friends were. At this time I wanted nothing to do with being a priest.
Later in my junior year I started to fall in love with the mass again. I started actively participating in it instead of just being there physically. When I was on retreat in the fall of my senior year I felt this tugging at my heart telling me to become a priest but couldn’t really accept it, I just couldn’t say yes. A few months went by and I kept thinking about it and one day one of my best friends randomly tells me that I would make a good priest and that I should join seminary. I didn’t have any real plans for the future and I thought that after all of that, maybe God was calling me. So I prayed about it and decided that I should at least give it a shot. So I called up the vocation director and started my journey to the seminary.
