58 Vocations So Far
No doubting Thomas Aquinas College's draw to serving
the Church since its 1971 founding
By Thomas A. Szyszklewicz
Our Sunday Visitor
(October 24, 2004)
With 37 Thomas Aquinas College alumni ordained since the Santa
Paula, Calif., campus was founded in 1971, one might think
there's something in the water. Add to that that the school
has 30 alumni in seminaries and 21 who are fully professed
in the religious life, and you might consider it an epidemic.
Well, there is something in the atmosphere, according to
Father Nicholas Callaghan, a newly ordained priest for the
Archdiocese of New York.
A priestly vocation "was not near the forefront of my
mind" when he started there, the 1996 TAC graduate told
Our Sunday Visitor.
But he said he had "an easier time. accepting it in
the atmosphere at TAC. Whether or not that would have happened
elsewhere, I don't know."
Nor is the college designed to recruit or form future priests
or Religious.
"We're not a seminary," said college president
Thomas Dillon.
Dillon pointed out that many marriages have come from the
alumni as well.
"But we recognize that despite our human frailty, the
college's unwavering fidelity to Christ and His Church and
the rich intellectual and spiritual life of our community
provide fertile soil for the cultivation of religious vocations,"
he said.
The 'big things'
Those points were echoed by Father Callaghan, who considers
the statistic that a steady 11 percent of its alumni have
pursued vocations to the priesthood and religious life as
"a sign of proper discernment:'
What he also saw is a number of men who went to TAC with
the intent of becoming priests ended up getting married to
fellow alumni.
What's helpful, Father Callaghan said, is not only the spiritual
atmosphere, but the curriculum as well.
The college follows a Great Books curriculum and the Socratic
method of teaching, so there are no areas of specialization.
"You spend four years thinking about the big things,"
he said.
Perhaps more importantly for discerning a vocation, they
also thought about "how you fit into those big things."
For Cistercian Father Bernard McCoy, it was also the atmosphere.
He definitely was not thinking about the priesthood when he
arrived at TAG in 1984. He wasn't even Catholic. Raised a
Methodist in North Carolina, he quit school at 16 to go to
Georgia Tech to study physics and astrophysics. But the big
college scene soon lost its luster and he started looking
for a smaller place.
He found TAC on a list of the 10 smallest colleges in America.
The irony is that at that time he didn't even know who St.
Thomas Aquinas was.
He had a whirlwind application and acceptance process and
within a month of his arrival, he was inquiring into the faith.
On Ash Wednesday, he was received into the Church. A month
later, he knew that he was called to some form of religious
life.
Now, he's the steward of temporal affairs at Our Lady of
Spring Bank Abbey in Sparta, Wis.
TAC, Father McCoy said, "was fertile ground for letting
the seed sprout and grow."
The agricultural analogy continued as he credited TAC's classics
curriculum, and environment.
"My Catholic upbringing was at TAC, and my catechism
was Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and all that."
Add to that the social and spiritual atmospheres at TAC and
one almost has the perfect soil for bearing the fruit of a
religious vocation.
This article originally appeared in Our Sunday Visitor
on October 24, 2004. Reprinted with permission.
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