The Journey So Far
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been searching for truth. That search led me into the Catholic Church as a teenager, then into the seminary, then into the priesthood. I gave everything to follow Christ, because I believed that faith required surrender—even surrendering parts of myself I barely understood.
For years, I trusted that the Church’s teachings on sexuality were true. That my struggles were a cross to bear. That holiness meant sacrifice, and sacrifice meant silence.
But life has a way of breaking open things we thought were settled long ago.
I never expected to find myself here. Never expected to be questioning the very things I had spent my life defending.
And yet, here I am.
This is the story of how I got here.
A Search for Truth
For most of my early life, faith was a background reality—something as familiar as the color of the walls, not something I thought about much. My family were mainline Protestants, and they gave me a normal Christian upbringing: church, Sunday school, prayer before meals, all the steady rhythms of a respectable Methodist home.
As I grew older, I drifted from the faith of my childhood, as so many of us do. When one of my parents became seriously ill, our family stopped attending church altogether. Perhaps it was a crisis of faith for them. For me, it wasn’t a dramatic rejection so much as a quiet disaffiliation. I wasn’t angry at God. I wasn’t even thinking about God. If anything, I was relieved to sleep in on Sundays.
But even then, something deeper was stirring in me. I was drawn to the big questions about “life, the universe, and everything.” What is the purpose of life? Does suffering have meaning? Is the world random or ordered? And most importantly: Where do I fit into all of this?
Even if I wouldn’t have described it this way at the time, I was already setting out on a journey—a search for truth that would radically alter the direction of my life.
For a while, that journey took me through Eastern and New Age philosophies. I read about relativism, consciousness, and the power of thought to shape reality. Like all good millennials, I grew up on Harry Potter (#GryffindorForever), and my fascination with magic led me down rabbit holes of psionics, manifestation, and astral projection. I devoured the Tao Te Ching in middle school and called myself a Taoist for years, haunted by the beauty of its opening words: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao…”
But for all the beauty I found in these ideas, I never found something solid. Everything was shifting, dependent on perception. I wanted something that felt real.
Then, almost by accident, I stumbled across Catholicism.
At first, it was just another intellectual curiosity. But as I read, I found something different. Catholicism wasn’t just a collection of ideas; it made claims. It spoke of truth as something objective, existing outside of me, independent and unchanging, yet directly accessible to reason. More than that, it provided something I had never encountered before: a framework in which suffering had meaning. Reality wasn’t arbitrary; it was ordered. Faith and reason weren’t enemies, but intimately connected.
The first Catholic document I remember reading was an article from Catholic Answers on original sin. I was a sophomore in high school. I remember thinking it was nothing like how I would have designed the world—and yet, it made sense. It explained human nature, suffering, and my own experience in a way that felt brutally honest. I couldn’t dismiss it out of hand.
From there, curiosity led to conviction. I read St. Augustine’s Confessions and saw myself reflected in his restless search for the “beauty ever ancient, ever new.” I discovered Catholic prayer, drawn in by words that resonated with something deep within my soul. And finally, one bright Sunday morning in February, after months of wrestling and praying, I stepped into a Catholic church for the first time in my life.
That first Mass changed everything.
When the priest elevated the Host, I felt a profound sense of peace—of being home in a way I couldn’t yet explain. What had started as an intellectual exercise had become something far more personal. My search for truth had led me to the Logos Himself, the One who loved me and gave His life for me, and who had been waiting for me all along in the unlikely Nazareth of a suburban Catholic church.
After that first Mass, I knew I had to keep coming back. So I did, every Sunday, then almost every day, as winter gave way to summer. I enrolled in RCIA, and a little over a year later, I was received into the Roman Catholic Church.
The Call and the Cost
Conversion is rarely a single moment. It’s a series of moments—gradual, unfolding, marked by grace and struggle alike. For me, discerning the priesthood was no different.
In the months after my reception into the Church, my faith became the center of my life. I fell in love with the Eucharist. I began attending daily Mass. I devoured theology and the writings of the saints. And then, one day after Mass, an elderly priest I’d never met before followed me outside, looked me in the eye, and asked the question that would set the course of my life for years to come.
“Have you ever considered the priesthood?”
I stammered out some noncommittal reply and left as quickly as I could, but the question lingered. Soon, I found myself saying it out loud: I think I might be called to be a priest.
I prayed the rosary daily, asking Our Lady for the grace to know my vocation and follow Jesus wherever He led. I read books about the priesthood, watched ordination videos on YouTube, and imagined myself saying Mass when I was in the shower.
But my discernment wasn’t simple.
I was sixteen years old, and I had already fallen in love—not only with God, but with my best friend.
We had met a couple of years earlier, around the time of my conversion. He was my first real close friend, and over time, my feelings for him deepened into something more—something I didn’t have words for. I wanted to be around him constantly, to share everything with him. And yet, as a new Catholic, I had no framework to understand what I was experiencing other than temptation, struggle, and renunciation.
I told myself this was what God was asking of me. That to follow Christ, I had to give up everything—including these desires. So I buried them. I doubled down on discernment. After all, Christ had saved me—rescued me from my years of searching, of existential loneliness and longing for meaning. If He was calling me to follow Him into the priesthood, how could I withhold anything from Him? How could I place my own desires before the One who had given me everything?
Finally, at a discernment retreat, I laid it all before the Lord. I poured out my heart before Him in adoration, asking—begging—for the grace to be free. If He was calling me to be a priest, I needed Him to break my attachments, to sever whatever held me back.
When I awoke the next morning, I felt an inexplicable peace. Like I could move forward. Like I could follow.
A week later, I told the vocations director I wanted to apply. And within a matter of months, I found myself in the seminary.
Formation and Deformation
Seminary was everything I had hoped for. It was structured. Orderly. It gave me a path forward, and I threw myself into it with a young man’s zeal, eager to give myself to Christ completely on the journey toward priesthood. And yet, I couldn’t escape the feeling something was deeply wrong within me—something the external structures of formation couldn’t reach.
Every year, I developed an attachment to another seminarian. Sometimes it was admiration; sometimes, it was something deeper. And every time, that person left. They discerned out. They graduated. They were transferred to another seminary. I was left behind, wondering why the Lord kept breaking my heart again and again, but reminding myself that this was what it meant to love as a celibate loves—as Christ loves.
At the same time, I became increasingly aware of the unspoken realities of seminary life: who was “safe” and who wasn’t, what could be said out loud and what was never acknowledged, who could afford to be honest and who had to stay hidden. There was a “gay subculture” we were all aware of. But the one thing you must never, ever do was admit it.
I did everything I could to distance myself from suspicion. I wasn’t like those people. I wasn’t acting on anything. But I knew, deep down, I was no different. I, too, had shameful desires that could only lead me away from God, away from grace.
Eventually, I convinced myself that the diocesan priesthood was hopelessly compromised, that it was a place for spiritual mediocrity. Religious life, I told myself, was the answer. So, after two years, I left the seminary for a monastery.
At first, it felt like everything I had been searching for. But as I moved deeper into the novitiate, I had to face the truth: on some level, I had entered the monastery because I wanted to be erased. I thought that if I emptied myself completely, I could become somebody new—someone whole, someone holy, someone lovable.
But holiness is not the annihilation of self. It’s the transformation of the self by love, and “the unforced rhythms of grace” (Mt 11:28-30).
The silence in the cloister stripped everything away—my illusions, my distractions, my self-justifications. And in that silence, I had to admit to myself: I don’t want this life.
So I left.
I returned to my diocesan seminary. But for the first time, I was beginning to understand something: I had spent the past three years trying to kill the parts of myself that I thought were unworthy of love. But God had never asked for that. He had only ever asked for me.
Breaking Open
In the summer after my first year of theology, I was sent to study in Rome. It was my first time living outside the United States, my first time stepping beyond the carefully managed world of seminary formation. And it was there, in the city of Peter and Paul, that my life really began to change.
That summer, I met the man who would become my closest friend—the kind of friend I hadn’t had since high school, but with whom I would share an even deeper, more searching bond. He was another seminarian in my program at Santa Croce, though he would later discern out. From the moment we met, we clicked. We bonded over theology, over a certain shared intensity, a love for beauty and the deep, unrelenting questions that had dogged both of us for years. He saw me. Really saw me. And he wasn’t afraid of what he found. He remains my best friend to this day.
Then, in the middle of that summer, my parents got divorced.
I got the call just before dinner one evening, looking out over St. Peter’s from our residence on the Janiculum Hill. It wasn’t unexpected. Their marriage had been unraveling for years. But when the final rupture came, something inside me cracked open, too.
I had spent my whole life keeping things contained—emotions, desires, wounds—because I had learned early on that repression was safer than expression. My conversion, my seminary formation, everything I had built my life upon had only confirmed that belief. But now, I couldn’t keep it in anymore.
When I got back to the States, I started therapy.
For the first time, I spoke about the wounds I had carried since childhood—the instability of my mother ever since her illness, the quiet ache of rejection from my father, the way he lost control when he drank. The abuse I had suffered and never been able to name.
My therapist listened, then gently suggested that my same-sex desires might have their roots in childhood trauma. I wasn’t sure what to make of that. I didn’t have any real hope that my orientation could change, but I did hope—desperately—that I could at least gain control over my struggles with pornography and masturbation. So I did what I had always done.
I tried to be better.
I went to a month-long retreat with the John Paul II Healing Center, longing for some kind of deliverance. And in many ways, I found it. There were real moments of encounter with God, deep healing from wounds I had carried for so long.
But my sexuality didn’t change. My attractions didn’t go away.
What did change, as I threw myself into the work of ongoing healing, was my understanding of myself.
I was learning to open up—not just to God, but to others. To stop seeing my wounds as defects, as things that needed to be hidden, but as places where grace could enter. For the first time, I was beginning to understand that love wasn’t something I had to earn, and the places of my deepest shame could become doorways to deeper communion.
My friend from Rome and I kept in touch after that summer. We talked on the phone almost every week. We both wrestled with questions of faith, of vocation, of sexuality. He had his own struggles; I had mine. But through those conversations, I learned what it meant to love and be loved—not in some abstract, theological sense, but in the deeply human, deeply incarnational reality of true friendship.
For years, I had feared that if people knew the real me, they would walk away.
But he didn’t.
He stayed. He listened. And in doing so, he helped me learn how to stay with myself, too.
I was still a long way from clarity. But the cracks in my carefully controlled world had begun to form. The light was getting in.
Moving Forward
Priestly formation is a long journey, but for me, at least, it was a clear path. A carefully plotted trajectory, all leading up to one day: ordination.
As that day drew near, I was filled with a mix of excitement and fear—not that I was making the wrong choice, but fear of my own unworthiness. Despite the healing I had received, I still struggled with what I then called my “sexual brokenness”—same-sex attraction, unwanted desires, and the shame I carried with them. The weight of those struggles pressed down on me more intensely than ever. How could I stand before God’s people and promise to be a spiritual father when I carried all of that inside me?
The crisis came not long before my diaconate ordination. I met with my bishop and, for the first time, poured out my heart to him. I told him about all my struggles with chastity—things I had never spoken aloud outside the confessional, things I thought might end my vocation on the spot. I felt like I was falling on my sword, fully aware that this conversation might end with me being asked to leave seminary in disgrace.
But it didn’t.
The bishop listened with gentleness and kindness. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was ready for ordination. That my own fear and sense of unworthiness was, in fact, the very thing that proved I was ready. He assured me that struggling with chastity was not a sign that I was unfit for the priesthood—that even if I should fall in the future, that would be no cause for despair.
I left that meeting with immense relief. And so, with a clear conscience, I went forward to ordination.
The big day came. I made my seven priestly promises. I prostrated myself on the marble floor before the altar. I let the weight of hands press down upon my head. And at last, I became what my whole life had been leading up to for the past ten years: a priest of Jesus Christ.
At first, I was determined to live as the best possible priest, just as I had once tried to be the best possible seminarian. Fortunately, I had very clear ideas of what a good priest looked like, and so I tried to play the role to perfection.
I wore the cassock.
I celebrated the liturgy just so.
I prayed all the right prayers, made two holy hours a day.
And I wracked myself with guilt over the slightest failure.
Not long after my ordination, my spiritual director told me, with a quiet, knowing smile: “Perhaps one day, the performance will have to crumble.”
He was right. The pressures of ministry broke it down piece by piece.
I had been formed in the idealized world of seminary, but now I was living among real people—their lives filled with complexity, grief, beauty, and contradiction. I walked with them through loss and heartbreak, through doubt and despair, and the moments of faith and hope breaking through the darkness. I found that the human heart was where I encountered God most powerfully—not in perfection, not in rigid categories, but in the raw reality of human lives, in all their messiness.
Some nights, I came home feeling utterly numb, overwhelmed by everything I had seen and heard that day. Other nights, when I let myself sit with the day’s events in prayer, I wept uncontrollably—not just for my people, but for myself, in ways I couldn’t fully articulate.
The Lord wasn’t just breaking down my performance of piety; He was overwhelming my system with grace.
At the same time, I felt the weight of loneliness. My parish was large, active, and the demands of ministry unrelenting. My pastor was a good man, but not someone I could be fully myself with. My closest friends were far away. I was struggling to keep my head above water, drifting into early symptoms of burnout and depression. There was so much I loved about being a priest, but so much that felt unbearably hard.
And slowly, something began to shift.
Something in me was breaking open.
Deconstruction
After a year, it was clear that something had to change. I was drowning—buried under the relentless demands of ministry, struggling under the weight of loneliness, wrestling with an exhaustion that was more than just physical.
So I started making small adjustments.
I gave myself more margin, more breathing room. I loosened my rigid spiritual routine and let myself pray in ways that actually felt like prayer, rather than performance. I stopped holding myself to the structures of seminary life and instead sought out a rhythm of prayer and work that worked for me.
I let go of the cassock.
I started exercising again, lifting weights, even ran a 5k.
For the first time in years, I began to feel connected to my body again.
And as I entered my second year of priesthood, three things happened that would shift the course of my journey in ways I never could have predicted.
1. I met him.
I wouldn’t call it falling in love. But it was close.
He was young, bright, utterly open-hearted. He wasn’t Catholic, but he had questions—real, searching questions. And one day after Mass, he came up to me and asked if we could talk.
We started meeting, week after week. And as I walked with him—not just through his doctrinal questions, but through his deepest wounds and fears—I watched grace doing its gentle work in him. I saw him transform before my eyes, from anxious, fearful, and defensive, to open, joyful, confident in Christ.
I had never been more careful with pastoral boundaries in my life. I was his spiritual mentor, nothing more. But I couldn’t deny what was happening inside me. I was drawn to him, not just physically, but spiritually. Emotionally. Something in me recognized him.
And when I sat with my prayer at the end of the day, when I did my daily examen, asking: “Where did I feel most in communion with God today?”—the answer was always the same.
With him.
2. I watched Heartstopper.
I had no idea what I was in for. It was just a Netflix show—one I clicked on out of curiosity after a long, exhausting day, because the cover image of Nick and Charlie caught my attention. It turned out to be a sweet, charming, innocent story about queer love and belonging.
But it hit me like a tidal wave.
I’ve since heard people talk about “Heartstopper syndrome”—the bittersweet, gut-wrenching realization that they never had what these characters had. That their own story was one of hiding, of fear, of self-denial. That something had been stolen from them.
I felt that, too.
For the first time, I found myself grieving. Not just longing, as I had done for years, but grieving. And not just for the love I had never experienced, but for the self I’d never allowed myself to be.
3. I began to read.
It started as a slow unraveling.
For most of my life, I had avoided certain questions. I knew what the Church taught. I knew the cost of questioning. But something in me had broken open enough that I could no longer ignore them.
I found Cade Hanson’s Intrinsically Ordered YouTube channel.
From him, I found Catholic and Christian voices I had never let myself engage with before—people like Justin Telthorst and Brandan Robertson, queer Christians talking about faith, theology, and belonging.
I started reading theologians I would have once dismissed without a second thought—Fr. James Alison, Fr. Richard Rohr, Todd Salzman and Michael Lawler.
I let myself sit with the arguments I had spent years avoiding.
I engaged with them honestly.
And slowly, something happened that I never, ever imagined possible.
I found myself increasingly convinced that the Church’s teaching on homosexuality was wrong.
What Comes Next?
At first, I didn’t want to believe it. I had built my entire life on the foundation that the Church is right. That if I struggled to accept something, it was my problem—not the Church’s. That obedience, trust, and surrender were the only faithful responses.
But now, for the first time, I was allowing myself to ask the question: “What if it isn’t?”
What if the theological framework we’ve inherited is built on faulty premises?
What if what we’ve called “disordered” is actually a gift?
What if God’s call is not to repression, but to love?
And if that’s true…
What does it mean for me?
For my life?
For my vocation?
For everything?
I don’t have all the answers yet.
But I know this much: I can’t unsee what I’ve seen. I can’t unknow what I now know. And integrity demands that I wrestle with these things openly, rather than pushing them back into the shadows.
I’m still a Catholic.
I’m still a priest.
I’m still committed to seeking the truth.
But the truth is leading me somewhere I never expected to go.
This blog is my way of walking that road—of exploring these questions honestly, theologically, and with an open heart.
I hope you’ll join me on the search.