A Note from our Summer Seminarian

Dear St. Mary's,

First, I would like to thank all of you for welcoming me here at Saint Mary’s. Your willingness to host seminarians every year is a great gift to our diocese and to the universal Church. I already know that Saint Mary’s has much to offer me in my own priestly formation. Monsignor Rose asked me to write a little bit more about myself for you to know me better.

I have just completed my fourth year of seminary at Saint John’s Seminary in Brighton, which means that if all continues to go as planned, I will be ordained to the transitional diaconate in 2021 and to the priesthood in 2022. As a boy, I attended Our Lady of the Angels School in Worcester and in 2008 I graduated from Saint Peter-Marian High School. In 2012, I earned a degree in applied mathematics and meteorology from the State University of New York at Oswego. From there, I was blessed to earn a master’s degree in statistics from UMass Amherst and master’s degree in secondary education from Providence College. For two years, I taught mathematics at Saint Mary’s High School in Worcester, where I also served as the dean of discipline, baseball and soccer coach, and retreat coordinator for the students. Certainly, I am a big supporter of Catholic education, and I am so thrilled to come to this parish with such a marvelous school. It is very hard to capture how life-changing my time at Saint Mary’s in Worcester was, so I will not attempt to do so in this space. Let it suffice to say that God used my time as a teacher to its fullest advantage, to call me to be his priest, to allow me to more fully experience his mercy, and to stoke a fire in my heart for bringing that mercy to others.

For fun, I love to play golf. But really, I love all sports. I am on the seminary basketball team even though I was a hockey player all through my childhood and at SPM. I coach the seminary soccer team and I also play softball and tennis with my brother seminarians. I enjoy hiking in Vermont and New Hampshire, I ride my bicycle around the rail trails of central Massachusetts, and I love candlepin bowling.

Many people have asked me, “Why do you want to be a priest?” Very simply, I want to be a priest because it is what God has preordained for my eternal happiness and for the eternal happiness of those in my care. In our world, so many people are unhappy, so many have no direction and no purpose to their lives, and so many people suffer. I am convinced that the answer to all of this is Jesus Christ. In the words of my hero, Saint John Paul II, “It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness. He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you. He is the beauty to which you are so attracted. It is he who provokes you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise. It is he who urges you to shed the masks of a false life. It is he who reads in your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives!”

Thank you again for welcoming me here. I wish we could be together under more normal circumstances, but I am sure that there is much grace to be received during these difficult times. Please be assured of my daily prayers for you, and thank you for remembering me in yours.

Yours in Christ,
Derek Mobilio