About-face to the priesthood

Brother Nathaniel Pierce, S.J.C. speaks during a benefit dinner alongside members of his community. (All photos by Esther Jula, Courtesy of the Canons Regular of St. John Cantius.)

WHEN WE'RE YOUNG, we seek a path true to ourselves. However, some of us don’t discover our true self until we’re older. That’s what happened to me, at least, having had to search for years until God gave me the grace to seriously discern religious life and the priesthood.

I’m one of three kids. I have a twin sister and a brother a year younger than me. We grew up in Chicago with parents who both worked in the Catholic world—my father in publishing and my mother as a Catholic grade-school teacher. At my all-boys Holy Cross High School, I’d often imagine how cool it would be to be a priest and religious, thinking that the Holy Cross men led a particularly alluring life, living in community and serving in education. I then remember thinking that it would be even cooler if I kept those notions to myself and instead did what most high school boys did. I was a good baseball player and knew I could play baseball in college. I also had other legitimate interests, like literature and entrepreneurship. So religious life thoughts took a back seat to other interests.

The sexual abuse crisis in the church was also front-page news while I was in high school, and it angered me and began to wear at my faith. After I went off to Grinnell College in Iowa, where I majored in English and played baseball, I, unfortunately, soon fully abandoned my faith. Yet I carried with me an enigmatic sense that I should be a priest or monk or something, premonitions that I never allowed to rise past my deep subconscious as I pursued the fleeting fun of my college years.

After graduating, I continued to have the peculiar thought that I should be a priest or a monk, even though being a Catholic was the furthest thing from my mind most days. Through a college friend I fell into a career as a financial adviser at Merrill Lynch, a profession for the hard-and-fast entrepreneur (the failure rate for financial advisers at Merrill Lynch is higher than for Navy SEALs). I had to learn the profession on the job, but my liberal arts education had taught me how to learn and think, which was very useful for beginning in the business. Equally important to my success was good old-fashioned gumption and competitiveness that years of playing baseball had instilled in me. After several years, I was able to scrounge up enough clients to build a practice at the top wealth management firm on Wall Street; plus, I began dating the sort of girl I had always wanted to date.

Things fall apart

I had all the world said I needed to be happy, but my spirit felt devoid of purpose, and life had a bitter taste to it. Around the age of 28, I’d inched as close as I’d ever gotten to despair. My relationship with my girlfriend fell apart. I was apathetic about continuing to grow my business and make more money. I was spiritually dry. I remember thinking to myself, When was the last time you were grateful for anything? For a decade I’d been searching to fulfill my spiritual longings, but to no avail. In frustration one day, I cried out to God, “Please show me who you are!”

And God obliged.

My mentor at work, a consultant to some of the financial advisers at the firm, knew I was breaking down and that my production was stalling. One day he was in town and hastened me to a room to confront me about what was going on. In tears I told him how unsatisfied I felt about life. I let him into my suffering. He was actually under the misconception that I was a practicing Catholic, and, being a devout Lutheran, he exhorted me to put my suffering at the foot of the cross and to trust Christ to help me. Trust Christ? I thought, It’s been a long time since I did that. But I trusted my mentor, and his Christian conviction brushed off on me so strongly that I decided to take his advice. Nothing else I had tried had worked.

While I didn’t have an immediate reversion, in time I found Catholic resources online that gave me the rational explanations I needed to understand the foundations of the faith. Eventually, I experienced a major return to the Catholic faith, something I never would have expected based on the beliefs I held the prior 10 years of my life.

Everything comes together

I soon found myself making a good, lifelong confession, and God took me through a process of cleansing my soul. Through research, I eventually learned about the traditional Latin Mass and became interested in attending one. I learned that a nearby parish, St. John Cantius in Chicago, celebrated such Masses, and, on what must be the most consequential Sunday of my life, I walked into a most glorious church, and I heard, for the first time, a Mass sung in Gregorian chant. A neo-baroque church in my hometown, a powerful liturgy, angelic chant, beautiful vestments, incense. I was captivated by the beauty and tradition of the Catholic Church.

I had no idea what I was doing as I participated in that Mass, and even though I felt out of place, I knew I would be back every week. I was filled with wonder in having encountered the sacred in this way. As I went on to encounter the marvelous traditions of the liturgical year at the parish, I dove deeper into my faith. I began in search of truth, but as my faith blossomed, beauty had the day.

Within a few weeks I noticed that St. John Cantius Parish was run by a religious order, the Canons Regular of St. John Cantius. As I began to seriously pursue holiness, it eventually became apparent that the Holy Spirit had been telling me what to do my whole life. I was called to make a deeper commitment to God; I was called to be a religious and a priest.

While I did consider the diocesan priesthood, the Canons Regular of St. John Cantius seemed like the right place for me as the community’s charism had so transformed me that I naturally wanted to share it with others. I especially wanted to help bring grace into the world for those who had either fallen away like I had or who weren’t Catholic. The community’s charism is “restoration of the sacred,” a charism that is manifested by exposing people to the church’s incomparable patrimony of sacred art, music, and liturgy within a parish setting. I see this as particularly important in today’s world.

Going public

One of the most challenging things I had to do during this process was tell people about my decision. I worried that telling people might cause me to turn back on the whole vocation. Only my immediate family and my best friend knew that I was discerning my calling. Everyone else knew very little of even my return to the church. I would be blindsiding most of the people closest to me. For my clients and coworkers, leaving a successful Wall Street career to become a religious was unprecedented. When I told my boss I was leaving to pursue a vocation, he said, “Well, I’ve heard a lot in my 25 years on the job, but this is a first!”

People turned out to be a mix of ambivalent, surprised, happy, and worried for me. Despite that range of emotion, God gave me the fortitude I needed to deal with it. I have learned that a person’s vocation belongs to that person; anyone who is generous to God can trust God for help through the major life change a vocation can entail.

Getting to know myself

I’ve been surprised since entering into religious life by how God has exposed every weakness of mine and made me learn more about myself than I had in the prior 32 years. God is, after all, the Good Doctor, and when you willingly come into religious life pursuing holiness, you can bet God is going to challenge you.

Religious life has required a lifestyle diametrically opposed to my old life. I used to say I liked being a financial adviser because I worked for myself and had autonomy in how I did things. When you live under obedience within a religious community, your life is no longer yours. For me, living around other people all the time now and having to be forbearing and patient and cheerful with them day-in-and-day-out has been my biggest challenge, but also my biggest opportunity for growth in virtue.

A true vocation, however, doesn’t challenge us more than we can handle. I’ve found great joy in holding the hand of God throughout the day more intentionally than I could in my previous life. As religious, we wake up each day and make an aggressive pursuit at perfection, and we have the great benefit of living, in a disciplined way, surrounded by grace. As a brother I might find this grace while attending Mass, training altar servers, teaching Sunday school, helping the youth group, praying the Divine Office, or spending time alone with God. Currently, as a seminarian, I devote a lot of time to study. No matter our daily focus, all of what is built into religious life helps to sanctify us. It’s a way of life I had been searching for my whole life, and I’m so happy that I finally found it.

Related: VocationNetwork.org, “No regrets: A grateful priest takes stock.”