Editor’s note: This story ran alongside a feature about another candidate for the priesthood, Deacon Manuel Holguin, in the June 2012 print edition of the North Texas Catholic.
Michael Moloney’s journey to Holy Orders has literally taken a lifetime. Yet, his ordination next month at St. Patrick Cathedral will be just in time. With God, it is never too late. In his 61st year, he will become a priest in the Diocese of Fort Worth.
He has fallen from the Church and fallen back in love, first with the Word, then with the Eucharist and, finally, with the Church.
“The reason I’m going to ordination next month is because of that call, which has been persistent,” said Deacon Moloney, a native of Ireland who spoke by phone from Sacred Heart Seminary in Wisconsin, where he is undergoing intensive instruction in the Spanish language.
“The most proximate cause was the call to discernment by the bishop in 2006.”
For years the question of answering the call had hung over Moloney’s head.
Born to a dairy farming family in County Waterford, Ireland, Moloney had “a full Catholic school education,” a background and heritage left behind when he was a teen.
Moloney went his own way, which led him to medical school in the states and a practice in Houston, where he moved in 1976.
Deacon Michael Moloney says goodbye to his classmates and Sacred Heart faculty and staff during the seminary’s "Rite of Sending," for graduating students.
It turned out to be the wrong way for him.
Around the age of 30, Moloney said he had “a crisis of meaning in life.”
It was 30-year journey to the priesthood.
“God responded by giving me a conversion experience,” Moloney said. “Out of that I found myself in the evangelical churches. All the way through the ’80s I was Evangelical.”
He believed his calling was using his medical expertise in missionary work. To that end, he enrolled in the late’80s in a program of theology and missionary work at an Evangelical Protestant seminary.
What he discovered, though, was his Catholic faith, through the realization that he was drawing on his Catholic education in the coursework, he said.
He returned to parish life and not long after, friends began encouraging him to explore the priesthood, beginning in the early 1990s, “but I went back to medicine. I always shrugged it off.
“I wasn’t ready,” he said, even though people continually encouraged him.
He had, he explained fallen in love with the Word of God through the Protestant churches. Now he had fallen in love with the Eucharist through the Catholic Church.
Unbeknownst to him, he was about to fall in love with the Church, his spiritual evolution coming full circle.
He left Houston for Lubbock, where he joined the faculty as a fellow at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center.
When he took a job as the medical director of the Community Healthcare Center of Wichita Falls, he was exactly where the Holy Spirit wanted him.
“There was a vocations dinner, and I was invited to attend,” Bishop Vann was there and spoke of beginning a discernment group for men. I knew then and there that I had to participate, if for no other reason than to put this question out of my mind once and for all.
“You could say I got tapped on the shoulder by the Holy Spirit because I had been told for 15 years that I should do this.
“When the bishop said that he was setting up the center for discernment, it was like the Holy Spirit saying, ‘You’re going this time.’”
In 2008, he entered the Sacred Heart Seminary in a program designed specifically for later vocations.
The new priest will be able to share with parishioners his unique journey, not only to the priesthood, but also back into full Communion with the Church.
One can fall away, but he is always welcome to come home.
Copyright © 2012 by North Texas Catholic
See Also:
Dcn. Manuel Holguin studied in Mexico before deciding to spread the Gospel in Texas