In May 2021, the Catholic Standard interviewed four seminarians at the Saint John Paul II Seminary in Washington, D.C., about how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted their lives and outlooks. For National Vocation Awareness Week from Nov. 7-13 – a special time to reflect on and pray for vocations – here’s a look at those four seminarians and what they said.
‘People need God’
Seminarian Chukwuma Odigwe said studying for the priesthood during the pandemic offered him insights that he may not have had otherwise.
“This year in many ways, in midst of all the suffering that happened, there’s some things I learned about myself and about God that I definitely wouldn’t have learned had this not happened,” he said.
Odigwe, who is now 25, grew up at St. Columba Parish in Oxon Hill, Maryland, and his family has roots in Nigeria. In high school, he went on a Quo Vadis vocations retreat. “I wondered, does God want me to be a priest?” he said.
Attending the University of Maryland, where he earned a degree in electrical engineering, Odigwe said his faith grew as he participated in the Catholic Student Center there. After graduation, he worked for Catholic Charities and the government. His thoughts of the priesthood stayed with him, and he eventually entered the seminary, studying at the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington’s Saint John Paul II Seminary.
During the pandemic, as the seminarians were quarantined together, Odigwe said, “The seminary really became a great home, and we were able to grow in fraternity in many ways. The pandemic itself allowed us to better focus on God.”
He said a big emphasis for those spending their last year at that seminary “is to help us see ourselves as God sees us. The pandemic provided a unique opportunity for that for me.”
He added, “A big lesson for me was to more clearly define my relationship with Him, and see myself as a beloved son” of God.
One of the difficulties he faced in that time was not being able to see his family during those periods of quarantine.
“A big takeaway for me is that people need God, just seeing that in the last year, in my family, my friends and the parish I was at over the summer,” he said. “It helped me remember the importance of what we’re doing here.”
This fall, Odigwe is studying at the Pontifical North American College in Rome. Earlier when asked about his goals for the future, he said, “I hope that I can help people who are suffering and who have gone through real struggles in life, to remember God does love them and wants to be with them.”
‘Here as brothers’
Seminarian Peter Trossbach agreed that being together during the pandemic deepened the sense of brotherhood for the men at Saint John Paul II Seminary.
“All 44 of us were in here as brothers. One family unit is how we treated everything,” he said.
Trossbach, who is 20, grew up in a Catholic family at St. George Parish in Valley Lee, and he said his faith deepened after attending St. Mary’s Ryken High School in Leonardtown and being inspired by the priest chaplain there, Father Scott Woods. During Eucharistic Adoration at a Quo Vadis retreat, he prayed, “Lord, I want to do what your will is.” That discernment later led him to become a seminarian for the archdiocese.
Like other seminarians, he has a wide range of interests. The DC Priest website notes his interests include powerlifting and poetry, he plays the bass guitar, and he enjoys playing football, soccer and basketball with his brother seminarians.
The pandemic brought its share of anxieties. Like the other seminarians, he was apart from his family members and worried about their safety. Trossbach noted that online classes sometimes posed challenges.
“It’s hard to do philosophy, which is discussion based, on a computer,” he said.
Trossbach said the pandemic opened people’s hearts to what is most important in life.
He noted how Archbishop Fulton Sheen once said the only way for the Lord to get into some people’s hearts is to break them first.
“He makes a greater good. I’ve seen that with a lot of friends,” Trossbach said. “They’re faced with the reality of the end of life, and they want to be better people, and the only way they can do that is with a relationship with Christ, and that’s changed a lot of my friends.”
Reflecting on how Christ died on the cross for our sins, Trossbach said, “He still loves me and desires eternity with me and every single person he died for on the cross. If the world knew that, everyone would encounter the same joy I have.”
On the DC Priest website, Trossbach reflected on how Christ had moved his heart to seek the priesthood. “His love, His way, brings me true joy and peace,” he wrote.
Fitting into God’s plan
Another seminarian from Southern Maryland, Marcus Lloyd, is from St. John Vianney Parish in Prince Frederick and also attended St. Mary’s Ryken High School. Before becoming a seminarian for the archdiocese, he attained the rank of Eagle Scout. Like his fellow seminarians at Saint John Paul II Seminary, he too has varied interests, including hiking, wood carving and playing lacrosse.
Studying philosophy helped him decide to enter the seminary. In a reflection posted on the DC Priest website, he wrote, “Since God is the most important thing there is, I asked myself, ‘Why would I want to do anything but dedicate my life to Him?’”
“There’s a purpose behind things,” Lloyd said in an interview, adding, “I saw the most radical fulfillment of my purpose would be a total gift of myself to God.”
Reflecting on how the pandemic impacted his life as a seminarian, he said, “The timeline is important. It started during Lent.”
Like other seminarians, in that spring of 2020, he was assigned to a parish, in his case, St. Cecilia’s in St. Mary’s City. That summer, he also worked in vineyard in Calvert County.
But the initial period of separation from his family was difficult, he said, noting that his father Bruce Lloyd, a fiberglass technician, had a stroke around that time and had to undergo physical therapy and retire from his job.
“It was really hard for Mom. She couldn’t visit him in the hospital,” he said.
Then for the fall semester, the seminarians returned to Saint John Paul II Seminary to resume their studies there. Initially, they all wore face masks, but after all their COVID tests came back negative, they were able to live together maskless at the seminary, in a safety bubble like NBA players had that fall. He said the seminarians cheered at dinner that evening when they learned the news.
“From the chaos of summer, returning to the seminary was like returning to normalcy,” Lloyd said.
He said a quote from Soren Kierkegaard, a 19th century Danish philosopher and theologian, seemed to sum up that period of fear and uncertainty that people experienced during the pandemic: “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
Lloyd added, “Even in all the struggles and difficulties of current times, there’s still an occasion for joy.” And like the other seminarians interviewed, he said he found joy living among his brothers in the seminary in that challenging time. “The joy of this house still reigns,” he said.
Asked about his dreams for the future, Lloyd, who is now 21, said, “My hope for myself and for everyone is they can find where they fit into God’s plan.”
‘An interesting time to start’
Seminarian Brendan Parlett’s biographical sketch on the D.C. Priest website notes, “I have a triplet sister and brother. No, we are not identical.”
Now 25, he was also interviewed in May at the Saint John Paul II Seminary. After growing up in Crofton, he earned a degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland at College Park, where he said he was drawn closer to his faith at the Catholic Student Center there. “I saw a community of people who had something I desired – a joy in Christ, and a love for Christ,” he said.
After graduation, he moved to Arlington and worked for two years as a technical consultant, building computer applications for the Department of Defense.
Parlett explained that desire for Christ he experienced at the University of Maryland never went away, and in his biographical sketch, he wrote about being inspired by priests “who lived an authentic, holy and joyful priesthood.” After a mission trip, continued reflection, spiritual direction and prayer, he discerned that he should enter the seminary.
“The Lord was persistent,” he said in the interview, also noting how he began seminary life during the pandemic.
“It was a very interesting time to start,” Parlett said. “Moving from a fast-paced job was not an easy transition on its own, but with the added complication of COVID, I didn’t know what to expect.”
That year, he said, demonstrated to him “how the Lord can redeem suffering.”
During his first semester at the seminary, he and his fellow seminarians were quarantined together, with limited opportunities to see their families.
“That was certainly difficult,” he said, but he agreed with his fellow seminarians about a blessing that they experienced together. “It was a call to fraternity, and the Lord really showed me how the seminary can be a home. I come from a home where I have four brothers and sisters, but now the Lord has shown me that at the seminary, I have 42 brothers.”
As they focused on their relationships with each other, their main focus at the seminary remained “our relationship with Christ,” he said.
Like many others, Parlett experienced times of worry and anxiety during the pandemic. His 92-year-old grandfather in New York became infected with COVID-19 and was hospitalized for a few days. Family members across the country who could not be with him in person were united in prayer and support for him, he said.
The seminarian said for him, “the lesson learned (during the pandemic) was to focus on relationships with family, friends and with Christ.”
Parlett, whose home parish is Sacred Heart in Bowie, enjoys playing soccer, playing the guitar, and rooting for the Baltimore Orioles and the Maryland Terrapins. As he continues his seminary studies, he hopes that he will be an instrument for Christ’s truth and help bring that truth to others, to help them “trust in God, that their joy may be made complete in Him.”
(For snapshots of the 76 seminarians of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, and for information on the call to priesthood, go to the DC Priest website. For those interested in vocations to the priesthood, consecrated life or the diaconate, the Archdiocese of Washington has a special web page on religious vocations.)
