(Nov. 6-12, 2022 marks National Vocation Awareness Week for the Catholic Church in the United States, a special time to promote and pray for vocations to the priesthood, diaconate and consecrated life. In this and two upcoming articles, three new priests with Southern Maryland roots share their vocation stories.)

Two days after the three friends had been ordained among 10 new priests for The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington in June, Father Alexander Wyvill, Father Ryan Braam and Father Kyle Vance stood together celebrating a Mass of Thanksgiving at St. John Francis Regis Church in Hollywood, Maryland. For all three young men who grew up in St. Mary’s County in Southern Maryland, the Mass marked a special homecoming to a parish where their vocations had been shaped, including by their shared experiences as counselors at St. John’s Summer Program, where the teens and young adults serving there form a community of faith as they lead campers in activities and attend Masses and pray at Eucharistic Adoration together.

And that Mass celebrated by the three new priests marked a special milestone for an historic part of the archdiocese, where in 1634 Jesuit Father Andrew White celebrated the first Catholic Mass in the English colonies at St. Clement’s Island. In 2022, the ordinations of Father Wyvill, Father Braam and Father Vance to the priesthood reflected the growing number of vocations in recent years originating in Southern Maryland. In the current 2022-23 academic year, 12 of the archdiocese’s 76 seminarians are from parishes in that region.

Father Wyvill, whose family moved to Hollywood when he was 6, said, “For me, the fact that the faith has survived and thrived in Southern Maryland for all these years is a testament to generation after generation handing the faith down, never missing a beat.”

The young priest, who is now 28, added, “Mine is just the latest chapter in this story.”

‘Collar ID’

This fall, Father Wyvill is continuing his graduate studies at the Pontifical North American College in Rome. After his ordination on June 18, he was assigned as a parochial vicar pro tem at Jesus the Divine Word Parish in Huntingtown, a Southern Maryland parish in Calvert County, where he was reunited with the pastor there, Father John Dakes, who had been his pastor when he was growing up as a member of St. Aloysius Gonzaga Parish in Leonardtown, in St. Mary’s County.

“My first assignment (as a priest) was with someone who was part of forming me in the faith in Southern Maryland. It’s caused me to reflect on the continuity of God’s work in my life,” Father Wyvill said in an interview at Jesus the Divine Word Parish this summer.

From the fifth to the eight grade, the future priest attended Father Andrew White, S.J. School in Leonardtown, located next to St. Aloysius Church, and he played the piano at school and church Masses. As an eighth grader, Alex Wyvill interviewed Father Dakes for a vocations essay he was writing for a contest sponsored by the John Carroll Society, a Catholic group in the archdiocese. He remembers that Father Dakes explained to him that he wore “many hats,” serving as a pastor at the parish, and also handling personnel matters and being the plant manager there. 

“I thought Father John was great… He was joyful and energetic, and I could tell he cared about us,” Father Wyvill said.

The youth received a scholarship for his award-winning essay that he titled “Collar ID,” a play on words tying together the Roman collars that priests wear and the caller ID telephone feature.

This summer at Jesus the Divine Word Parish, Father Dakes remembered being interviewed by that eighth grader years earlier at the St. Aloysius rectory. “I remember thinking he’ll be a fine priest some day!” he said.

At the Huntingtown parish, the two priests posed together for photos, including with Father Dakes’s dog, Rudy, a Labrador retriever mix. 

For Father Dakes, being reunited with Father Wyvill after the new priest’s ordination was especially meaningful, because that spring, the pastor had suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm and after being hospitalized, he had returned to his parish in mid-June. Later that month, Father Wyvill was assigned to serve with him at Jesus the Divine Word.

“It’s great to have him here,” Father Dakes said then. “He’s certainly an asset to the parish and helpful to me in my recovery.” And he said it was moving “just to see him, mature in his faith.”

Father Ryan Braam, another of the three new priests with Southern Maryland roots, had also grown up at St. Aloysius Parish when Father Dakes was the pastor there and as a youth was a cantor at Masses at that church. “It makes me very proud to see two of my young men from St. Aloysius from my days serving as a priest in Southern Maryland” now being ordained, Father Dakes said.

Father Wyvill noted that 14 years after he was an eighth grader interviewing Father Dakes about the priesthood, he was serving with him, “and we can be coworkers in the vineyard as brothers. It’s a humbling experience.” He praised the pastoral approach of the veteran priest and his “ability to look at all the factors in play, in making decisions for the people.”

Remembering his experiences at Father Andrew White, S.J. School, he said the school gave him a foundation in the faith, and the teachers there were good role models and “authentic witnesses of Christian life.”

Searching for answers

Then Alex Wyvill attended St. Mary’s Ryken High School in Leonardtown, where he was captain of the sailing team, played ice hockey and participated in theater productions of “Grease” and “Annie,” and also played piano, guitar and drums in the school’s jazz band. “I was a big music guy,” he said.

But he added that during his sophomore year, he began to doubt his faith, feeling that he had questions that no one else could answer. “It was a really dark time,” Father Wyvill said, adding that John Olon, the teacher for his theology class the next school year, “took a lot of time with me, to hear my concerns and doubts. He listened and helped me answer a lot of questions. But above all, he convinced me that the truth I was seeking was not an idea, but a relationship with a person – Jesus Christ.”

The next week, Alex Wyvill began meeting with Father Scott Woods, a chaplain at the school who is now the pastor of Sacred Heart Parish in La Plata, and since then, he has had a spiritual director. “He (Father Woods) fostered accountability in prayer and moral and spiritual growth through some of the most difficult years of my life,” Father Wyvill said. “Father Scott is very generous and never stops. He taught me through his example that a priest must be totally committed to his people if he’s going to show the love of Jesus Christ to them.”

College and camp

Later while earning a degree at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, the future priest participated in the Catholic campus ministry at the Newman Center there, where he said he received good formation in his faith. “What was important to me (was) I had a solid community there to walk with me,” he said. 

At that time, he began thinking about celibacy, which he described as “the call to love people with an undivided heart that asks for nothing in return. The people that accompanied me through my darkest moments loved me like that, with an undivided heart.”

And during three summers while he was a college student, Alex Wyvill was a counselor at St. John’s Summer Program, overlapping at different points with both Kyle Vance and Ryan Braam, fellow camp counselors there who later would be ordained with him as priests for the archdiocese. “The three of us were friends. Kyle was my year at Leonardtown (High School), Ryan was a year younger than me, I knew him at Ryken.”

St. John’s Summer Program “was wonderful,” Father Wyvill said. “It gave me such a good context to grow and deepen my faith, but above all, to experience a joyful, youthful Christian community.”

New priests’ bonds

Looking for a deeper purpose in his life, he began to discern the priesthood, and after graduating from Vanderbilt, he entered the seminary.

Father Wyvill said he and those other two future priests really got to know each other as they studied as seminarians for the archdiocese, and now he said that “I count them among my closest friends.”

And on the evening when those three new priests concelebrated a Mass of Thanksgiving together at St. John Francis Regis Church, Father Wyvill gave the homily. “I preached about our own lives, and how our lives had been formed by the people in the pews that evening, that the reason we were there at the altar was they walked with us in good times and bad as we grew up,” he said.

The three men shared bonds as brother priests and as friends, and also by having Southern Maryland Catholic roots.

“As a proud Southern Marylander, being Catholic is the air I breathed, and so I did not have to search far and wide to find genuine examples of real, concrete, boots on the ground faith,” Father Wyvill said.