The Sign

Some men look for a sign when they’re thinking of a vocation to the priesthood. For Kurt Gunwall, who will be ordained this May for the Dio­cese of Fargo, N.D., God got His point across on the front page of the diocesan newspaper.

 

Well, maybe it wasn’t that simple. But an erroneous headline certainly nudged the lanky Minn­e­sotan from life as a permanent deacon to the priesthood. 

 

Gunwall, 41, grew up the eldest of five children in Wadena, a farming hub about 83 miles east of Fargo. As a teenager, he says, he experienced the common identity crises that a lot of teens go through: “Who am I? Why am I Catholic? And what does that mean, anyhow?” 

 

Coming from a small town, he adds, he didn’t have the benefit of “an active or consistent youth program.” He attended a few Search retreats in high school, which focus on building community and small group sharing, “and came back very strongly to the faith” in college. But he worried that he didn’t have a strong enough grounding in what it means to be Catholic. 

 

He began volunteering in youth ministry. “I saw the need and desire that kids have for a faith community and for some assurances, some certainties in life.” He was studying at the Milwaukee School of Engineer­ing, a discipline that appealed to his logical and methodical side. It gave him answers.

 

It did not satisfy what he wanted to be doing, however. Energized by his volunteer work, he transferred to Minnesota State University-Moorhead near Fargo to get an education degree be­cause “I knew I wanted to work with students.” 

 

He was working part-time at the Diocese of Fargo’s Office of Catechesis, Evangelization and Youth when a friend suggested that he enroll at Cardinal Muench Seminary to see if he might have a vocation to the priesthood.

 

Gunwall stayed for one year, then for one more in its Vianney resident program, which allows young men who are still discerning to live in community. Still seeking, still questioning. Still, no sign.

 

“I didn’t feel a strong call at the time,” Gunwall admits. When a full-time position opened up in the youth office, Gunwall didn’t expect that he would be hired for it. But, to his surprise and delight, then-Bishop James Sullivan took him on. “I think Bishop did that to keep an eye on me,” Gunwall now chuckles. “I think he was pretty sure I had a vocation.” 

 

The thoughtful young man also be­gan studying for the permanent diaconate, and that’s when God took over, as it were, as a typesetter. 

 

After Gunwall’s candidacy rite, the diocesan paper ran his photograph under the headline “On the road to the priesthood” instead of the diaconate.

 

“All these people were calling to tell me, ‘We’re so glad you’re becoming a priest!’” Gunwall laughs. “I just kept telling them it was a mistake!” 

 

But something clicked. “I started asking my spiritual director, my family and friends to pray for me — that if God were trying to make things that clear, that He would —- it would be unmistakable.”

That was during Lent in 2004, and when Easter arrived, Gunwall’s spiritual director asked him the $64,000 question, “Is there any reason that you couldn’t or wouldn’t be a priest?” 

 

“As soon as he asked the question,” recalls Gunwall, “I thought, ‘There’s no reason at all.’”

 

“Nothing had changed, but the question itself opened my eyes and my heart to what He was calling me to do,” Gunwall says. Unlike St. Paul, he wasn’t knocked off a horse. “It was very subtle with me. Everything else was the steps and the stages and the places He had me be at certain times in my life 

to prepare me.” 

“Most everybody did in fact think Kurt was called to the priesthood,” says Father Paul Duch­schere, the diocese’s vocation director, “and he was one of the last ones to see it for himself. 

 

“I knew then he had made the right choice in a complete way,” adds Father Duch­schere. “Kurt was always called to a vocation in Holy Orders, “but it took him, in the Lord God’s providential time, a while to really see which of the orders it was!” 

 

Now wrapping up his final year of studies at St. John Vianney Seminary in Denver, Gunwall has used his own experience “to help other guys who are struggling with discernment. I just say, ‘Pray about it, and be sure. Even if it’s over a period of years, as it was with me, He’ll make it clear to you.’” 

 

Gunwall is finishing his thesis, which deals with the importance of youth ministry in helping young people find their way. 

 

And when he is ordained May 24 at St. Mary Cathedral in Fargo, Gunwall will finally be able to say, “Yes, this is where I belong.”