SEMINARIAN AT ST. FRANCIS
August 2015
As was the case last year, St. Francis is fortunate to have one of the seminarians of the Diocese of Richmond assigned to the parish for the summer. We have asked him to introduce himself to parishioners:
My name is Daniel Molochko. Let me start off by saying that if you have met me in the parish, you know that I love to laugh and I am constantly joking around. I can be serious when I need to be; I have just never encountered a situation so far where I have needed to be serious. I was born in Virginia Beach in 1986. I have one older brother who is four years older than I. If he had had his way when I was born, my name would have been “brownie,” mostly because I think he was hungry at the time they asked him for suggestions. My brother and I were raised in a wonderful home with delightful parents. My father was a Navy SEAL and my mother a French teacher at the school my brother and I attended. My father was medically retired from the Navy after 20 years of service because he developed early-onset Parkinson’s disease at age 40. He retired when I was four years old and my mother decided that retirement sounded pretty good, so she followed my father’s example. Growing up we were the typical beach family. We spent our summers in and around water and spent the winters (mild as they are) wishing it were summer again. I started surfing when I was nine years old and it is something that I still enjoy today. I had the distinct pleasure of experiencing both the Eastern and Western Churches growing up. My father is Russian Orthodox and my mother is Catholic. So growing up we would flip flop back and forth every week between the two. At that time I didn’t care where we went to church because I knew that wherever it was I would be extremely bored, but if I was good, I would get to go to Dunkin Donuts after. That love affair with Dunkin Donuts is one that remains until this day, although admittedly now I really enjoy going for the coffee. In ninth grade my mother decided that I should start attending a youth group and it was a decision that changed my life forever.
Through a very powerful experience with the sacrament of confession during Lent that year, I started to realize that God is not just an old man with a white beard who lies on clouds all day. Rather, he is a God who is deeply, passionately, and jealously in love with us. Over the next three years I learned a wealth of knowledge about the Catholic faith from youth group and made some of my best friends. During my youth I attended a small private school called Cape Henry Collegiate from Pre-K till I graduated from high school.
Coming from a small private school I was not looking to attend a huge university. I also knew that my faith was something that I wanted to continue to foster during college. With those criteria in mind I chose to attend the best institution of higher learning in the entire world: Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. While in attendance at FUS I was discerning the vocation of marriage. By discerning the vocation of marriage I really mean I was running from the vocation to the priesthood. During my senior year in high school I started to feel that I might have a vocation to the priesthood, but I was trying to convince myself that I was wrong about that.
I graduated from college with a Bachelors of Science in elementary education and promptly left that field forever. During my junior to senior year in college I fell in love, and her name was Emergency Medical Services. I took a three-week course over that summer and in August of 2007 I become an EMT. I knew from the moment that I did my first chest compression on the 40-year-old man who came into the emergency room in cardiac arrest that I needed to start saving lives as a full-time job. I spent the next two years after my Bachelors becoming a paramedic. All this time the feeling of a possible vocation to the priesthood never went away, but I was able to quiet it down pretty effectively. Fast forward to the year 2011. I was working at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia, as a domestic contractor. I had a great paying job and a girlfriend who was a model, and I lived with one of my best friends since fifth grade three blocks away from the oceanfront, and yet I still wasn’t happy. I started to look for overseas jobs thinking that a change in venue might shake things up and reinvigorate me about life. I found a job paying six figures as a paramedic contractor for the Army in the Middle East. It was basically the same exact job I had, but in a different country for an exorbitant amount of money. I thought that I would spend a year or more there and come back and reevaluate my life and what I wanted to do. Within one month of being hired I quit my job, broke up with the girlfriend, put everything I wanted to keep in storage, and moved to a foreign country. I quickly found myself relating to Jeremiah 20:7 “You duped me, O LORD, and I let myself be duped” for I quickly realized that the Lord had other reasons for bringing me out to the desert besides a nice paycheck.
I soon realized after I arrived that living in a foreign country where you do not speak the language or know anything about the culture is quite scary. I decided to go where I did speak the language and knew the culture and started going to daily Mass on base at Camp Arifjan. I only had to hear three homilies from the Army Chaplain Lieutenant Colonel Father Rajmund Kopec before I asked him to be my spiritual director. I started meeting with him every other week and it was not long before he asked me one day in spiritual direction if I had ever thought about going to seminary. I laughed at the notion and brushed it off because it had been years since I had entertained the idea that I could become a priest. I doubted that I was even smart enough to go through six years of formation even if I wanted to. I spent the rest of that year discerning with the help of my spiritual director to just be open to the possibility of going to seminary. I spent a total of 367 days in the desert, and the first Sunday Mass I attended when I returned home the priest’s homily was about spending time in the desert. He said that every person in the Bible who does something great first spends time alone praying in the desert. I could not help but think to myself “I just got back from the desert, does this mean I will get to do something great now?” I met with the vocations director for the Diocese of Richmond, Father Mike Boehling, on Holy Thursday, which was March 28 and by June 1 had gone through the whole process and was officially accepted as a seminarian.
I have just completed my second year at Saint Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, Maryland. I have another academic year starting in the end of August, then a pastoral year, then two more academic years, at the end of which I will be ordained a priest. Before, I tried to fill my life with everything I thought would make me happy and I was miserable. Now, I have none of that and I am filled with more joy than I could ever imagine. I challenge any man who feels that he may have a vocation to the priesthood, or any woman who feels she may be called to be a nun, to pray earnestly about it. Go on discernment weekends, visit convents, talk to Catholic married couples. Ultimately if you are truly seeking God he will not let you down and will make it very clear what you are supposed to do and when he wants you to do it. The world definitely needs more priests and more nuns. There is no question about that. The world also needs wonderful married vocations to raise children who are told from an early age that a life of ministry as a priest or sister is not something to be feared but something wonderful. In the words of Pope Saint John Paul II, “the family is the first seminary.” Please continue to pray for me in my discernment and all the seminarians of the Diocese of Richmond. Never be afraid to ask young Catholic men and women if they have considered a vocation to the priesthood or religious life, because if you don’t they may never get asked.
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Daniel Molochko, seminarian, surfer, skateboarder:
