Odyssey of Faith
STL student escapes Katrina into deep waters of trust
By Molly Mulqueen

Dan Wilson entered the STL program last fall, and continues to discern a calling to the priesthood.

Fourteen hours before Hurricane Katrina made landfall last August, Daniel Wilson and his dad had packed up Dan's Jeep, hitched up a trailer and pulled out of New Orleans on a northbound odyssey to Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit. By the time they arrived in Michigan, much of the New Orleans area was covered with water.

"Once I got here and unloaded everything, my dad immediately had to go back to try and get my mother, who was in the city during the storm at a hospital with a friend of hers," Dan explains. "My mother was in a situation for six or seven days where she was stranded. All the stuff you saw on TV about the looting was happening around her. My parents only had about an inch of water throughout the whole house. We were very blessed."

Dan had been a seminarian for the Archdiocese of New Orleans for three years prior to his move to Michigan. Last May, he and his superiors agreed that as a fairly recent convert, Dan should take some more time to discern his vocation. Dan then made plans to attend Sacred Heart with a goal of entering the new Licentiate in Sacred Theology program.

"I am still working on the prerequisites for the STL. I hope to finish the credits for my Master in Theology in the spring and work on my thesis over the summer," Dan says. "Before I left New Orleans, everybody said, 'Do you realize that Detroit is so cold?' I said, 'I don't care if it's minus 30 degrees. The truth of Jesus is there.' I looked at the faculty and knew I wanted to be here."

Dan says he looks at his life as an ongoing project. "I am sitting back and saying, 'Lord, I am here, studying with your holy people and trying to accomplish whatever it is that you want.'" This is an amazing statement of faith from a young man who converted to Catholicism from agnosticism just six years ago. Two high school teachers at Archbishop Rummel High School in New Orleans were responsible for encouraging his conversion. Ironically, Dan's attending Catholic high school was a fluke—his mother and father were not practicing Catholics. They sent him there because it was close to home and they knew it was a good school.

"I went in with all these prejudices against religious people. I thought everyone who was into religious things was like Ned Flanders, that character on the Simpson's—you know, very boring, without a sense of humor." Dan was received into the Church on December 8, 1999, at Archbishop Rummel in the gym at one of the school Masses.

After high school, Dan spent two years at a Catholic university and then genuinely felt God was calling him to the priesthood. He continues to be open to the possibility.

"Now is the time for me to be patient and see what God chooses for me. Maybe he is still going to call me back to the seminary in the end. But I trust that whatever the calling, I will know it without a doubt."