Vocation Stories: Fr Kevin Heery
It wasn’t just one event that I can say that helped me become aware of God’s calling to Priesthood, it was a combination of a great foundation of family prayer and a culture of faith at home, the importance of Sunday Mass, education in Catholic Schools, and the great example of priesthood offered through parish and school. We had priests who lived their ministry joyfully.
The Mass was always important to me and helped to deepen my own personal prayer. As a young teenager, I had the chance to become a Youth Reader in the parish which opened the Word of God up in a whole new way, as well its important place in the Liturgy. With my eyes opened further by attending World Youth Day during the Jubilee Year of 2000 AD, to the beauty and vitality of the Catholic Church, the sense of priestly vocation didn’t seem so strange to me when it dawned!
People, Prayer and Parish were all tools that God made use of, to open my heart to His call to priesthood, that when choices of college and career were being looked at; it was that desire to be a priest that topped everything. Despite the natural hesitation and sense of unworthiness, I approached my local priest to talk about a priestly vocation.
I entered seminary after my Leaving Certificate for the Diocese of Meath, studying in Maynooth College. The emphasis on discernment through prayer, studying, growth and discernment allowed the priestly call to be clarified in my heart, and through it all that support and example of friends, college community and priests were great guides to discernment.
However, after 5 years of studying and discerning, I made the decision to leave seminary in order to gain a great appreciation of my vocation in the world. With a couple of years working in finance, and some travelling, I felt that urge to return to formal discernment. Providentially it was another World Youth Day that helped me to make that decision.
I was ordained a deacon in May 2011, and a priest in October 2011, afterwards being appointed to serve as a curate in the Parish of Navan, and since 2019 have been assigned to the parish of Mullingar.