Zachary

Communion, was confirmed, and then slowly stopped going to Mass altogether.

At Cornell, I drifted further. I made friends who encouraged a non-virtuous lifestyle for years. I never doubted God existed, but those years I had no interest in knowing Him. Looking back, I can see He was pursuing me even then.

The turning point came in the summer of 2022. My brother, who had been praying a rosary for me every day for two years for my re-conversion, invited me on a pilgrimage to Medjugorje. I agreed only because my parents were paying for it. I planned to treat it as a vacation.

On the first day, during outdoor Adoration at the youth festival, a man near us began screaming and convulsing. The priest with us explained it was a deliverance. I had never witnessed anything like it. In that moment, standing among thousands of people adoring the Blessed Sacrament, I understood for the first time that the Eucharist is truly Jesus, so truly Jesus that a demon was expelled simply by being in His presence. The spiritual world became real to me, and nothing was the same after that.

Afterwards, I still resisted. I tried going to Mass alone that fall of my senior year and felt too lonely and too proud to keep going. I returned to my old life, but the seed had been planted.

The following summer, my brother invited me to World Youth Day in Lisbon. There, a young woman named Kiera learned that I had not been to confession in eight years and saw no need to change that. She told me bluntly that I had the biggest ego she had ever met and that I could not be Catholic on my own terms. Her words stung, and then slowly transformed me.

I moved to New York City in August 2023. On my first morning of work, my meeting was pushed back two hours. I remembered someone at World Youth Day mentioning a parish in Greenwich Village called St. Joseph’s. I knocked on the door. The secretary suggested sit in the chapel until work started. I sat there for two hours in silence. That afternoon I went to Mass at the Catholic Center at NYU. I went back the next morning. And the morning after that. I have not stopped since.

Within weeks, my entire life had reorganized itself around the sacraments. I began daily Mass, a Holy Hour every morning before work, and regular confession. My first confession in eight years came after a Mass for the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, when I wept over sins I had long dismissed. I started Exodus 90 with men from the parish, began spiritual direction with Fr. Jonah Teller, O.P., and made my Marian consecration with my brother.

The thought of religious life first came during prayer on the feast of St. Mary Magdalene in 2024. It frightened me. I kept dating and kept pushing this new desire aside, until Fr. Jonah helped me see that honest discernment required full freedom of heart. I began a dating fast in November 2024. The peace that followed was unlike anything I had experienced before. My vocation weekend with the Dominican Province of St. Joseph in February 2025 confirmed what I had been sensing for months. What struck me most was that the consolation I felt was not purely emotional. It was intellectual, grounded, and clear. I could see myself living this life. I wanted to live this life.

For two and a half years I have prayed Matins, Lauds, and Vespers alongside the Dominican friars at St. Joseph’s, served as Head of Communications for the parish, and worked as Digital Communications Strategist for the Catholic Center at NYU. Living and working alongside these friars daily has shown me from the inside what Dominican life actually looks like, not as an idea but as a practice. The four pillars of Dominican life, prayer, study, community, and preaching, are not foreign to me. God has already been drawing me into each of them here at St. Joseph’s, and I cannot wait to live them more fully as a son of St. Dominic.