Thirteen years ago, after graduating from Harvard Law School, Robert Boxie III, was working in a D.C. law firm, making good money, living in a condo. He had a girlfriend and enjoyed spending time with his friends. Nonetheless, he felt an emptiness.

“Something felt unfulfilled,” he said during a July 21 group panel discussion at the National Black Catholic Congress XIII at National Harbor, Maryland.

One weekend, he went home to Lake Charles, Louisiana, for an unscheduled visit with his father and mother. During a two-year period, he had discerned that he should apply to enter the seminary to study to become a priest and decided to tell them. “We already knew,” his mother responded, before giving her son a hug. His experience demonstrates the importance of building strong Catholic families, which will lead to more vocations, he added.

Ordained as a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington in 2016 and serving as the Catholic chaplain at Howard University, Father Boxie joined five friends who are also Black priests whom he called “regular guys,” to talk about their vocations. Father Michael Trail, pastor of St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church in the South Side of Chicago, moderated the panel on “Black Priests Living the Priesthood.”

“The joy of our fraternity is strengthening me,” commented Father John McKenzie, pastor of Christ the King Parish in Detroit, who came back to the United States after living in an Italian monastery for 13 years. True to their millennial ethos, the young clerics keep in touch day-to-day through a group chat they maintain and visit each other from time to time. 

One of the young priests, Father Joshua Johnson, came back to the Catholic Church as a teenager, drawn by the Eucharist. He serves as pastor of Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in addition to serving as vocations director for the Diocese of Baton Rouge and working in campus ministry at Louisiana State University.   If those engagements did not pack his schedule, Father Johnson also produces the “Ask  Father Josh” podcast, and one session attendee credited his podcast with helping her overcome depression.

“Jesus Christ gives us the model,” for both evangelization and cultivating vocations, Father Johnson said. He opened up his Bible and read Matthew 4:18-22 about Jesus calling Peter and his brother Andrew to follow him. Jesus was inviting Peter to follow him for three years and through this relationship, Peter would be ready for the mission that Jesus had chosen him to fulfill.

“Invite them to a relationship,” he implored the audience. “Make it organic,” he said. 

He suggested inviting young people to attend a Holy Hour or to come along for a community service opportunity, which could ultimately lead to attending a retreat and perhaps an ordination ceremony, which could naturally lead to a question about discerning one’s vocation. 

Toward that end, the Archdiocese of Washington is working with high school students, helping adolescent boys build a relationship with Christ and discern their vocations through prayer, Eucharistic Adoration, sports, and “hanging out with priests and seminarians,” Father Boxie said. 

Father Ajani K. Gibson, another panel speaker, was ordained two years ago for the Archdiocese of New Orleans and serves as pastor of his home parish. St. Peter Claver in the Crescent City. 

“We kill our priests,” he said of Catholics, in a remark that drew a supportive response from audience members. Lay people can sometimes be a bit high maintenance with urgent, incessant requests of their priests, he said. “It’s a long journey to the altar. It’s a longer journey to salvation,” he said. 

Dressed in a black cassock, Father Gibson joked about laypeople feeding him fried food smothered in gravy that could harm his health, although he clearly appreciates the gesture of hospitality. “It’s important that you support us,” he said.  

Father Johnson, who is the only African American priest in his diocese, said that the support of clergy and laity was very important to his persevering through his seminary experience, which was his first time attending a Catholic institution or a predominantly white school. His work as vocations director has resulted in two Black seminarians studying for the Diocese of Baton Rouge, among other results.

Norbertine Father Claude Williams, pastor of Saints Peter and Paul Parish in Wilmington, California in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, said that having a large group of Josephite priests serving at St. Augustine High School in his native New Orleans helped to attract him to the priesthood and the community life of religious.  

During the question-and-answer period, Father McKenzie pushed back on a veteran priest, who said that he didn’t feel very comfortable encouraging young Black men to enter the seminary because he feels that his diocese’s seminary isn’t very welcoming to Black seminarians, since it lacks Black faculty members and tends to present religious art that exclusively advances Eurocentric notions of beauty and holiness, among other shortcomings. Father McKenzie said that Jesus had his cross, and that any young man who has an earnest desire to become a priest will have to overcome obstacles, just as the young priest did.

The “Black Priests Living Priesthood” session drew dozens of interested attendees, including Father Boxie’s mother, who is preparing with her husband to celebrate their 50-year wedding anniversary, and priests with decades of service, including Paulist Father Michael Bell, a District native; Msgr. Eddie Tolentino, pastor of St. Michael the Archangel Parish in Silver Spring, Maryland; as well as Josephite Father Michael Thompson, pastor of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish in Southeast Washington, D.C., and Father Maurice Henry Sands, a Native American priest of the Archdiocese of Detroit and the executive director of the Black and Indian Mission Office located in Washington.