Vocation Stories

Rev. Evan Simington

Parochial Vicar, Cathedral of Our Lady of Walsingham, Houston, Texas

Rev. Evan Simington was baptized and raised in the Episcopal Church.  While attending Florida State University, he experienced a pivotal religious and intellectual awakening, confronted with the challenging reality of developing an understanding of his own personal beliefs.   It was at this critical moment, both in his life and in the wider national communion of the Episcopal Church, that Rev. Simington was faced with pressing theological questions he had not engaged before.  He was drawn more deeply into the service of his college faith community, the liturgy, and set himself on a new degree path at F.S.U.  He wanted to grow more deeply in his pursuit of serving Jesus Christ.  He attended Nashotah House Theological Seminary where he graduated with a Master of Divinity.  At that time, it was abundantly manifest to Rev. Simington that he needed to be in full communion with Catholic Church through the Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter.  His discernment to the priesthood and Pope Benedict XVI’s vision for the Ordinariate coalesced with great serendipity.  In 2015, Rev. Simington was the first formally accepted Ordinariate seminarian. After further study at St. Mary’s Seminary in Houston he was ordained to the priesthood on June 29, 2017.

Rev. Armando Alejandro

Parochial Administrator, St. Timothy's Ordinariate Catholic Church, Sykesville, Maryland

The heart of the priestly vocation is deeply Eucharistic. Rev. Armando Alejandro heard his calling to the priesthood in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament with the gentle invitation, "Would you be my priest?" Despite initial resistance to the idea, he found himself at peace when he conformed his own will to the will of God and did everything in his power to pursue holiness in seminary and later as a parish priest. He was ordained to the priesthood in 2020. 

Rev. Nathan Davis

Parochial Administrator, Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church, Covina, California

Rev. Nathan Davis was  raised in the Episcopal Church and became Catholic through the Ordinariate in January, 2012. He was 39 years old at the time. He was never an Anglican priest, but a lay-person. His whole life was one of gradually becoming more and more Catholic while still in the Anglican communion, primarily through love of liturgy and reverent, beautiful worship. At his Episcopal parish in Sarasota, FL, he served at the altar almost every Sunday throughout junior high and high school. It was there, around age fifteen, he first felt like he wanted to be a priest, but put it on the "back-burner." After becoming Catholic, he heard the call to the priesthood stronger than before. It came in two ways: via internal and external calls. Internally, his soul longed to serve God and his Church as a priest. Externally, many fellow parishioners kept asking him, "When are you going to become a priest!" He heard the call! With the help of his pastor, spiritual director, and the vocations director, he realized that he should enter seminary to discern his vocation further. His first two years were at Mount St Mary's Seminary, Emmittsburg, MD, before he transferred to St Mary's Seminary in  Houston, TX to study Theology. He was ordained to the priesthood in 2020.

Fr. Patrick McCain

Parochial Vicar, St. Joseph Catholic Church, Eldersburg, Maryland 

When Rev. Patrick McCain became Catholic in 2008 (as he graduated college), he assumed he would serve the Church as a layman in one of her many wonderful apostolates. After college, he worked in the nonprofit sector while he grew in the practice of our Catholic faith. During that time, he felt what he  can only describe as a tug on his "spiritual sleeve." He met with his pastor and a couple of other priests occasionally to help discern the next steps. Finally, one priest snapped at him: "You just need to go to seminary and get it out of your system!" That was the best advice he received. He also had a moment in prayer, meditating on John 21:15-19. In 2017, Bishop Lopes accepted him as a seminarian for the Ordinariate. He never "got it out of his system." He is grateful to all who have supported him over the years, enabling him to respond freely to God's invitation to serve Him and His people in ways he couldn't have imagined when he became a Catholic 17 years ago.  He was ordained to the priesthood in 2021.

Fr. Andrew Westerman

Parochial Administrator, Our Lady of the Atonement Catholic Church, San Antonio, Texas

Fr. Andrew Westerman first began discerning the priesthood at the age of twelve. At that time he was attending confirmation class taught by the parish priest and was inspired by Father, and thought that his was an awesome life. He became more involved in serving, and found himself with two desires: to become a priest and serve the Church and to be the father of a family. He alternated between these two desires for the next few years, sometimes convincing himself that he didn’t want the one, sometimes the other. He found himself at Wyoming Catholic College thinking about his future. Once more he thought about his many years of thinking about the priesthood. He had grown in his understanding of the priest as the spiritual father of his flock, something which had not figured much into his previous discernment. For the first time he was able to see that his desire for priesthood and service to the Church was not contrary to his desire for fatherhood, though it would be a different kind of fatherhood than he had initially thought. 
 
With this it was left to choose for whom he would study. From the time his family had begun attending Mass at the Cathedral parish while he was in high-school and college, he had grown increasingly fond of the mission, character, and patrimony of the Ordinariate. He applied to the Ordinariate between his junior and senior years of college, was accepted and returned to finish his senior year, after which point he began studying formally as a seminarian for the Ordinariate. He spent four years living and studying at the North American College in Rome where his desire to serve as a spiritual father in the Ordinariate continued to grow. He was ordained to the priesthood in June, 2024.