Journey of discernment draws future priest into the mystery of Christ
Transitional Deacon Thomas Day incenses concelebrating priests on April 15 at SS. Peter and Paul Cathedral in Indianapolis during the annual archdiocesan chrism Mass. Deacon Day will be ordained a priest on June 7 at the cathedral. (Photo by Sean Gallagher)
By Sean Gallagher
At the start of the summer of 2016, transitional Deacon Thomas Day, 21 years old at the time and a new college graduate, traveled from Indiana by a Greyhound bus to Newark, N.J. He then took a subway to 151st Street in the Bronx.
“I was walking down this street in the Bronx with two suitcases and a backpack, never having been to New York City before,” Deacon Day recalled.
He was beginning a year of volunteer service at St. Anthony Shelter, a center for homeless men operated by the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal.
The Bronx was a world away from where Deacon Day grew up in suburban Indianapolis and attended St. Joseph’s College in Rensselaer in rural northern Indiana.
Volunteering in New York was one stage on a winding journey that led to his discovery of God’s vocation for him as a priest of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis.
That journey involved travels to places on the East Coast that were new for Deacon Day. It also involved an interior pilgrimage as God led him in his heart along many stages of discernment.
That journey will come to a turning point at 10 a.m. on June 7 at SS. Peter and Paul Cathedral when Archbishop Charles C. Thompson will ordain Deacon Day and transitional deacons Liam Hosty and Isaac Siefker as priests.
Deacon Day will then begin ministry on July 2 as parochial vicar of Our Lady of the Greenwood Parish in Greenwood.
Growing in faith in community
Deacon Day grew up as a member of Holy Spirit Parish on Indianapolis’ east side until he was a middle school student when his family moved to Westfield, Ind. There, he and his
family became members of the nearby St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Parish in Carmel, Ind., in the Lafayette Diocese.
“My parents were the first people to get me involved in the Mass. I still remember my dad telling a 5- or 6-year-old me that, at church, we have to ‘sing, pray, respond and listen,’ ” Deacon Day said. “They were also responsible for getting me to start altar serving at the age of 10.”
Looking back, he sees God’s providence at work when a few years later as a student at Westfield High School he randomly picked up off the shelf in the school’s library a battered old copy of the 20th-century British author C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters.
The book about the Christian faith is written in a humorously ironic way as a series of letters by a demon (Screwtape) to his nephew and underling named Wormwood, who increasingly fails in his efforts to tempt a young man away from the faith.
“I read it within three or four days,” Deacon Day said. “It was intense. This was what Christianity is about. I said to myself, ‘Why isn’t this the most important thing in my life?’ ”
He soon became friends with a group of fellow students at Westfield who took their Catholic faith seriously. They would meet in what Deacon Day called a “kind of accountability group” in which they helped each other live out their faith and grow in prayer.
“That was one of the most important things that’s ever happened to me in terms of my faith,” Deacon Day said. “It turned the faith from this problem I was trying to solve into a community.”
A ‘life-changing’ year of ministry
While a junior at Westfield, Deacon Day began to think that he might be called to the priesthood.
“I had begun to experience God in the Mass and in confession,” he said. “And my thought had been that, if this is where I find God, I want to make sure that other people like me have the sacraments. I wanted to be able to give people these things because it was where I’d been able to find God.”
The vocations director for the Lafayette Diocese advised Deacon Day not to become a seminarian at that time, but to allow his faith to mature more in college.
That growth happened at St. Joseph’s as Deacon Day grew in his life of prayer and making friends with other Catholic students.
He also discerned a possible call to religious life with the Dominican friars of the Province of St. Joseph, based in Washington, D.C.
Because he was to graduate from St. Joseph’s after only three years, the Dominicans recommended that he do a year of volunteer work before entering their community. He did that by working at the shelter in the Bronx, which he described as “an incredible year, truly life-changing.”
The ministry he did helped Deacon Day see “different parts of people’s lives and being able to speak to that.”
Many of the people who came to the shelter where he served struggled with mental illness and drug addiction.
“I spent New Year’s Eve helping a friar get a guy to a mental clinic because he was suicidal,” Deacon Day said. “He was starving himself and we had to get him checked in.”
The priesthood’s double mystery
After his year in the Bronx, Deacon Day became a postulant and then a novice with the Dominicans at their novitiate at St. Gertrude Parish in Cincinnati.
The parish ministry that he and his eight fellow novices got involved in “really jumped out at me,” Deacon Day said. “It was an awesome thing to do, and very fulfilling.”
After professing temporary vows as a Dominican, Deacon Day moved to Washington where he was enrolled at the Dominican House of Studies. His busy days were filled with classes, praying in common several times a day with his fellow friars, ministry and community events.
The daily schedule grew increasingly difficult for him.
“As much as I enjoyed huge chunks of what I was doing, I was making myself miserable, trying to follow the schedule,” Deacon Day said.
So, in April 2020, during the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, Deacon Day left the Dominicans and returned to Indiana.
He soon was hired as a religion teacher at St. Michael-St. Gabriel School and found a fruitful spiritual home at Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary Parish, both in Indianapolis.
During this change in his life, he continued to hear God’s call in prayer. So, he applied to become an archdiocesan seminarian and was accepted in the spring of 2021.
As he’s gotten closer to the priesthood through formation at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology in St. Meinrad and ministry assignments in archdiocesan parishes, Deacon Day has pondered a double mystery in how priests are sacramental signs of Christ to the people they serve.
“In Christ you don’t become a generic replica or a factory machine model of Christ the priest,” he said. “It is Christ who transfigures you in who you are and with everything that you are, perfecting it. Somehow, that’s how Christ becomes present in the world.”
At the same time, Deacon Day, in his ministry at Our Lady of the Greenwood since December 2024, has come to realize that it’s really Christ who is acting in him.
“It’s all Jesus,” he said. “That’s the first truth. But right behind that truth is the truth that God is making you who you truly are.”
As he considers being able to celebrate the Eucharist after being ordained a priest, Deacon Day’s thoughts turn to a message he’s seen on the sacristy wall of chapels in convents of the Missionaries of Charity he’s come to know in various cities, including those who serve on Indianapolis’ near east side: “Priest of God, celebrate this Mass as if it was your first Mass, as if it was your last Mass, as if it was your only Mass.”
“That’s a reality that I’m beginning to understand,” he said. “When you’re working in a parish, as awesome and fruitful as it is to be working with the people of God day in and day out, the temptation can be to treat Mass as being on the back burner and not being the centerpiece of what you’re doing with your daily life.
“I never want that to happen. It should be at the heart of my day and something that my heart jumps up and leaps up for.”
‘God is not a miserly God’
Katie Warren, the director of youth ministry at St. Joseph Parish in Corydon and St. Mary Parish in Lanesville, came to know Deacon Day when he ministered at the two New Albany Deanery faith communities.
She values that his wide knowledge of the faith doesn’t lead him to be “pretentious.”
“With him, there’s just a desire to share the knowledge and the passion and the love that he has for the faith,” Warren said. “That comes through.”
She also appreciates his humor.
“I love to laugh, and he’s somebody who makes me laugh regularly,” Warren said. “I think that’s great, because I think priests should take their faith seriously, but not necessarily themselves seriously. That makes them relatable and enjoyable to be around.”
Deacon Day’s experience of discernment is valuable to Sophie Lorenz. A special education teacher at St. Mark the Evangelist School in Indianapolis, Lorenz, 24, came to know Deacon Day through a Catholic young adult group that meets at Our Lady of the Greenwood.
“He listens to you,” she said. “In our time of life, we have a lot of uncertainties. The experiences he’s had helps him empathize with our age group more.”
Deacon Day encouraged young men who might wonder if God is calling them to the priesthood.
“Discernment for the priesthood is a very long road, but no matter where it takes you, God will reward your zeal,” he said. “The gifts that God will give you and the people that you will meet and the experiences that you will have are so fulfilling.
“God is not a miserly God. If you give yourself to him with an open heart, he will give himself back to you.”
(For more information about a vocation to the priesthood in the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, visit HearGodsCall.com.) †
About Transitional Deacon Thomas Day
Age: 29
Parents: Michael and Jeanette Day
Home Parish: Holy Spirit Parish in Indianapolis as a child; Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary Parish in Indianapolis as an adult
Education: Westfield High School in Westfield, Ind.; St. Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, Ind.; Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C.; Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology in St. Meinrad
Favorite Scripture verse/passage: Psalm 73:25 (“Who else have I in heaven but you? Apart from you, I want nothing on Earth.”)
Favorite saint: “Too many to count, but all of the Thomases, plus St. Joseph and St. Mary Magdalene.”
Favorite prayer/devotion: The Divine Office (also known as the Liturgy of the Hours)
Favorite movie: O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Favorite authors: G.K. Chesterton, St. Augustine
Hobbies: Gardening, cooking, reading good books and hanging out with good friends, preferably with bourbon and cigars
