In his first year at Corpus Christi College, the diocesan seminary for Victoria and Tasmania, Rhys Lowther was sent to visit a nursing home. There, he got to know an old nun, who gave him a copy of True Devotion to Mary by St Louis de Montfort. ‘She looked me in the eye,’ Rhys remembers, ‘and said, “The priesthood of Jesus was formed in the womb of Mary. You’ll never have a priestly heart unless you allow Mary to form it in you.”’
‘Our Lord took his human nature from Our Lady, and his nature is what makes him a priest, a mediator between God and humanity,’ Rhys says, observing that in some ways we are asked to do the same thing. Pointing to the way Christ asks Mary to cooperate in his redemption of the world, he says, ‘In my vocation, that’s very much what I see Christ asking me: to lend him my nature so that he can continue the work of redemption on earth.’
From his high-school years, Rhys knew that he wanted to enter the seminary. As he grappled with the ‘big questions’ in life—‘Is there meaning to life? What is my place in the world?’—he started attending Mass and getting involved in the life of the Church, especially through the sacrament of Confession. ‘That marked a big time for me,’ Rhys says. ‘[It] led me to have a more personal relationship with Our Lord.’
It became clearer to Rhys that God was preparing him for something. ‘God was working in my life,’ Rhys says, ‘preparing me to give myself to the mission of the Church … He was asking me to be a priest and to serve him as a priest.’
In his discernment, Rhys found—and continues to find—great inspiration in the life of St John Mary Vianney, the ‘Curé of Ars’ and patron saint of parish priests. ‘I always think, “He is not a saint because he converted the town of Ars; he converted the town of Ars because he is a saint.”’ For Rhys, St John Vianney exemplifies the qualities that lie at the heart of priestly life: ‘the overflow of our union with Christ, our desire for holiness and, ultimately, being a saint, which is something applicable to all states of life’.
Rhys says the spiritual formation he has received at the seminary has been a great gift to him. ‘Growing in that discipline of prayer is, perhaps, the biggest thing I’ve received from the seminary,’ he says. ‘Being with God’s people is animated by the spiritual life.’
His favourite subject of study is grace, which he understands as ‘our participation in the very life of God and the Trinity that dwells within our soul.’
Grace, he says, ‘sheds light on the whole Christian mystery’ and what it means to live ‘as a son of God’.
Now in his fifth year as a seminarian, Rhys is currently doing his pastoral year at St Peter’s Parish in Epping. This time spent in the parish serving the needs of God’s people has helped him understand more about priestly fatherhood. ‘Seeing the way God’s people invite me into their lives has been incredibly humbling,’ he says, observing that it has allowed him to take on ‘a very privileged role that is greater than what I am … My presence reminds them of God—and not just God, but God as Our Father, who is present to us.’
Rhys hopes that by being truly present to God’s people in the parish he might ‘remind them that God is present to them, that God loves them, that God is their father, and that he is very interested in them and is calling them to be holy and to become saints.’ The ministerial priesthood, he believes, ‘is there to empower the priesthood of the baptised and their call to holiness and, through the sacraments, give them the necessary grace to become saints.’
‘That’s the biggest thing,’ Rhys says. ‘The people of God are teaching me what it means to be a father, a priestly father … A priest is not a priest for himself; he is a priest for God’s people.’
Rhys likens the image of the priestly father to that of the pelican piercing its side to feed its young—an image that appears on the seminary’s crest. A crucial element of seminary life, he says, is ‘learning how to suffer. Without that, I could never be a good priest, because the priesthood of Our Lord is shown on the cross; it’s at its fullest on the cross.’
Rhys is aware of how important the prayers of others are in his journey towards the priesthood. One day, in heaven, he hopes to ask God to show him who prayed for him, ‘because they’re supporting me, supporting all of us, supporting new vocations’. To those who pray faithfully for seminarians, he says, ‘I just want to say thank you, and even if you don’t see the results of your prayers immediately, they are certainly the petrol that keeps us going … I look forward to thanking you in heaven.’
