By Thea Jarvis

Approximately 40 percent of those now studying for the priesthood for his archdiocese are North Georgia natives or transplants.

In contrast to past archdiocesan history, when vocations came from other parts of the U.S. and especially from Ireland, the current trend shows a significant number of North Georgia residents among seminarians.

Growing numbers of men studying for the priesthood reflect a willingness of the community to support vocations through prayer and action, said Father Donald Kenny, who has directed vocations for the archdiocese since 1989. He is the first full-time vocations director in the history of the archdiocese.

“It’s a sign of the people’s faith, that the Holy Spirit is in some way blessing the archdiocese of Atlanta,” Father Kenny said. “If we pray for vocations, we will be rich in vocations. I have no doubt about it.”

North Georgia now has the second largest number of vocations to the priesthood in the country, proportionate to its Catholic population, according to his statistics. Projected Catholic growth means many more priests will be needed, Father Kenny said.

A total of 41 men – 26 Americans, 10 Irish, four Hispanics and one Vietnamese – are currently studying for priesthood for the archdiocese. This includes two former Episcopal priests now seeking ordination to the Roman Catholic priesthood.

Over the past year, 34 applicants were considered for admission to priestly study. Only 15 were accepted.

“We do not accept everybody, who comes our way,” Father Kenny pointed out. “We are not interested in quantity per se, but quality.”

Steve Siler, 25, is among the growing number of seminarians who call North Georgia home. Born and raised in Cincinnati, his parents moved to Atlanta during Siler’s senior year at the University of Notre Dame. An offer from the public accounting firm of Arthur Andersen & Co. completed the Atlanta connection and Siler adopted his new hometown with enthusiasm.

For eighteen months, he enjoyed a busy social life, successful career and comfortable salary. Eventually, however, he decided the corporate lifestyle didn’t satisfy his deeper needs.

“I was in the race towards Yuppiedome, but I didn’t have time to sell out,” he admitted. “It’s dangerous. You can get really wrapped up in it.”

Siler had considered the possibility of priesthood since sophomore year in college, where he carried a double major in accounting and theology.

“The itch was there,” he said, adding that his faith had blossomed at Notre Dame, had become “a valued part of my life.”

In Atlanta, he was able to express his faith in a strong community setting. After a round of parish-shopping, he had settled in at All Saints Church in Dunwoody, where he attended classes, helped with the youth group and took part in planning an adult education curriculum.

“I was enthused about the level of commitment, the life-giving nature of the parish,” Siler said. “I found a vitality in the Church of Atlanta” that nurtured the faith he had renewed at Notre Dame.

When he made the decision to apply for admission to the priesthood, he found, “It wasn’t difficult leaving the workaday world,” though his independence was understandably “hard to leave behind.”

Siler begins his second year of seminary this fall at St. Mary’s in Baltimore. This past summer, a sojourn with Father Dan Stack at his Cedartown Church of St. Bernadette was a refreshing experience of small town, rural parish life, he said.

While Siler was helping in Cedartown, fellow seminarian Dan Toof was doing yeoman’s duty at Grady Memorial Hospital. Like Siler, Toof had come to Atlanta after college. He had earned an accounting degree from the University of Nebraska.

It was then 1983 and employment in his chosen field was elusive, Toof found. He drove a taxi, set tile for a construction firm and managed a Marietta Burger King before getting serious about the priesthood.

A student of Catholic elementary and high schools, he had put aside the religion of his childhood before coming to Atlanta. But when a friend from his hometown of Columbus, Nebraska moved to North Georgia, Toof began the road back.

The two began attending Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Atlanta, and then Holy Family in Marietta, where the well-organized Ultreya group made a favorable impression.

“I like what they had, a strong sense of the community I had been missing,” Toof said. He made a Cursillo weekend in 1986 and underwent a major conversion.

“Something broke open in me,” he said. “The need for prayer really hit me hard.”

In the light of Cursillo, Toof saw his varied experiences as manifestations of God’s hand in his life. The thought of a religious vocation surfaced, but it seemed unrealistic, unattainable. Marriage and a family had always been his expectation.

“If You want me to be a priest, let me know,” he found himself praying.

During time in the chapel while helping at a subsequent Cursillo weekend, Toof felt a strong sense of God’s presence and a definite call to serve in the priesthood. He talked things over with Cursillo moderator Father Richard Kieran that day.

“Why don’t you try it?” Father Richard asked candidly. His encouragement put Toof over the edge.

While awaiting a response to his application for the priesthood, Toof remained active in the parish as an eucharistic minister, Ultreya leader and volunteer at St. Anthony’s night shelter.

“It was building,” he remembered. “More and more of my life was being focused on Christ than on what I was going to do for a living.”

Toof was 33 when he got the official nod and entered St. Meinrad School of Theology in Indiana. This fall marks his fourth in a six-year program.

“It’s harder for an older person” to make the transition to priestly formation, he said, pleased to be nearer the home stretch.

At 35, Greg Goolsby is Toof’s senior. This fall, he begins his third year at St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, where he has found late or second vocations to be not uncommon.

Goolsby grew up in metro Atlanta during years of rapid archdiocesan growth. He entered first grade at Saints Peter and Paul in 1961, the year the school opened. During his high school years, he and his family attended St. Patrick’s Church in Norcross, then serving all of Gwinnett County. With other Catholics, he founded the Neumann Club at Mercer University’s Atlanta campus before transferring to Jesuit-run Xavier University in Cincinnati to complete his undergraduate studies in history.

Goolsby remained an active, committed Catholic and after graduation entered the Jesuit novitiate, where he stayed for a year. Although a time of growth and reflection, Goolsby’s novitiate uncovered a stumbling block.

“I was not very obedient,” he says with a grin, remembering the conflict he saw in equating obedience to one’s superiors with obedience to God.

He returned to Atlanta and enrolled at Georgia State University, working full-time and studying for a law degree. When he passed the bar, he became a sole practitioner in a general practice that included wills, trusts, small business cases and academic counsel. More often than not, he was drawn to plaintiffs who struggled against the tide.

“It seemed much more worthwhile to me than being on the defense,” he said, “trying to enforce sometimes specious situations.”

He was disturbed by what he saw as a prevailing lack of ethics and a “poor sense of the human commitment, one to another.” Hoping to be part of the solution rather than what he called “a fix-it man,” he began rethinking a religious vocation.

“I felt when I left the Jesuits I had completed my investigation of what priesthood would mean to me,” Goolsby said. But he discovered the door had not closed. For a year, he prayed and received regular spiritual counsel from his friend, Father Steve Churchwell.

“God really prepares us. He speaks to us in gentle whispers,” he said, although “the din of our daily lives can drown that out.”

Although he told no one of his renewed interest in priesthood, he prayed a great deal about it. Eventually, he found people spontaneously approaching him on the subject – friends, co-workers, fellow parishioners, even an aunt who “called out of the blue.”

“I felt like I had been hit over the head with a hammer,” he laughed.

Goolsby joined the roster of candidates studying for priesthood in April, 1989. This summer, he worked at the Metropolitan Tribunal, which handles marriage cases for the archdiocese. He enjoyed the exposure to canon law and found it to be “a very positive time for me.”

He is enthusiastic about his calling and generous in his praise of the vocations director, Father Kenny, whom he considers “a model of what a priest should be. We couldn’t have a better or stronger model for priestly care.”

In his view, the archdiocese of Atlanta is “on the verge of an explosion” in which priests will be called on to serve ever increasing numbers of Catholics.

“What’s going to happen in the diocese is very exciting,” said Goolsby, who, with his brother seminarians, is happy to be part of it all.