from Projo.com...
Among the prayers that the Rev. Marcel Taillon offers during his celebration of Mass this day before Thanksgiving is one common during Catholic services for more vocations. It is a prayer he often heard as a young man, when he enjoyed a promising lay career at CVS.
“When that petition would come up at Mass, it rocked me” –– in a disturbing way, says Father Taillon, 45, pastor of St. Thomas More Parish. He sits in his church rectory as he tells the story of his calling, which did not follow a traditional path.
His path led through the drugstore chain, where he had started work as a teenager and where in his 20s he was still happily employed –– making good money and enjoying a social life. He was traveling the country for CVS, part of a 1980s team that was assisting company pharmacists’ often difficult transition to computers. His strength was in people skills: communicating, listening, problem-solving.
“I loved CVS,” he says. “I loved my job. I loved my friends. I loved it all. I was really happy, but I wasn’t fulfilled.”
And that was one problem he couldn’t solve. He felt incomplete: a feeling, he would later discover, shared by other eventual priests. “It’s one of the threads that runs through everybody’s different story: You’re not sure what it is, but you can feel something’s missing.”
Father Taillon had been a devout Catholic since he was a child, and during his teenage years and into his 20s, lay people, along with some clergy, sometimes remarked that he would make a good priest. The possibility both intrigued and frightened him. A vocation might fulfill him, but his lay life was comfortable.
So he adopted an avoidant mentality.
“I ignored it pretty well, I think, for a while,” he says. “I put all my eggs in the corporate basket. I wanted to do a good job. And my job at CVS really affected people’s lives. They needed support.”
Mass-time prayers and Sunday sermons about callings, he says, kept resurrecting his dilemma. He was increasingly conflicted: a young man caught between a life he enjoyed and a life, not easily achieved, that might hold more for himself and others.
“It was spiritually uncomfortable, when I look back,” he says. “I wouldn’t have called it that then, but now I can put it together and see that obviously the Lord was calling. Very mysterious.”
One of three children of a forklift operator and a housewife, Father Taillon grew up in Woonsocket in a French-Canadian family where the rosary was prayed regularly. His mother took him to Mass every day and he was an altar boy, which brought him into contact with priests and a nun who would prove influential: Sister Maria, who belonged to a small and now-dwindling order, the Sister Servants of Our Lady, Queen of Clergy.
“She was an anchor in my spiritual life,” says Father Taillon. “Without being heavy-handed, she was always teaching me.”
After Catholic grammar school, the young Marcel entered Woonsocket High School, class of 1983. He was a class officer. He dated. At 16, he took a part-time job at CVS. He had no desire to become a priest, despite what others thought –– to Marcel’s annoyance.
“In high school, I resented it when people told me I should be a priest. I didn’t like it at all. I actually thought it was terrible.” He thought he would get a good-paying job, marry and have children, like most of his friends.
Marcel worked at CVS while attending Southern New Hampshire University, which he left shortly before graduation to join the Woonsocket-based corporation full-time. He was returning from a trip to Newark three days before Easter in the late 1980s when he decided to visit his parish church, St. Ann, in Woonsocket.
“It was Holy Thursday,” he says. “The churches are open, the Eucharist is out, and that’s the day that we believe that Jesus instituted the Eucharist and the priesthood.”
A nun was praying. Light from the sanctuary cast a glow.
Thoughts of joining the priesthood settled on him again, this time decisively.
All right, he thought, I’m going to try this.
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