‘Repair My Church’: A Priest’s 25 Years as a Deacon With St. Francis

National Catholic Register, 6 October 2026

To be ordained a deacon on the feast of St. Francis 25 years ago seemed an unintended blessing for a Church that would soon find itself in need of repair.

Twenty-five years ago this past Sunday, 40 of us from the Pontifical North American College in Rome were ordained deacons in St. Peter’s Basilica. It was the feast of St. Francis of Assisi. In our yearlong spiritual preparation, St. Francis had a prominent place — he remains the most famous deacon in the history of the Church. 

I don’t think that any of us were aware that it was the 775th anniversary of his death that year. But it means that our 25th anniversary is the 800th for the transitus of Francis, and there have been celebrations in Assisi and all over the world throughout the year. Pope Leo XIV has declared a special “Franciscan” jubilee for the occasion. 

Our ordination took place between two epoch-changing events. The first, just weeks before our ordination, was 9/11. It brought George Bush the Elder to the Vatican the same day that we were ordained. The second, just months later, was the eruption of the sexual abuse crisis, first in Boston in January 2002 and then with reverberations everywhere.

In 2001, Catholic spirits were riding high. It was the time of peak Pope John Paul, as it were, having concluded the triumph of the Great Jubilee — what he called the “hermeneutical key” to his epic pontificate. He had been to the Holy Land on a pilgrimage suffused with two millennia of history; he had been to Fatima, unlocking the hidden history of his life, the 20th century and the defeat of communism.

The 1990s opened with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The end of the evil empire in places such as Poland and Czechoslovakia could be counted among the most spiritually uplifting events in the entire history of the world.

In the Church, the 1990s were the most impressive magisterial decade in history, led by the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992) and the most consequential series of encyclicals ever published in such a short period: Redemptoris Missio(1990), Centesimus Annus (1991), Veritatis Splendor (1993), Evangelium Vitae(1995), Ut Unum Sint (1995) and Fides et Ratio (1998).

The World Youth Days of Denver (1993), Manila (1995), Paris (1997) and Rome (2000) breathed new energy into the New Evangelization. 

In 1995, John Paul addressed the United Nations in New York as “a witness to human dignity, a witness to hope, a witness to the conviction that the destiny of all nations lies in the hands of a merciful Providence,” predicting that the 21st century would bring a “new springtime of the human spirit.”

It seemed in 2001 that everything was in bloom. 

What then to make of the famous words spoken to St. Francis in the Church of San Damiano in Assisi?

“Go and repair my Church, which, as you can see, is falling into ruin,” a young Francis heard the crucifix speak to him. 

Taking Jesus at his word, he began repairing the fabric of that very church. In time, Francis would understand that it was the Church herself that needed reform and repair, leading to the foundation of the Franciscan order and a recommitment to live the Gospel as simply and literally as possible.

In 2001, the Church did not appear to be in urgent need of repair.

The first earthquake of 9/11 brought religion as a whole into disrepute. Was the lethal hatred of 9/11 the true face of religion? 

Or were the Rosary protests of Manila in 1986, or the processions of the Black Madonna by the Solidarność movement in Poland the true face of religion?

When Mother Teresa died in 1997, the whole world recognized her as the best of the human spirit, the Christian witness par excellence. 

What to say then about Osama bin Laden? Was his dark “gospel” the deeper reality?

The attacks of 9/11 fueled the rise of the new atheists, gifted and prolific authors who, like Christopher Hitchens, argued at book length that “God Is Not Great.”

That was a challenge to religion in general. In January 2002 came the second earthquake, a challenge to Catholicism in particular. 

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