FIFTY six-year-old Limerick city native David Casey, the only priest ordained in the Limerick Diocese this year, is looking at his ministry and the challenges facing the Church as an opportunity for a “new beginning”.
Fr Casey was ordained by Bishop Brendan Leahy at St John’s Cathedral last Saturday to fulfil a call he got as a child but put to one side until he felt the time was right. Son of the late Noel and Teresa Casey from O’Connell Avenue, he said he regards his ordination at the age of 56 as more of a “slow response” than a late vocation.
“I did feel this call as a young man but I put it aside. I had a friend who gave the homily at my first Mass and he spoke about the Pre-Vatican II approach to priesthood when ordination was seen as an ‘arrival’ but it is now looked at as more of a launch, an entry into a ministry of service,” Fr David commented.
“There is a great sense of fulfilment, having put it off for so long and then having answered the question. This is the way for me,” he added.
One of six children, four brothers and one sister, David worked in real estate and in the antique trade before planting the seeds of his future priesthood back in the 1990s when he studied Philosophy and Theology and did a Masters in Spirituality at the Milltown Institute; graduating with his Masters in 1997.
He responded to ‘the call’ over four years ago when he began his studies for the priesthood at The Pontifical Beda College in Rome, which was founded in 1852 to form older men and often convert clergymen for Catholic priesthood.
Fr David says he fully appreciates the challenges facing the Church but that they present an opportunity to build again.
“I am definitely making a new beginning, coming into ministry at this hour of my life. It is also a time of new and much needed beginning for the Church and we are seeing the seeds of that being sown,” he said.
