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An out of the ordinary figure played an influential role in leading Father Gabriel Joseph Kyte, C.F.R., to the priesthood—his hockey coach.
“We’d be away at a hockey tournament and on Saturday night he’d get the Catholic boys together and we’d go to Mass,” Father Kyte recalled. “So I thought, ‘My hockey coach thinks this is important’!”
Father Kyte, 36, comes from Canada, which should give you some idea of just how authoritative a hockey coach was to him. But it wasn’t as if he hadn’t already been giving the priesthood some thought. Father Kyte says he first started thinking about becoming a priest when he was about seven years old. He said his parents went to Mass fairly regularly but weren’t particularly devout.
Other than that he lived a pretty standard life for a boy growing up in Eastern Ontario just across the St. Lawrence River from upstate New York. He played hockey, but he also played basketball and other sports, loved mountain biking and was in a rock and roll band as a teen. He hung out with friends, dated girls and admits he liked to drink with his buddies too. Meanwhile that quiet nudging continued.
One day he told his girlfriend of his secret desire. She “was stunned,” he recalled. His parents didn’t take it any better.
“It didn’t go over well,” he said. “It was too much. They couldn’t make sense of it.”
Eventually he hit on an idea he considered a compromise. He decided to become a youth minister and enrolled at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick to study international development, thinking that it might be kind of a “middle ground” where he could devote part of his life to God and social justice, and still get to date and hang out with his buddies.
But the nudging didn’t go away. “I said, ‘Lord, give me one year on my own.’ I knew I was just putting off the inevitable. I knew what was on the horizon,” he said. During this time he would go to Mass pretty much every day, his fellow communicants usually three or four gray-haired ladies.
One day he finally surrendered it to God.
“I said, ‘OK, Lord, I give my life to you.’ I didn’t want to live a double life anymore,” he said.
He began to feel drawn more specifically to a religious life. “I was inspired by life of St. Francis,” he said. “I wanted to make the vows of poverty and chastity. I wanted to follow Jesus like St. Francis did, in a radical way.” He had met some Franciscan Friars of the Renewal and looked them up on the Internet. They invited him to visit them in New York. He was impressed and entered St. Joseph’s Friary in Harlem in 2005.
“From the time I left the driveway at home for the flight to New York, there was this peace,” he said.
His parents, Robert and Pauline, have since come around. After meet his new Franciscan brothers, they discovered that aside from their religious vocations and luxuriant beards, they were regular guys. His parents plan to be at his ordination, and they are as excited as he is.
With his ordination only days away, he looks back on his journey to the priesthood with tremendous gratitude.
“There’s been twists and turns in the road but I’ve just been so grateful,” he said. “It’s like arriving at a goal I’ve been working toward for 17 years.”
Father Kyte’s first Mass will be at St. Crispin’s Friary, St. Adalbert Church, the Bronx, Sunday, May 25 at 3:30 p.m. The homilist will be Father Luke Mary Fletcher, C.F.R., director of seminarians for the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal.
