Father Seán Connolly

The summer before he began Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx, Seán Connolly began accompanying his now-late paternal grandfather Peter Connolly to Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament on Thursdays and to Sunday Mass at St. Augustine Church in Ossining.

“That’s really where the seed of my vocation was planted, just witnessing the faith of my grandfather,” who at the time was recently widowed, Father Connolly recalled. “He was someone who I respected so much. He would struggle to kneel, struggle to genuflect, but would always do it.

“His love of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament was passed on to me by his example,” as was the Rosary, he said.

Father Connolly also remembers watching his grandfather in the vestibule “stand up on one of the kneelers and reach across just to kiss and touch the statue of the foot of our Lord.”

“The first time in my life I was attending the Sunday Mass regularly was when I would accompany my grandfather,” he said. Father Connolly will offer his First Mass on his grandfather’s behalf.

Grounded in that good example, Seán then entered Fordham Prep “wanting to make full use of its Catholic identity.”

There he was blessed to befriend a “good, holy, Jesuit priest, Father Thomas Benz.” Then, Father Connolly’s grandfather died and Father Benz was transferred.

Contemplating the mystery that called him to the priesthood, Father Connolly believes “there definitely have been grace-filled moments in my life where God has protected my vocation.”

After high school, he encountered some who did not value the importance of Catholic identity.

“So much of my generation, so many of my peers, seem to have this inherent skepticism or cynicism about authority or about the values of yesterday.

“I did not. To me, Catholic culture was liberating, rather than constraining. The world shows us all the ways one can fall. The Church shows us the only one way there is to stand. I trusted the teachings of the Church. I was inspired.”

While high school was a conversion of the heart, college, he said, was an intellectual conversion, a conversion of the mind. He cites the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Lives of the Saints as particularly instrumental in that regard.

The youngest of two sons of Kevin and Francesa Connolly, and brother of Kevin, he was raised by loving parents, he said, in St. Augustine’s. Before Fordham Prep, he attended the government schools in Ossining.

“When I was introduced to the Catholic faith in a really substantive way, it captured my imagination, my heart, my intellect, and it has never faded.”

Seán then began attending daily Mass and receiving the sacrament of reconciliation weekly. That deeper awakening in the faith became apparent his sophomore year at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., where he received a bachelor’s degree in the classics before entering St. Joseph’s Seminary in Dunwoodie.

Apostolic assignments at the seminary included teaching parish religious education at St. Vito’s, Mamaroneck; pastoral work at Calvary Hospital, the Bronx and guiding retreat sessions at Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains.

Summer parish assignments were at St. Raymond’s, the Bronx and St. Mary’s, Fishkill. He concedes the call to the priesthood didn’t come “like a clap of thunder,” rather through the clarity “that true happiness for me could never be attained unless there was a total consecration of myself to God.”

Father Seán Connolly will celebrate his First Mass Sunday, May 24 at noon at St. Augustine’s Church in Ossining. The homilist will be Father William Elder, judicial vicar of the Interdiocesan Appellate Tribunal of the Province of New York and professor of canon law at St. Joseph’s Seminary.