How often does that happen?!
From CNA:
Peyton and Connor Plessala are brothers from Mobile, Alabama. They’re 18 months— one school grade— apart.
Despite the occasional competitiveness and squabbles that many brothers experience growing up, they’ve always been best buds.
“We’re closer than best friends,” Connor, 25, told CNA.
As young men— in grade school, high school, college— much of their lives centered around the things you might expect: academics, extracurriculars, friends, girlfriends, and sports.
There are many paths the two young men could have chosen for their lives, but ultimately, last month, they arrived at the same place— lying face down in front of the altar, giving their lives over in service to God and the Catholic Church.
The brothers were both ordained to the priesthood May 30 at Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in Mobile— in a private Mass, because of the pandemic.
“For whatever reason, God chose to call us and he did. And we were just fortunate enough to have had the foundations from both our parents and our education to hear it and then to say yes,” Peyton told CNA.
Peyton, 27, says he is most excited to begin helping out with Catholic schools and education, and also to begin hearing confessions.
“You spend so much time in seminary preparing to be effective one day. You spend so much time in seminary talking about plans and dreams and hopes and stuff that you’ll do one day in this hypothetical future…now it’s here. And so I can’t wait to begin.”
What prompted their twin vocations?
Peyton told CNA that despite going to Catholic schools and getting the “vocation talk” every year, neither of them had ever really considered the priesthood as an option for their lives.
That is, until early in 2011, when the brothers took a trip with their classmates to Washington, D.C. for the March for Life, the nation’s largest annual pro-life gathering in the U.S.
The chaperone for their group from McGill-Toolen Catholic High School was a new priest, fresh out of seminary, whose enthusiasm and joy made an impression on the brothers.
Further proof that “the best advertisement for the priesthood is a happy priest.”
As for the parents:
What’s the key to becoming parents of two priests?
“All we did was to get out of the way of the Holy Spirit,” Dr. Deneen Plessala smiled and said.
Amen.
