Igniting a path to Priesthood

Seminarian Dylan House

Dylan House looked all set for a career in coding until he threw logs on a fire…and stoked a different fire instead.

He was a good fit for the “Generation Z” demographic, those born between 1997 and 2012 who were as well-versed in computer speak as those from earlier times would have been in Shakespeare or Yeats’s verses.

A Queanbeyan boy, Dylan, did well at Canberra’s Marist College, where he found the IT classes “really excited me the most”. He got a good enough ATAR to enter the Australian National University and pursued software engineering, graduating in 2023.

After uni, he obtained a much sought-after graduate position at KPMG, one of our “big four” accounting firms. He was a technology consultant at KPMG, and a lucrative career in bytes and binary code was his reason for taking the job.

Except he didn’t take it.

“I quite enjoyed my time there [at KPMG]”, he said. “I built a lot of relationships with colleagues that helped me and gave me a lot of confidence and mentorship.”

“But I started feeling a call to serve in the Church more, and there were many opportunities at my local parish at St Gregory’s, Queanbeyan. We needed a new acolyte. At that point, I had also been on the parish council for a little while. I put my hand up [to be an acolyte] and decided to get involved in that liturgical way.

“Once I started serving, I felt a call in my heart that this might be something I must take seriously…about the priesthood.

“As a child, I had felt a calling as well, but I kind of neglected that for various reasons.

“Then, at that moment, it was just like a fire had been set off in my heart. And as I served more and more in my parish, it was like throwing more logs on the fire. Over time, they were turning into coal.

“I was really happy, and growing in my faith through that, through serving both God and God’s people.

“And so after discerning for over a year, I decided to step forward and speak with the Archbishop and the vocations director, Father Emil [Milat].

That step forward for Dylan led to a more significant step, to the front steps of the Seminary of the Good Shepherd in Sydney, where he started this year. He is one of three first-year students from the Archdiocese of Canberra and Goulburn and one of six overall at the seminary from the Archdiocese.

It’s very early days for him in discernment and reflection on the journey towards the priesthood.

“I’ve now been in the seminary for a little while [and] it’s definitely affirmed the calling”, he said. “I am very content with where things are going. God willing, I’ll persevere.

“But I’ll need the prayers of the whole Archdiocese to help me with that.

“But I’m also praying for everyone”, the seminarian said.