Kingsville’s Newman Center is wellspring for vocations

Twenty-one-year-old Luis Lozano is discerning the priesthood at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. He is one of many students at the St. Thomas Aquinas Chapel & Newman Center who are considering religious life. Four young men have already entered seminary studies, three for the Diocese of Corpus Christi and one for the Diocese of Fort Worth.

Luisa Buttler for South Texas Catholic
 

The college years are stereotypically a time of discovery – discovery ranging from new friends, new viewpoints, new career options or even a new moral code. For a select few students at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, their time on campus solidified their discovery of a calling from God to a vocation of religious life or ordained life as a priest and the St. Thomas Aquinas Newman Center & Chapel at Texas A&M-Kingsville is the hub for much of that discernment.

In the last two years, three young men out of the Kingsville Newman Center have become seminarians for the Diocese of Corpus Christi—Michael Golla, Raymond Pendleton and Thomas Swierc. A fourth student, Eric Flores, has joined the seminary for the Diocese of Fort Worth. Other students are discerning the priesthood or consecrated life as a religious sister.

“A home away from home,” is how Nina Joiner, Director of Campus Ministry at the Kingsville Newman Center, describes the place she has worked at for 13 years.

“The center provides a place for students to feel at home,” Joiner said. 

The St. Thomas Aquinas Newman Center & Chapel opened in 2013. The chapel seats 300, a multipurpose meeting space adjoining the chapel is a hub for students and next-door the Newman student dorm, provides living accommodations for 278 students. Activities are plenty at the Newman Center. There is Scripture class, dances after home football games, movie nights and a computer lab with free printing. 

And then there is food. Nobody who visits the Newman Center goes hungry. There is free-access fridge with sandwich fixings, plus a kitchen to cook in. On Thursdays during the school year, the Newman Center, with the help of neighboring Kingsville parishes, serves a hot casserole lunch for up to 800 Javelina students, faculty and staff. During Thanksgiving, more than 1,200 people came for lunch.

“I always felt I might have been called to religious life, but I didn’t really accept that idea until my freshman year of college, while I was at community college” Swierc said, a College Station native who attended Texas A&M-Kingsville from 2013-2015 to study engineering and computer science. 

“I felt like there was something lacking in my prayer life, so I started by taking on an hour of weekly adoration at my parish and started singing with the church choir. Once I transferred to A&M-Kingsville, that same feeling and desire was there, complemented with my desire to help people, so I volunteered at the Newman Center, taking on different projects. I deepened my faith further by attending daily Mass at the chapel, and Mass on weekend, and then weekly holy hour.”

The 24-year-old just finished his second year of seminary at Holy Trinity Seminary in Irving, Texas.

Michael Golla

Raymond Pendleton

Thomas Swierc

“Everyone at the Newman Center was supportive of whatever God’s call was for me,” Swierc said. “The priest when I was there, Father Peter Stanley, was very supportive. In fact, the first time he looked at me, he told me he knew I was in discernment. Later, during a passionate and intense moment of my faith, he helped me decide if I should leave school a year early for seminary. He helped me realize the intense burning in my heart was there to stay and I eventually told him ‘Father, pack me up. I am ready to go.’”

Pendleton, a Benavides, Texas native, completed his second year at Holy Trinity Seminary and is assigned to St. Pius X Parish in Corpus Christi for the summer months. 

While at Texas A&M-Kingsville he was assigned to do an internship at the St. Thomas Aquinas Chapel. His duties were to clean the Chapel and prepare the sacristy for the liturgy. 

He soon found out that, in addition to the Mass, he enjoyed helping others. He decided to join the seminary while in his junior year.  

Golla graduated this past May from Texas A&M-Kingsville and is starting his studies at Theological College in Washington, D.C. this fall.

“I was a fallen away Catholic when I began to fall in love with the Mass at the Newman Center,” Golla, a former Marine, said. He said that while attending Texas A&M Kingsville he began to learn about the faith of his childhood. 

Luis Lozano is a 21 year old master’s student studying biology at Texas A&M-Kingsville. The Laredo native has a brilliant mind, Joiner said, and graduated Cum Laude in his undergraduate degree in biomedical science with a minor in chemistry in only three years. He has been discerning the priesthood for more than three years.

“When I first went to the vocations office at the Diocese of Corpus Christi, I was in my second year of college, and they didn’t tell me ‘no,’ they just said ‘not yet,’” Lozano said. “I had just come off a retreat, and they were afraid I was on a ‘retreat high’ but that retreat high has lasted three years now. I am still on that high.”

In Lozano’s final year of his undergraduate degree, he made two visits to Holy Cross Seminary, on the campus of Notre Dame. “Holy Cross provides the balance I am looking for, where they have priests that are professors—academic priests—who teach at the university,” Lozano said. “So I went there twice, once for a tour and once for the interview process, but again, they said I needed to wait.”

Lozano says, when it comes to his vocation, he has stopped making big plans, and has surrendered his future to what God has in store for him.

“What separated discernment from regular thought is the element of God. What does God want you to do? He has the best plan for you,” Lozano said.  “That’s why I’ve decided to stop making plans, because as best as I may try, my plans are shortsighted, and I can’t see God’s full picture for me.”

Lozano is expecting to graduate from Texas A&M-Kingsville with his master’s degree in May 2018.

“The Newman Center has taught me what it means to serve,” Lozano said. “I have always been a person who likes to be helpful, but being helpful and committing to service are two very different things. Service helps you find who you are and helps you find your vocation.”

Teresa Pendleton

Pendleton’s sister Teresa is also discerning religious life. She first attended Texas A&M-Kingsville in the fall of 2015 and first visited the Kingsville Newman Center during her senior year of high school, when she attended a vocations retreat at the Center. It was then she met Golla, who, at the time, was a Texas A&M-Kingsville student and a friend of her brother’s. 

“Michael is now one of my best friends, like one of my big brothers,” the 20-year-old education major said. “We have similar interests, including learning more about the Mass, the saints and just realizing there is so much more out there to learn. Michael also helped me to begin my discernment.”

Teresa Pendleton said she officially began to discern becoming a sister this past January.

“For a time, I thought I wanted to get married and have a family, but for the last year or so, I’ve had thoughts of a religious life, especially because I’ve spent more time around religious sisters and priests, and all these instances, they grow on you, and you fall in love with the idea of it,” she said. “I have fallen in love with this vocation like I would have fallen in love with a man. It really hit me, and opened my eyes and my heart to the thought of being a sister.”

Teresa Pendleton worked at the Newman Center as an intern during her freshman year, and is now the president of the Catholic Student Organization at Texas A&M-Kingsville. She also volunteers her time at the Newman Center by getting involved with Mass as a lector or extraordinary minister of Holy Communion.

“I go to the Newman Center pretty much every day,” Teresa Pendleton said. “If you put yourself around people who are about you, who actually mean it when they call you a friend, who aren’t afraid to ask why they haven’t seen you at Mass or ask to pray the rosary with you, it helps. These are the people I found at the Newman Center.”

“We are just normal kids,” Teresa Pendleton said. “We have bad semesters, drama in our personal life, but we are there for each other and we stick together. That’s how we express our thanks for what we have and to the one that gives us all these graces. I go to the Newman Center because that’s where I find love and peace, and isn’t that all what we want to feel? At the Newman Center, you will be served, and you will learn to serve and that sense of community leads to a wonderful, community life.”

Lozano is not sure how many other students at the Newman Center are in discernment, because sometimes the process is private and internal. What he and others do know is that there is something special about the Newman Center, and the people who work and serve there. The Newman Center gives these students an opportunity to become better versions of themselves —in whatever vocation lies ahead.

“The Newman Center is a place of peace,” Joiner said. “This is a place to think, where minds are not cluttered. People come here to worship, study, socialze—all in one place. This is a place where God is.”