Fr David Vard Personal Profile
Fr David Vard represents a face of the Church that is not often seen in the western world today: that of a young man’s. Rarer still is the face of a young priest. While youth Catholicism has its vibrant strongholds around the country, it is yet to bear much fruit on the vocations front. In Fr Vard, we’re offered a glimpse of the future.
A young man with a thoroughly relatable experience of Irish adolescence not long behind him, Fr Vard spoke to The Irish Catholic about the making of a priest in modern Ireland:
“I’m from Newbridge in County Kildare. I suppose I grew up in a typical Irish, Catholic family. As in, I was baptised, I made my first Holy Communion, and did my Confirmation and that was really it. After Confirmation, I didn’t really want anything else to do with the Church. I was quite happy not to darken the door again. And then when I got to transition year, I made a promise to myself to say “yes” to everything that came along and that involved then the principal of my school, the Christian Brothers in Newbridge, he asked myself and another of my classmates if we would go to Lourdes, to represent the school on the parish pilgrimage. I reluctantly went along on the pilgrimage and that really opened my eyes to the life of Faith, I suppose,” he shares.
Experience
The experience of a nominally Catholic youth is a ubiquitous one for Irish youths growing up in the quickly receding shadow of a predominantly Catholic Ireland. They are exposed to just enough Faith to raise questions, and just too little to answer them. Fr Vard was presented with an opportunity in Lourdes to deepen his understanding of the Church as it was, rather than as he thought it was.
“One of the stand out experiences was having a conversation with the parish priest who came along on the pilgrimage….We started asking him questions that I suppose, at the age of 16 you always wanted to ask a priest, but you might have been too afraid to. Like, you know, did he ever want to have a family? Did he ever want to get married? Had he ever a girlfriend? How much money do you make? It was all those questions really, but they really opened my eyes to the priest as a normal person.”
Coming to see the figure of the priest as “normal” proved a transformative experience, one which Fr Vard is keen to share with other young people in the position he found himself in back then.
Path
This started Fr Vard down the path he finds himself on now, but it didn’t just happen: “Going to Mass every day and beginning to understand, “Actually, what does the Church believe?” and, “Maybe the Church isn’t this big, bad institution that I always thought it was”, the institution that I grew up hearing about in the media.”” He had a lot of misunderstandings to work out before entertaining the priesthood, and he had a relationship to develop. It was this filial relationship with God which proved the decisive point in transforming his conversion into a vocation.
“I suppose it really started with, “I am a beloved child of God”. Knowing that. And also knowing that, you know, my mother always said to us growing up that, “What’s for you will not pass you.” Really, in my Faith, believing that God has a plan for each of us. It’s up to us then, to discover that plan, and discern that plan, and that question that came to me in Lourdes didn’t leave me and this was over a year. “David, maybe you could be a priest.””
The road to priesthood was not without its bumps, however, just as no vocational road is ever straightforward. Speaking of his imminent entry to the seminary, he said, “This was at the time of the Dublin report, the Ferns report, the Cloyne report, all these reports were coming out that the priests weren’t good people.”
But the nature of Faith is that it overcomes, and God provided what Fr Vard needed in order to be convinced, “And yet God was putting in front of me priests from my parish and nearby parishes of my diocese who were good priests, who I developed a relationship with, and they were really good spiritual fathers to me. God was saying, “Listen, this is where I want you to go,” he remembers.
Ministry
A few years into his ministry with the Church, Fr Vard reflects on how best he can draw people like himself back into the Church:
“I know, especially dealing with people my age, I know the gripes they have with the Church, because I had those gripes….And, you know, I don’t want to be a reflection of what they think the Church is; I want to actually be what the Church is and try my best to be Christ-like.”
For him, it all comes back to the relationship at the heart of it all, “If someone comes away from one of my Masses or if someone comes away from talking to me, and if they feel, you know, “He thinks that I’m a beloved child of God,” that’s fantastic.”
“I’m also a chaplain to a hospital here in Portlaoise and sometimes I’d come to a person in a bed and they’d say, “Oh, would you send me a real priest?” There’s funny stuff like that as well,” he laughs.
Fr Vard is more than ready to love the Church as he’s found it, but it may be a while before the Church grows accustomed to the youthful face he presents.