Bishop-elect recalls his journey to the priesthood
OTTAWA (CCN)
Bishop-elect Scott McCaig, named by Pope Francis April 8 to head the Military Ordinariate of Canada, traces the beginning of his priestly vocation to a glimpse of a road sign.
Bishop-elect McCaig, the Superior General of the Companions of the Cross since 2006, was then 13 and travelling by car on vacation with his parents. He saw a sign showing a picture of the crucified Christ with the caption, “Dare to be a priest like me.”
“It pierced me to the heart in a way I could not explain,” he said. “At that time, I was religiously very ignorant. I could not have told you the difference between Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed, or any other religious figure.”
Though he discovered later this was part of former MP Father Sean O’Sullivan’s advertising campaign, he set this religious experience aside because he had “no vocabulary for it” and “never told a soul about it.”
His journey to the Catholic faith began years later with a “significant existential crisis” while he was attending university in Kamloops, B.C. He was asking all the big questions about life, and even dropped courses to pursue the answers. “I wanted to live in integrity, in honesty,” he said. “If there is no God, then fine, I can move on with my life. If there is, I had best be taking it seriously.”
The questions he pursued were threefold, he said: does God exist, is Christ who He claims to be, and if He is, where do I find Him.
In addition to reading, he visited many churches and got to know many pastors from a range of denominations who were in their own way deeply faithful and admirable people, “Yet they disagreed on some extremely important matters.” He was also dating a very devout Catholic woman who exposed him to the Catholic Church.
He began to see the differences among the faiths, but was reminded of St. Paul’s saying there was one faith, one church, and one baptism. “It was a moment of real trial.”
It was a study of the early Church Fathers that convinced him to enter the Catholic Church in April 1987. He also found himself moved by the revelations of Fatima, Lourdes, and St. Faustina’s Divine Mercy. He read about the life of St. Padre Pio and his miracles and realized “miracles aren’t medieval myths, they are real and they are here today.” The example and authenticity of St. Pope John Paul II attracted him.
The next year he spent in youth ministry with NET Ministries U.S.A. that he said grounded him in faith, prayer, service, and outreach. He fully expected to return to B.C. to finish his studies and marry the young lady he had met in Kamloops once the year was up.
“But God had different plans,” he said. “Already the seed of a vocation had been growing in me. It was just burning in my heart more and more and more. Eventually I came to a place where I could no longer ignore it.”
Enter Father Bob Bedard, the founder of the Companions of the Cross, a 30-year-old order of priests founded in Ottawa.
While travelling with NET, he met Father Bedard at a charismatic conference at Notre Dame Cathedral.
“At that time I thought I had no interest in a vocation, but we had heard about him,” he said. “I knew he was beginning a new community in Ottawa, and we were very excited about that. So he took four of us Canadians, who had been on NET that year, out for beer and pizza with a few of his seminarians.”
“Lo and behold, three out of four of us ended up Companions of the Cross,” Bishop-elect McCaig said.
The turning point in his decision to answer the call to the priesthood came while he was in St. Andrew’s Cathedral in Victoria, B.C., praying in front of the tabernacle and acknowledging the Lord might be calling him.
“I basically said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ he said, “but I left the door open just a crack.”
“I told him, ‘If You really, really want me to be a priest, then I need You to speak to me in a way I will really understand,’ and I left it there. I got up, walked to the back of church, flipped open copy of <ct:Italic>The B.C. Catholic<ct:> newspaper, and there right in front of me, a full-page spread of that same campaign I’d seen 10 years earlier. There was the crucified Christ and the words ‘Dare to be a priest like Me.'”
“Within weeks I was visiting Father Bedard in Ottawa, and within a few months I had moved to Ottawa and become an applicant to Companions of the Cross.”
Ordained to the priesthood in 1995, Bishop-elect McCaig has served as an associate pastor, a hospital chaplain, and a parish administrator. He became the director of formation in 2000, and spent the next six years developing the order’s present formation program. In 2006 he was elected General Superior, and re-elected in 2012.
He describes his call to the episcopacy and the challenge of the military ordinariate as a “poignant moment.”
“I’ve poured my life into the development of the Companions of the Cross, my whole priesthood, and now the Lord is giving me a new challenge, knowing, however, I am always a Companion. it’s still my spiritual family, but I have a new apostolate, a new mission given to me by the Lord through the Holy Father, and I take it up with a lot of enthusiasm. I’m very much looking forward to it.”
Bishop-elect McCaig said he has already met and known a number of military chaplains and found them impressive. He was raised with a deep respect for the military, and many of his family members over the generations have served, including in both world wars.
“It’s a crucial necessity to support the troops and support those protecting our freedoms and upholding human dignity,” he said. He recognizes the ordinariate, like many dioceses, finds it challenging to find men with vocations and bringing them into ministry.
Pope Francis may have picked the right man for the job of fostering vocations. Since Father Bedard’s death in 2011, the Companions of the Cross has grown dramatically. By next fall there will be a total of 27 seminarians. The order boasts 40 priests and now two bishops, including Auxiliary Bishop Christian Riesbeck of Ottawa two years ago.
The bishop-elect takes no credit for the order’s flourishing. “One cannot help but wonder how busy Father Bob is in heaven,” he said.
Bishop-elect Scott McCaig will be ordained in Notre Dame Cathedral on May 31, the Feast of the Visitation.
