Father Paul Byron relates that he was seven years old in 1928 when he announced to his Irish Catholic family in Albany, NY, that he was going to be a priest. That was welcome news. “The Church was the center of our lives and our neighborhood,” Father Byron recalled. “I don’t think I met a Protestant until I was 14.” His uncle was a priest, and he had a particular admiration for his pastor, “a man of great intellect and determination, and a student of the liturgy.”Father Byron says he nev-er once doubted that the priesthood was where he was meant to be,but that he only realized with time the many joys his vocation would bring.

But the young man’s road to the priest-hood took an unexpected turn. After one year in an especially strict seminary, he accumulated enough demerits for small rule infrac-tions, mostly talking during times of mandatory silence, that he was suspended. His influential family stormed the chancery to get him transferred to another seminary, but their Catholic connections weren’t enough to persuade the local Bishop.

His pastor, however, came to the rescue. He had a friend who was a Bishop, the Most Reverend Eugene J. McGuinness, Bishop of Raleigh. A meeting was arranged. The North Carolina Bishop accepted the young man on the spot and arranged for the rest of his seminary training. “I learned later,” Father Byron recalls, “that my pastor had written Bishop McGuinness a personal check for $10,000 for the missions in North Carolina. So I wound up in the Diocese of Raleigh, which was unlike anything I had ever known about the Catholic Church.

“It was so different from what I’d expected in the priesthood, and the way I got here was so funny,” Father Byron says today with a grin, “that I really felt it had to be God’s Will.” Father Byron began his priesthood in Delco, in Bishop Vincent S. Waters’ “apostolate,” traveling far and wide, knocking on doors with the goal of making “every North Carolinian a Catholic.” His first parish was in Asheboro,“seventy-two souls in three counties,” followed by stints in Morehead City, Durham and Charlotte, where he was the first pastor of St. Gabriel Parish. “I still have friends there,” he says, “and had a chance to preach at the 50th anniversary in a vast church that didn’t exist when I was there.”

Father Byron says he never once doubted that the priesthood was where he was meant to be,but that he only realized with time the many joys his vocation would bring. “When I was young,” he recalls, “much of my motivation was devotional. I wanted to be the one on the altar, doing that thing that only priests could do. And that still thrills me, ministering in the liturgical and sacramental life of the people. But gradually I also learned the joy of being a pastor, a guide for people’s souls. Later, in the 1960s, my friend Father Charlie Mulholland introduced me to and encouraged me to be involved in peace and social justice issues.” Father Byron also started the first Cursillo in North Carolina, a movement which would be a tremendous spiritual success. “At the very first Cursillo,” he remembers, “we invited a group from Baltimore to join us. One of those who came was a likeable young Monsignor F. Joseph Gossman.”

Ordained now for 63 years, Father Byron looks back on a journey with unexpected, unsought twists and turns, but says, “I always knew that God would enable me because it was His Will that directed the path."

reprinted from NC Catholics Magazine, July 2009