Father Elder A. Maldonado was the first of nine Arlington diocese deacons ordained to the priesthood by Bishop Michael F. Burbidge. Due to a delay of his visa to return to the U.S., Father Maldonado was ordained May 27 at the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception at the Pontifical North American College in Rome.
Father Maldonado’s journey to the priesthood was not a straightforward one. Born Sept. 8, 1985, in Comayagua, Honduras, he was baptized as an infant and grew up praying the rosary with his mother. When he left his parents’ house in his teens, he stopped attending Mass and fell away from the faith.
But God was not finished with him. Not long after he began dating at 16, he began to consider the vocation of marriage, and the call to the priesthood soon followed. Since he was in a relationship at the time, he tried to distract himself from the call.
“I tried to cover it up with friends and things, and since I wasn’t practicing my faith, it was easy to cover up the thought. But I could never be happy until I made the decision to join seminary,” he said.
In 2005, he moved to the U.S. During his late teens and early 20s, he continued to search for happiness but could not find it in the secular world. When he was 22, a friend invited him to Mass in the Arlington diocese. That one invitation, he said, prompted his faith journey to truly begin.
Four years after he returned to Mass and the sacraments, he finally acted on God’s call and entered the seminary at age 26. Part of his decision resulted from witnessing the example of priests in the Arlington diocese. “Seeing examples in the diocese of good priests pushed me to seminary,” he said.
Similar to his reversion story, Father Maldonado’s seminary journey was remarkable. Beginning in 2015, he spent five years studying at the Universidad San Dámaso in Madrid, Spain. Just before he finished his bachelor’s degree in theology, he received the call from Bishop Michael F. Burbidge in 2021 to spend his remaining two and a half years studying in Rome. Last summer, he was assigned to serve at his childhood parish, St. Francis of Assisi Church in Comayagua, Honduras.
During his first year of the priesthood, Father Maldonado looks forward to celebrating the sacraments and “doing the will of God.”
With a deep desire to become a saint, he said, “the priesthood is the coronation of that journey with God.”
