This June, Deacon David Witherow will be ordained to the priesthood at the parish he attended as a child, Holy Trinity Church in Gainesville.
“I would never have thought growing up I’d be ordained at that church,” he said.
Born Aug. 18, 1993, he grew up in Virginia and was homeschooled with his seven siblings — six brothers and a sister.
For the first decade of his life, he was raised Presbyterian. When an associate pastor from their church became Catholic, his witness planted the seeds of faith for Deacon Witherow’s parents.
“My family was really close with (the associate pastor) and his family and so that started a conversation with my dad that spanned many years before my parents decided that it was time.”
In middle school, he entered the Catholic Church with the rest of his family and quickly built a new routine with weekly Mass and monthly confession.
“The faith just became very normal in our life very quickly,” he said. “It was an intense transition, but it was one that brought a lot of grace with it.”
As a child, he said he didn’t totally understand the significance of the change or the theology.
“I was very happy because we went from a two-hour service to a one-hour,” he said with a laugh. “A lot of that exploration of the faith came along later down the line.”
In high school, he began to develop a personal relationship with the faith. After he got his driver’s license, he would drive to adoration periodically to spend time with the Blessed Sacrament. He continued the habit through high school and college at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kan.
“The more time that I spent in front of the Blessed Sacrament and just praying and making space for that silence in my life,” he said, “the more I realized how consistently the question of the priesthood kept coming up in prayer.”
He graduated college in 2014 with a bachelor’s in theology and worked for two years at the Newman Center at Wichita State University while he continued to discern.
“I basically came to the conclusion that this question of the priesthood isn’t going away,” he said. “It seemed like the right place to answer this question … was seminary.”
He entered Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Md., in 2016. He was ordained a transitional deacon April 23, 2022.
After ordination to the priesthood, he will be assigned as parochial vicar of Holy Family Church in Dale City.
After preparing for so long, he’s “really looking forward to just resting in the reality of the fact that I am a priest of Jesus Christ,” he said. “For now and the rest of my life, I’ll be an instrument of grace for people. No longer discerning, no longer seeking for my vocation. Now just seeing how it is God wants me to live as he has called me to live.”
Bartlett can be reached at [email protected].
