I’m pleased to announce that Eli McFadden from St. Paul in Flowood has been accepted as a seminarian and will begin his formation in August 2025 at St. Joseph Seminary College in Covington, Louisiana. Eli is a senior at Northwest Rankin High School and is a member of the youth group at St. Paul. He has also participated in two discernment groups held for high schoolers in the Jackson area in the past year. Eli’s parents, Robert and Mandy, have been very supportive and I’d like to thank them for their collaboration and the trust they put in me to take Eli through the application process. We have two more applications in process for the fall, please keep those men in your prayers as well.

Eli will be entering into the ‘propaedeutic stage’ of formation. This is that newer stage of formation that the US Bishops introduced a couple of years ago. We’ve already had three of our seminarians go through this intensive preparatory stage of formation. Wilson Locke, Francisco Maldonado and Joe Pearson all participated in this stage and they all had a positive experience.
The point of this stage is to help the men build up the habits they’ll need to live life in the seminary and the parish well without being overburdened by philosophy and theology classes. It was observed over the years that academics were becoming an out-sized part of the discernment process, and so the propaedeutic stage puts the focus squarely on building up human virtues and fostering the spiritual life of the candidate before they get too deep into the academic dimension of formation.

All of our current seminarians just completed their spring evaluations. Each year Bishop Kopacz and I drive down to Notre Dame Seminary and St. Joseph Seminary to sit for these evaluations. Father Tristan Stovall also comes down to support our guys and visit with them. The seminarians provide their own self-assessment, and the formation faculty provide their own feedback to the man and to Bishop and myself as their primary formators. This is also a great time of fraternity for all of us. It is special for the seminarians to get to spend time with the Bishop, and we take them out for a nice dinner so they can relax after their evaluations and just visit with me, Father Tristan and the Bishop.

I’m very proud of our group of men and grateful to the Lord for their openness to their formation. They are all doing very well, and it is clear to me that they are all an asset to their respective communities.
This summer four of our men will be on parish assignment in the diocese. Will Foggo and Francisco Maldonado will be on assignment at St. Elizabeth Clarksdale; and Grayson Foley will be on assignment at St. John Oxford. I would especially like to thank Father Raju at St. Elizabeth and Father Mark Shoffner at St. John for taking on this responsibility. Joe Pearson will be arriving at Our Lady of Victories in Cleveland just after Independence Day. Joe will be participating in the Institute for Priestly Formation (IPF) in Omaha, Nebraska up until that point, but IPF ends at the beginning of July so we wanted to fit in a shorter parish experience following the end of the program. Thanks to Father Kent Bowlds for his openness to this.
I am confident that these men will be assets to the parishes they are a part of for the summer, just as they are assets to their seminary communities throughout the academic year.

Father Nick Adam, vocation director