Michael Furey, 29, is a little over a year from becoming a deacon, and talks about the quiet voice that called him.
Every Friday after morning Mass, Michael Furey walked across the road to a nursing home, praying as he went. In a small pouch around his neck, he carried Holy Communion for an elderly woman living with dementia.
“That was a really joyful moment to bring the Blessed Sacrament to the lady,” he says of his placement in Erewash Valley Parish. Asked whether he met Jesus in her too, he says yes. “Christ is definitely present in whoever you are going to see before you arrive.”
Michael is training to be a priest for the Diocese of Nottingham. If things go according to plan, he will be ordained a deacon on 18 December 2027, and a priest about six months later.
Faith first felt real for Michael at Mass with his grandparents at St Joseph’s, his home parish in Derby. The first stirring of a vocation came at about nine, soon after he became an altar server there. At 14, when his religious studies class at St Benedict’s School turned to vocations, it became serious.
How did he know it was God? “I think it was a very gentle kind of voice in my head, which was more like my own voice,” he says. “But I think that may have been the Lord speaking to me in his own way.” He thinks of the boy Samuel in the Old Testament: “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.”
“It just continued to develop from there,” he says. He was 24 when he applied, and Bishop Patrick sent him first to the English College in Valladolid, Spain, then to Oscott College in Birmingham. Along the way there were “wobbles and doubts”.
“Once in particular, I was really sort of 50/50,” he says. “But thanks be to God, I stayed at Oscottand I’m still here.”
The turning point was candidacy in his third year, when the Church formally accepts a man as a candidate for ordination. A few hours before the Mass, celebrated by Bishop Patrick, he was still nervous. It was “a really public act of saying yes”. He says: “I can’t think of anything else now I want to do other than, please, God, become a priest.”
Seminary has shaped how he prays. He keeps a holy hour, an hour of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament, and loves the Divine Office, the Church’s daily prayer. He has also found “a real love for the saints”.
As December 2027 comes closer, amongst many other things, his mind is on the guest list. Fr Eddie Jarosz, from his first placement, already has the date in his diary. Then there is his first posting as a deacon. “Could it be West Bridgford? Could it be Mansfield? Could it be the cathedral? Could it be Lincoln?”
A deacon proclaims the Gospel, preaches, and takes Communion to the sick and the housebound. Michael has already done a few placements in hospitals and prisons. “It’s amazing how many people you go to will have stories about the Church to tell you,” he says, “and their faith is very visible when you are there with them.”
Wherever he goes, he hopes to “bring at least something of a lot of the priests who have shaped me”. One is Fr John Martin, “a very caring, very loving man” who “makes time for anybody”. He also wants to “bring myself to wherever I’m asked to go.”
He hopes to be “a priest who is true to his promise of obedience to the bishop”. He knows there will be limits. “We’re not miracle workers,” he says. “We can only do the best we can, and sometimes that’s limited.”
He often returns to the Gospel moment when Jesus calls his first disciples: “Follow me.” That call, he says, belongs to “any member of the baptised”. St John Henry Newman, one of the saints he loves, gives him words for it, as Michael recalls them: “God has called me for some definite purpose. I may not know it in this life, but I will be told of it in the next.”
In seminary, that purpose has begun to take shape: a walk across the road on a Friday morning, with Christ around his neck, to visit the sick and those in need.
Perhaps you are a young man with your own quiet sense that God is asking something of you. Michael’s advice is to pray, “preferably, I would say in a church and before the Blessed Sacrament”, and to talk to a priest you trust. The Diocese’s vocations director, Fr Neil Peoples, would be pleased to hear from you at neil.peoples@dioceseofnottingham.uk.
And whoever you are, please do pray for Michael as he continues his formation and prepares for ordination.
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