Deacon Michael Selenski was a college senior on the brink of graduation with plans to join a restaurant venture when he made an abrupt about-face: He instead took a job with Fellowship of Catholic University Students, known as FOCUS. Six years with the college ministry organization included stints in Colorado, Iowa and Boston, interspersed with mission trips to China, Gayana, Ireland, Peru, Russia and the Holy Land.

It also led the Coon Rapids native to seriously consider the priesthood.

Michael SelenskiDeacon Selenski, 34, is among five men who will be ordained priests of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis at the Cathedral of St. Paul in St. Paul 10 a.m. May 28.

The youngest of four boys born to James and Elizabeth Selenski, Deacon Selenski grew up in a devout Catholic home. His parents were involved in the charismatic renewal and were early members of St. Paul in Ham Lake, established in 1981. “Both of my parents were examples of faith-filled people,” he said.

Deacon Selenski’s pastor, Father Tim Nolan, was deeply influential in his life and, he’s come to realize, his vocation, he said. “He was a family friend. He would come over on St. Patrick’s Day and celebrate with us, and my parents would have him over for dinner with a group. He was my first example of a priest. … He was full of life, an extrovert, a people person, full of joy. He brought joy into a room whenever he walked in. It was palpable. I grew up thinking that’s what a priest was.” (Father Nolan died last year at age 82. One of Deacon Selenski’s ordination gifts is his former pastor’s chalice, which he plans to use when celebrating his first Mass.)

He attended Meadow Creek Christian School in Andover, and from kindergarten to grade 12, he was the only Catholic in his class. He loved the school and made great friends, and it instilled the importance of Christian morality. But, by the time Deacon Selenski was in high school, he started to feel indifferent to Catholicism or Christianity, he said, and he admittedly found Mass boring and odd, especially compared to his non-Catholic friends’ worship services. While his older brothers went to Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio, he chose the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul because it was close to home and friends.

He entered St. Thomas in 2006 with plans to major in English. He lived a pretty typical college life “not pursuing anything all that virtuous or worthwhile,” he said, until the spring of his sophomore year, when he studied in Rome through UST’s Department of Catholic Studies.

“And that was the big impetus for my conversion,” he said. “God’s Providence led me to Catholic Studies.”

Connecting with the Catholic Studies program was a fluke, he said. He wanted to study abroad, and heard UST had a Rome campus. Some friends were applying for the program, so he did, too. “Having gone to Meadow Creek, I actually entered college with a lot of questions about just faith, and I wasn’t adamantly pursuing them, but I was kind of curious,” he said. “All of the differences between Catholics and all my Protestant friends were kind of just confusing for me.”

For four months, he lived in the shadow of the Vatican and two millennia of Church history among other Catholics who loved their faith and became friends. “The Catholic faith became attractive to me when it was lived by these other peers that were fun loving, normal relatable,” he said. “I was studying theology, philosophy, art history in my classes. And then I was just discovering that there’s so much depth and beauty to the Church.”

While there, he was struck by one particular piece of art: Caravaggio’s “Calling of St. Matthew.” He studied it in class, and then made it a point of seeing it in person, in a church near the Pantheon. “I remember just looking at this painting,” he said, “and the Lord was just working and moving and speaking to me because … just the drama in it of Christ dramatically calling Matthew, who’s still a sinner, to follow him, and a life with him. And it was just this moment of just seeing myself in Matthew that like, I am a sinner and my life is not what it could be.”

When Deacon Selenski came back to Minnesota, he was different. He was passionate about his faith and felt “plugged into” the Catholic community. He switched majors to business entrepreneurship, where he felt he could better express his creativity. He began working as a server for a restaurant group in Blaine, loved the culture, and decided he wanted to pursue the restaurant business. He also thought of the restaurant world as a place where he could quietly evangelize.

Then, out of the blue, an old friend called him and asked him to consider applying to FOCUS, which evangelizes on campuses across the U.S. He said no at first, but she was persistent. He visited the FOCUS website and was inspired by what the ministry was doing. Even though it was late in the application season, he snagged an interview, and then was offered a job. After seeking counsel from close mentors, he decided to take it. “There was something attractive in giving more of my life to God,” he said.

Three of his six years with FOCUS were at Harvard University in Boston, where he was the team director — a perfect fit for his people skills and business entrepreneurship background. In his final year with FOCUS, he oversaw from Denver the ministry’s western region, including on the campuses of University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Los Angeles; and the University of Southern California. Through FOCUS, he developed a love for evangelization and building relationships, and matured in prayer, and developed key habits, such as a daily Hour Hour and daily Mass, that deepened his faith.

The “seed” for priesthood was planted while he was in Rome, he said, but FOCUS nurtured it and made priesthood attractive, he said. “Through FOCUS, I saw this (priesthood) is the best: Doing the work of the Lord in a radical way, working for the Church, sharing the Gospel, giving my whole life in this way — it just resonates with me. This is what God has created me for. And FOCUS helped me experience that before joining seminary.”

Deacon Selenski ultimately entered seminary in 2016. The change from FOCUS’s fast pace to the slower rhythms of seminary life was a challenge, he said, but he hasn’t looked back. His teaching parish was All Saints in Lakeville with Father Tom Wilson, and he also spent two summers at St. Therese in Deephaven with Father Leonard Andrie.

At seminary, he said, “you actually have the time and the resources around you to dive deeper into your own soul and your own human brokenness, which I think is important to do before you’re ordained a priest: to grow in self-knowledge, self-awareness, understand yourself, your tendencies, your strengths, your weaknesses, and to integrate that into who you are as a man preparing for ordination.”

As a priest, he looks forward to evangelization, building community, and being with people in joy, sorrow and everyday life. “I naturally just love people,” he said.