Two men will make Final Profession of Vows with the Congregation of Holy Cross at 10 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 7, 2013, in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the campus of the University of Notre Dame.
Rev. Thomas J. O’Hara, provincial superior of the United States Province of Priests and Brothers, will preside at the Mass and receive the vows of Patrick E. Reidy, C.S.C., and Adam D.P. Booth, C.S.C.
OnSaturday, Sept. 7, you will be able to watch aLIVE video stream of Final Vowson theBasilica’s websitebeginning at10 a.m. Right now, you can watch this video preview of the vows that Adam and Patrick will make.
At 10:30 a.m. the following day, Sunday, Sept. 8, 2013, Adam and Patrick will be ordained to the Order of Deacon by Most Rev. Joseph W. Tobin, Archbishop of Indianapolis, at the Moreau Seminary Chapel. The men will be ordained priests on April 26, 2014.
Patrick and Adam, who both made their First Vows on July 31, 2010, will take the vows of chastity, poverty and obedience according to the Constitutions of the Congregation of Holy Cross. For the past several years, they have been in a period of temporary vows, which they renewed annually. On Sept. 7, they will commit their lives and work to the communal life and ministry of Holy Cross.
Adam, who was born in London, is the eldest of David Booth’s three children. He has two younger sisters who still live in Hertfordshire, United Kingdom. He graduated from the University of Oxford in 2004 with a degree in math.
He converted to Catholicism when he was in graduate school at the University of California Berkeley, where he received a master’s degree in math in 2008. During that time, Adam taught math at the San Quentin Prison Community College. That’s when he started seriously considering a religious vocation. “This was a truly inspirational environment for me and this way of serving felt at once perfectly right and an invitation to something else: I wanted my serving to become explicitly a witness to Christ’s self-emptying service so that I might invite others into relationship with God whose charity was urging me on.”
Adam entered Holy Cross as a Postulant in 2008 and earned his M.Div. degree from the University of Notre Dame in 2013. “The ministries of the community certainly excited me – a diverse range of institutions of higher education, but also working as authentic educators in the faith in parishes and in direct service to the poor,” he said of his encounter with the Holy Cross Community.
Adam will serve his diaconate year at Holy Cross and St. Stanislaus Parish in South Bend, Ind., where he previously taught Bible study and CCD as a postulant. He is looking forward to more fully participating in Mass by preaching homilies, Baptizing people young and old into the Catholic faith, marrying couples and taking on the deeper responsibility of presiding and assisting at funerals. “It’s the holistic combination of all of these things into a parish where you build community and relationships that I’m looking forward to most about the coming year.”
As a former teacher, Adam is excited about being involved in the parish school and helping children deepen their faith and engage more fully in the Church’s sacramental life. He’s also looking forward to being there for sports, drama and other activities as a way to show that the Church values the students and is there for them in every aspect of their lives.
Eventually, Adam would like to continue his studies in Scripture and teach at one of the Congregation’s colleges or universities.
During his formation, Adam also performed social work at Parroquia Nuestra Madre Santisima de La LuzParish in Monterrey, Mexico. During his novitiate year in Colorado Springs, Adam served as a chaplain at Penrose Hospital and visited the homebound and taught RCIA at Sacred Heart Parish. He also worked with middle schoolers at St. John Vianney Parish in Phoenix. As a professed seminarian, Adam facilitated grief support groups at Ryan’s Place in Goshen, Ind.; performed financial counseling at Stone Soup in South Bend; offered marriage preparation and adult faith formation at St. Joseph Parish, South Bend; and did formation work at the Old College Undergraduate Seminary at Notre Dame.
Patrick is the eldest of four children of Michael and Jean Reidy of Greenwood Village, Colo., Patrick was born in New York City. He has a bachelor’s degree in political science and theology from Notre Dame (2008), where he earned a M.Div. last spring. He entered Holy Cross in August 2008.
Family was “non-negotiable” growing up. The Reidy family prayed, ate, celebrated, mourned, learned and grew together. Because of that, the Holy Cross Community appealed to Patrick. “I make sense of my religious vocation and my relationship with God through the lived experience of family,” he said. “Holy Cross offered me just such an experience of family, modeled on that of Jesus, Mary and Joseph.”
In addition, members of the community Patrick encountered at Notre Dame showed him joy in ministry, trust in prayer and fidelity in community. “The hope of their lives beckoned me to fall in step with them.”
During his formation, Patrick served mostly in the South Bend area, including St. Joseph Parish’s RCIA team; Center for the Homeless, adult basic education; Rise Up Academy, student mentor; Christ the King Catholic Church, marriage preparation; and the University of Notre Dame, student leadership development with Campus Ministry. Patrick also served as a cantor and sang in the choir at Holy Rosary Chapel in Cascade, Colo., and Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Manitou Springs, Colo.; and was a volunteer chaplain at Penrose-St. Francis Hospital in Colorado Springs. Patrick also served in Student Affairs at the University of Portland (Ore.), where he worked with mission integration and residence life. Patrick served for two summers in Uganda. In 2006, he lived with the Holy Cross Community in Bugembe and taught at St. Jude Holy Cross Primary School in nearby Buwekula. In 2007, Patrick spent half of the summer doing research on primary education policy at Uganda Martyrs University and then returned to Bugembe to continue his research for the second half of the summer.
Patrick will serve as a Deacon at Notre Dame and looks forward to serving in an educational setting. “The men who nurtured my vocation worked in schools: Jesuit priests in high school, Holy Cross priests and brothers in college – men who taught, listened, preached, prayed and inspired. They helped me seek a kind of completeness in God’s call, learned and discerned through the formation of my mind and heart, of my whole person.”
Patrick has a passion for mission that flows through the example set by those religious who have influenced him. “I want to assist students not only in recognizing and developing their own gifts, but also in discovering their lives’ deepest longing: to become the men and women that God created them to be.”
Visit the U.S. Provincephoto and video galleryto see past Final Vows and Ordinations.
