A 30-hour drive from San Diego to Minnesota in 2015 helped pave a path to the priesthood for transitional Deacon John Rumpza, who grew up in St. Paul and attended Nativity of Our Lord parish.
At the time, he was working for a large software company in the California city and was seriously dating a woman he thought he would marry. Priesthood “wasn’t on my radar at all,” he said. At the same time, he said, he was open to that calling throughout his life and did give it serious consideration. That calling will come to fruition with Deacon Rumpza’s 10 a.m. May 27 ordination Mass at the Cathedral of St. Paul in St. Paul.
By June of 2015, it looked like marriage and raising a family would be his vocation. He was using his degree in business administration from Benedictine College in Kansas and making nice advancements in his career. After dating for a year, he and his girlfriend started considering marriage.
Then, that month, he got laid off. Try as he might, he couldn’t find a job. He decided his best chance would be moving back to Minnesota to take advantage of connections in his home state. Rather than continue the dating relationship long distance, the two mutually decided to break up. He spent his final evening in San Diego with her in late June.
He’ll never forget the stunning words she blurted out as they prepared to part ways.
“We had dinner and we were saying our goodbyes,” said Deacon Rumpza, 34. “Her face just froze. And, she just looked at me and she had this moment. I don’t know what happened exactly for her. But, she said, ‘Oh my gosh, I think you’re going to be a priest.’”
Her comment made a hard landing.
“I remember just thinking, ‘What?’” Deacon Rumpza, 34, recalled. “I had 30 hours in the car over the next three days alone, just me and the open road from San Diego to Minnesota. I packed my stuff in a pickup truck and was driving home. And, that (comment from his now former girlfriend) was the only thing I could think about the whole way home.”
Turns out, there were deep roots to a priestly vocation that had been planted years ago and finally were emerging. The beginning was a conversation he had with his father, Mike, back when he was in the fourth grade at Nativity School. A family custom for him and his seven siblings was to have one-on-one time with their dad, usually going out to lunch or dinner. On one of those occasions, a seed was planted.
“He (his father) said, ‘John, I think it’s time for you to start asking God what he wants you to do with your life,’” Deacon Rumpza recalled. “He explained how it’s something that I would start asking, (but) it’s not something that God would tell me right away.”
In his case, it took more than two decades to get the answer. He went to some discernment events in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, including one at St. John Vianney College Seminary in St. Paul. He jokes that his favorite part of that night was the pizza. Though he was open all those years, he just didn’t feel a call to the priesthood — in grade school, high school or college.
“I was planning to get married and join the NBA,” he said. “I was not the kid playing Mass (at home). That was my little brother (Joe), actually. My little brother is the one in our family we thought would be a priest because, when he was a toddler, he’d hold up his sippy cup during the consecration (at Mass), imitating the priest.”
“Everybody thought he was going to be the priest, and no one was thinking that for me,” Deacon Rumpza said. “It’s pretty funny how God works.”
Once back home, Deacon Rumpza dug into discernment. During his first week, he went to the eucharistic adoration chapel at St. Mark in St. Paul, just blocks from the house where he grew up.
“I prayed for an hour, and after that hour, I was just kind of sitting peacefully with God,” he said. “And this question just kind of poured out of my heart, and it was with this childlike openness and almost a sense of wonder: ‘Are you calling me to be a priest?’”
God spoke. “The response was immediate,” Deacon Rumpza said. “I heard and felt God’s voice in the depths of my heart say, ‘Come, be a priest for me.’ And I felt it in my whole being. It was so strong. God spoke to me, and I had no question about it, that that was the voice of God in answer to my question. It was so clear and direct.”
He added, “I still get goose bumps every time I talk about it.”
He waited a day “to make sure I’m not crazy and this wasn’t a fluke,” he said. Then, he contacted the vocations director for the archdiocese, Father David Blume. After they talked, Father Blume said he could start his seminary studies in fall 2016. But Deacon Rumpza wanted to start in fall 2015, just weeks away.
“There was an urgency I was feeling, a peaceful urgency,” Deacon Rumpza said. “So, I asked him, ‘Is that even possible (to start in fall 2015)?’ And, he said, ‘Well, I don’t think the door is locked yet. It might be cracked open.’”
Father Blume, new to the role of vocations director, moved the application forward quickly and Deacon Rumpza spent the final weeks of summer moving through the process.
“I was his first person to take through the whole process as a new vocations director,” Deacon Rumpza noted. “Several miracles happened that made it possible. I had my last interview for the seminary on move-in day, and I was accepted.”
Now that he had made it in, he faced a significant problem — his dislike for school. “I just thought I was going to be miserable,” he said. He braced himself for what he believed would be a great struggle. Then, something unexpected happened.
“As soon as I entered seminary, I had a peace and a joy I had never experienced,” he said. “It was just this sense of ‘This is what I’m made for from day one. It was an incredible grace from God.”
As Deacon Rumpza advanced in his studies, he began to think about the possibility of being a religious order priest. He explored a few orders and chose to look more closely at the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal. At the end of the school year in May 2020, he decided to step away so that he could focus on discernment of religious life. As he spent time in prayer — up to four hours a day — he realized that he had fear about becoming a diocesan priest.
After realizing this, he felt God both challenge him to address that fear and offer him gentle reassurance. He spent seven months of his year of discernment at Our Lady of Grace in Edina, where, for an entire month, he experienced “continuous peace.” That helped convince him that God, in fact, was calling him to be a diocesan priest. So, he came back to the seminary in fall 2021 to resume his studies and continue his path to ordination. He was ordained a transitional deacon in May 2022, and with it has come “the grace of (holy) orders.”
As far as being a diocesan priest, “I have deep peace and a deep confidence in him (God), not in myself,” he said, “and a very deep joy that he would call me to such an incredible path that I truly don’t deserve. But that is a gift. That’s just pure gift that he’s giving me for myself and for the people of God.”
He is excited about ministering to people in parishes where he will serve.
“Bringing sacraments to the people, especially the Eucharist and confession, I’m very much looking forward to that,” he said, “(and) looking forward to being with people in their pain and their suffering and their sorrow, and helping show them the face of Christ there, where they need it most, in their darkest hours.”
