Br. Philip Weisbrod, nLC

I grew up in Sunman, Indiana as the fourth in a family of five boys and two girls. I was definitely not the most likely of the five boys to follow a priestly calling. My brothers, though crazy, were also very generous and responsible. I tended to be pretty irresponsible and got angry at others very easily. Being the fourth of the boys, I recall my mom suggesting the priesthood to my older brothers, but when it came to me I think that she had given up. However, by hearing my mom talk to my older brothers, and by seeing the vocational videos she would show them, the desire to be a priest began to grow in me, though I never expressed it to anyone.

In my seventh grade year, my grandparents brought me and a friend up to Sacred Heart Apostolic School to visit my uncle, Fr Daren Weisbrod, who was the rector at the time. While I was there for a brief visit, I experienced a spirit of charity that I had never experienced before among my friends back at home, and it impacted me so much that I knew that I wanted to enter and live in a place where I could live such charity and also follow my quiet desire to be a priest. However, I was very shy and too scared to tell my parents that I wanted to join the apostolic school (I wanted them to ask me, as they had done for my older brothers). So I put the idea in the back of my head and continued as normal until the summer of my eighth grade year.

During that summer, a Legionary brother invited me to go to a camp at River Ridge, and I said yes without knowing that it was actually going to be during our family vacation. But I had already made the commitment, so I skipped out on a week at the beach with my cousins for a week of sports and talks—and I was not really a big fan of sports or talks! During that week, I was talking with the brother who had invited me, and he asked if I would like to go to the summer program at Sacred Heart to see if I wanted to join. I was very excited and told him that I would love to. Then he pulled out his phone and told me that if I really wanted to do it, I had to call my parents and tell them in order to ask their permission. At that point I finally gathered up the courage to tell them, and it wasn’t nearly as hard as I had thought, obviously. It was amazing to see how God led me gently to face this fear inside of me. And this small fear is only the first of many fears that God has lead me to conquer in the Legion since joining the apostolic school in 9 ^th grade—fears of speaking in front of people, of living radically for Christ, of joining the novitiate here in Cheshire. And now as a novice, I am still in the beginning of my life in the Legion, so I am sure that God will lead me to do things that even now I see as impossible. It will always be a joy to face my fears with Christ and live this awesome adventure.