Parents were role models

Lawrence Wumya says his parents’ active participation in the Catholic Church and their loving relationship had a deep impression on him.

“My father passed away two years into my seminary formation,” Wumya said. “My parents’ marriage life was one of dignity and respect and worthy of emulation. My religious, social and emotional world views have been shaped by their marriage life.”

Wumya’s parents were committed members of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, and Wumya said after his father’s death in 2017, his mother continued actively practicing her faith and reciting morning and evening prayers.

Wumya said his role model in discerning a vocation to the priesthood was French-born Father Olivier Leicester, a Missionary of Africa, who mastered the local language, Dagbani, and was even more fluent in speech and handwriting than the natives.

“He translated almost everything about the liturgy into the local language,” Wumya said. “His desire, passion, zeal, perseverance, faith, hope and love for people are  what I want to model my priesthood upon.”

Even while teaching mathematics at Kasuliyili Senior High School, Wumya never lost the desire to consider the priesthood.

There was hesitation, however, because “my community is 97% Muslim, and my family is 90% Muslim,” and Muslims could not conceive of the idea of having only one wife.

“So how could they understand a man who would not marry at all?” Wumya said.

Wumya said he determined to act on the vocational call while attending a church service on Ash Wednesday.

“I visited a village on Ash Wednesday, and they told me that they had not had Mass in three months because they were no priests,” he said. “They put ashes on their own heads to remind them that it was Ash Wednesday. This experience gave me the courage to enter the seminary.”

He entered St. Michael Propaedeutic Major Seminary in Yendi in 2015 and continued at St. Paul’s Catholic Seminary in Accra and St. Peter’s Regional Seminary in Cape Coast from 2019-21, before coming to Notre Dame Seminary.

– Peter Finney Jr.