Faith-Based Initiative

With no offers from the MLS after college, Hilgenbrinck headed to Chile on a one-way plane ticket, hoping to catch on with a team there. At first, he was miserable. Homesick and lonely, he turned to the one constant in his life outside of soccer, his faith.

"That was really when I saw Christ as a friend more than this godly figure that I can't touch," he said. "My faith now became not just something that I should do and what I started to enjoy, but it was now my rock."

With more free time on his hands than he knew what to do with, Hilgenbrinck set a goal of reading the entire Bible. He read books on Catholicism, particularly those by Scott Hahn and Karl Keating that his parents gave him. He also prayed regularly.

"It started out a lot with me doing all the talking and me trying to say everything that I needed to get out," he said. "But it was in the silent times of prayer, whenever I shut up, it was like, 'Okay, now feel this.' . . . This idea of the priesthood kept permeating my heart. It was just there all the time."

The way he describes it, Hilgenbrinck's call to the priesthood came gradually. It is not like he woke up one day and God told him to become a priest.

"No miracles happened here," he said. "It was just I felt that way, and it progressively got stronger every single day for two years."

At first he resisted. He did not want to be a priest. All he could think of were the negatives. To begin with, he'd have to give up soccer. But that wasn't even the biggest obstacle for him.

"I can't be married," he said. "I can't have kids, and that was scary because I'd always envisioned myself as a married man."

Besides, he loved playing soccer. He was doing well with his team in Chile, Nublense. He figured he could just wait until his career was over before he had to make a decision. Then he read Hahn's book, "Rome Sweet Home" and came across the line, "delayed obedience is disobedience."

"That just spoke to me so clearly," he said. "Not only as just something I was reading that helped me along, but I took that as a sign because I was really struggling with that at the time. . . . That definitely gave me the strength to say, 'Okay, I'm not going to wait until my career is over.' "

In time, all the barriers he put up fell away, and Hilgenbrinck realized he was destined to become a priest. But before he told his family and friends, he wanted to make sure the church would accept him. He called Brownsey and began the extensive application process, which included written exams, essays, background checks, fingerprinting and evaluations by three psychologists.

"They do want to make sure they're making the right decision," he said. "Obviously, with the scandal that we've had in the Catholic church in the past few years, that mistake doesn't want to be repeated. So there's going to be a rigorous screening process for anybody who really feels called to this."