When Father Parker Thompson walked through the doors of St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Frisco for his ordination last year, the occasion marked the grand culmination of years of prayer, discernment, and formation, according to the priest’s parents, Kathi and Bryan Thompson.
Parents
Father Jay Buhman still remembers the elderly gentleman he encountered weekly, in the middle of the night during perpetual eucharistic adoration. They would greet each other as they switched shifts to pray before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and go on their way; but one day the man revealed that his daughter had left the Catholic Church.
Nick’s parents, Amy and Corey Weiss, reminisced on this journey from childhood whimsy to God-given vocation and divulged their own experience of accompanying a child through the discernment process.
In a decades-old family photo, an infant Julie Elizabeth Martin — now Sister Juliana Guadalupe, S.V. — is bundled in pink and tucked snuggly into a stroller. Then one month old, the young Martin is pictured alongside her parents and brother during a pro-life rally at the Rhode Island State House.