ROME, December 23 -- Fr. Dominic Farrell LC is one more than 50 men who were ordained Catholic priests of the Legionaries of Christ today in Rome.

Franc Cardinal Rode CM, prefect of the Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, presided over the ordinations at the famous Basilica of St. Mary Major.  The newly ordained priests join the 650 Legionary priests already working around the world in a wide variety of apostolic works to help the Church and society.

Fr. Dominic, 33, is from the diocese of Down and Connor, Northern Ireland. He was born in Newtownards, County Down. He spent nine years of his childhood in Scotland, living mainly in Glasgow. Back in Ireland he finished primary school at St. Joseph’s Carryduff. At St. Joseph’s Parish he was an altar boy under Fr. Joseph Campbell. Thanks to that priest’s example he began to feel drawn to the priesthood. From 1985-1992 he studied at Our Lady and St. Patrick’s College Knock in Belfast. He entered the Dublin novitiate of the Legionaries of Christ right after secondary school.

“I became acquainted with the Legionaries of Christ because a couple of classmates played a practical joke during a vocations talk,” Fr. Dominic said “They put my name and address on a request-form for further information. At that moment I wasn’t interested at all in being a priest. Then God began to shake me up. I can’t account for it. I began to feel God’s presence and he virtually led me through the seminary door.”

Soon after he was sent to do the two-year novitiate in Germany. In 1994, he took his vows in the historic cathedral of Aachen. He then studied humanities and classics in Salamanca , Spain, for two years, before having to teach these subjects from 1996-1999 in the Legionary seminary in Cheshire, Connecticut.  “I’m not the teacher-type, but I really enjoyed forming future priests.”

During the last seven years he has been studying philosophy and theology at the Pontifical Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum in Rome. At the same time he has been working as assistant to the head of that university’s philosophy department. He has also spent several summers working in Mexico.

Fr. Dominic is now working on a doctorate in moral philosophy.