With less than a week until his May 27 ordination to the priesthood, Deacon PeterClaver Kasasa Kiviiri, 43, was feeling the excitement.
“I’m ready to bring my ‘A’ game,” he said.
Kiviiri anticipated receiving the sacrament of holy orders and bringing God’s people back to Him. He was eager to begin leading people to God by challenging them to live the holy, virtuous lives they were called to live.
“People will really feel a test of me. They will be like, ‘Yes, this is the man. This is the man we’ve been longing for.’”
Kiviiri’s passion for the priesthood and shepherding the Lord’s people was introduced to him at a young age. Kiviiri was born in Uganda, one of eight children raised by devout Catholic parents who instilled in their children the principles of the Catholic faith.
At age 6, Kiviiri began attending a preparatory seminary, which is a grade school that prepares boys for the priesthood at an early age. He said boys attend preparatory seminaries from age 6-12, and they continue religious preparation in school by attending minor seminaries from age 12-18. Young men then attend college seminary to study philosophy and theology, which often concludes by being ordained a priest.
In college seminary, he said, men complete a “pastoral spiritual year” to assist at their parish and reflect on whether they are called to the priesthood.
“Back home in Uganda, especially in my family, it was a culture for all boys to go to seminary school or Catholic schools,” he said. “The girls went to all-girls schools, and the boys went to all-boys schools.
“My father went to the seminary, my grandfather went to the seminary, and some of my great-uncles are priests. Some of my uncles are priests. Some of my aunts on both sides, maternal and paternal, they’re all nuns, sisters. So, for my case, my vocation started like that because, at home, that was the norm.”
Sunday Mass was taken seriously by the family. Kiviiri said he and his siblings were required to give a reflection of the Mass readings to their parents and grandfather every Sunday. This required the children to pay attention during Mass because, otherwise, they would not be served lunch or dinner that day.
“The religious background of my family really built that in me, and to me, it’s no surprise that I am who I am right now,” he said.
However, it would not always remain that way. Kiviiri’s devout Catholic upbringing would be put to the test after leaving Uganda.
In 2006, Kiviiri came to the United States as a seminarian. After beginning college seminary in Uganda, Kiviiri applied for and received a student visa to study theology at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, California.
When Kiviiri arrived in the U.S., he said, everything changed. After four years at St. John’s Seminary, Kiviiri’s journey to the priesthood came to a halt.
“I was like, ‘No way. Who becomes a priest in the U.S.?’” he said. “It was like coming from grass to glass. And I was like, ‘No way, I cannot become a priest in the U.S.’ So, I got out of the seminary.”
The priesthood in the U.S. seemed to be unpopular and not as normalized as in Uganda. Kiviiri said he felt that he was coming from “grass to glass” when he saw opportunities for success and money that he did not have back home, and so, he decided to leave the seminary. Kiviiri described his post-seminary lifestyle as chasing the “American dream.”
“You come from a country that has predominantly nothing, and you come to a country like the United States that has been endowed and blessed with all of this, and you’re like, ‘You know what? I think I want to be like everybody in the United States.’
“And you listen to all these mantras: ‘When you work so hard, you can achieve it; when you chase your dream, you can do it.’ I’m like, ‘Why not? I can chase my dream,’ and I did chase my dream, but at the end of the day, … when you sit down and reflect, it means nothing.”
For the first few years after leaving the seminary, Kiviiri said, he stopped attending Sunday Mass. He described himself as an “occasional Catholic,” going to church only around Christmas, New Year’s and Easter.
He decided to enroll in a master’s program at Franklin University, which brought him to Columbus in 2010. There, he studied communication, marketing and sales. He then worked for Express Scripts pharmacy.
Much of his lifestyle changed, Kiviiri said, when he started “doing works of charity.” He began going to hospitals to visit the sick and volunteering at food banks to feed the homeless.
“I was like, ‘Wow,’ some of these people had it all, but now, they cannot,’” he said. “That really, really struck me to heart, and I was like, ‘I think I need to think deeper.’
“Is this really my vocation? Is this really what God wants me to do? Chasing money and living a life, which I don’t think is the real, authentic life that I wanted to live.”
Kiviiri said he decided to begin attending Sunday Mass again, and he felt that the priest’s homilies were spoken directly to him.
“I started going back to church, and the way the priests used to preach at every church I used to go to, their homilies really touched me,” he said. “And, I felt that it was pretty much that they were preaching about me. I was like, ‘I think I need to consider this vocation.’”
One Sunday, at Worthington St. Michael the Archangel Church, Father Richard Pendolphi, the pastor at the time, spoke words, Kiviiri said, that changed his life.
“He preached on something about vocations, and he said, ‘You are not too worse to become a priest,’” Kiviiri said. “Oh, my goodness, I reflected on that statement for almost a year. And I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not too bad. I can become a priest.’”
Slowly but surely, Kiviiri said, he found his way back to the seminary.
In February 2019, while attending the Columbus Catholic Men’s Conference, Kiviiri said he had a powerful moment with Bishop Frederick Campbell, then-bishop of the Columbus diocese. Shortly after the conference, Kiviiri said, he knew God was calling him to the priesthood.
“I think the best thing is to serve the Lord as a priest, to bring Christ to the people and bringing people to Christ. So, I started hanging out with the people I call my spiritual fathers – Bishop Campbell, Father Pendolphi, the (former) pastor at St. Michael – and going to church, receiving the sacraments.
“That was very key – receiving the sacraments – and not excusing myself whatsoever for Sunday Masses. So, all of that combined really had an impact on me to consider the vocation to the priesthood once again, and here I am now. I’m ready. No turning back.”
Kiviiri completed his theology courses at Pope St. John XXIII National Seminary in Weston, Massachusetts. The seminary is for men who received a calling to the priesthood at an older age.
“It’s a seminary for ‘secondary career’ men, meaning these are the men who have lived different types of vocations,” Kiviiri said. “Some of them were married, some of them were like myself, were in the seminary and got out and lived other lives, … guys were teachers, they were engineers, they were pilots, they were mechanics, or just anything.
“And then, down the road, Jesus calls them. These are the people who were doing their own professions. They had their own nets; they were out there fishing. And Jesus is like, ‘I need you. Thank you so much for serving in that (former) capacity, but I also need you in this (priestly) capacity.’”
During his time in seminary, Kiviiri completed pastoral assignments at Columbus St. Joseph Cathedral, Canal Winchester St. John XXIII Church and Sunbury St. John Neumann Church and at churches outside of Boston.
As a priest, Kiviiri said, he wants to minister to God’s “forgotten” people.
“I think about people who sometimes the world may not think about, and unfortunately, even within the Church, like sick people who are in hospitals, nursing homes, the incarcerated people who are in prisons and jails,” he said. “Those people need our ministry. They need our presence.
“The aged, the seniors, those who were great contributors to our parishes and cathedrals, who cannot come to church for whatever reasons, those are the people I really want to have a feeling that ‘when Father Kiviiri was in our parish, he remembered us, he considered us.’”
Kiviiri said his focus will also be on the youth, who are the “future of the Church.”
“There is no way I’m going to stand on the pulpit to preach and don’t say anything that the children should take home,” Kiviiri said. “The children should not be left behind, and I’m ready to embark on that. You know, when you have the children happy, when you have them on board, they’ll be the first ones to wake up every morning and say, ‘Mama, I’ve got to go to Mass. Papa, I’ve got to go to Mass.’”
When it comes to vocations, Kiviiri said, there are four people children need to listen to: their parents, themselves, a spiritual director and Jesus.
He said parents are a “visible God” on earth, and children love their parents by being obedient and doing what their parents ask of them.
He said children also need to listen to themselves, or their conscience. Kiviiri said children have an inner voice that distinguishes right from wrong, which God has written on their hearts.
Kiviiri said he also encourages children to seek spiritual direction.
“We are both material but also spiritual human beings, meaning that sometimes also our spiritual life needs nourishment, and sometimes parents may not be in a position to, and the children may not be in a position to, and that’s where we seek spiritual guidance from our pastors,” he said.
The “extremely important person” whom children need to go to, Kiviiri said, is Jesus. He encouraged children to bring “everything” to Jesus – their homework, their siblings, their families and their desires. He said children should have a conversation with Jesus in the morning, before bedtime and any time during the day.
“Sometimes we don’t reach out to Jesus, but He’s the best resource we have,” Kiviiri said.
He said he wants children to be a part of the Church’s ministry, specifically his ministry as a priest. He also hopes children grow to love the Catholic faith, finding that it is “rich in everything.” And if it takes children into later adulthood to realize their vocation, Kiviiri said he was in the same boat.
“To see that men of my age could be called to this vocation of the priesthood, it is never too late.”