ST. BENEDICT PARISH

Fr. Branden Gordon is a Salesian priest at St. Benedict’s Parish in Etobicoke. Having been born into a culturally Catholic family, he was taught good human values but didn’t grow up going to church. By the time he was in high school, he began to ask life’s big questions: Does God exist?  Does life have a purpose?  Is death the end of one’s existence?  These and other questions led him to embark on a quest for ultimate Truth.  After exploring many philosophical systems and religious traditions, he realised that the Truth he was seeking wasn’t some abstract set of principles but rather a Person: Jesus of Nazareth.  Thus began his reconversion to the Faith into which he had been sacramentally initiated as a child — a reconversion fraught with twists and turns but sustained and brought to fruition by divine grace.  He considers his life to be a testimony to that well-known adage in St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “[W]here sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (5:20). Now in his ninth year of consecrated life and second year of priesthood, he’s grateful to God for having chosen him to serve as an instrument of grace for others.