2024 Vocations Awareness Supplement
Catholic leadership skills instilled in seminarian from a young age
Seminarian Samuel Hansen poses on Oct. 3 by the main entrance of Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology in St. Meinrad. A member of St. Roch Parish in Indianapolis, Hansen is in his fourth year of priestly formation as an archdiocesan seminarian. (Photos courtesy of Saint Meinrad Archabbey)
By Sean Gallagher
ST. MEINRAD—Parish priests are called to be leaders. Sometimes within a few years of their ordination, they will be pastor of a parish.
That call to leadership is one of the reasons why priestly formation happens through the course of several years and involves many kinds of supervised ministry.
Samuel Hansen started to see what Catholic leadership looked like long before he became a seminarian.
He saw it as a student at St. Roch School and Roncalli High School, both in Indianapolis, in their teachers and in their administrators—including his father, Joseph Hansen, St. Roch’s principal when he was a student there.
“It was made clear to us explicitly at St. Roch, not just by my dad, but by every teacher there, that their job there was ministry as well as just educating,” Hansen said. “They were there to love you and attend to your faith.”
He saw Catholic leadership at home where he grew up with two younger brothers.
“It was always faith first,” Hansen recalled. “We dedicate ourselves to God in everything we do, whatever that might be. We give glory to God in the good times and in the bad. We’d have deep conversations together about the faith.”
And he’s seen it in archdiocesan priests, especially retired Father James Wilmoth, Hansen’s pastor at St. Roch for many years.
“You could sense it in every interaction he had with people he met,” Hansen said. “He just really belonged to the people of the archdiocese. He tried to give of himself to as many people as he could, to cast a wide net.”
Now in his fourth year of priestly formation and enrolled at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology in
St. Meinrad, Hansen, 25, is embracing in his own life the models of Catholic leadership that he’s been given.
Being drawn to a ‘sacred fraternity’
Hansen’s thoughts turned to the priesthood while he was still at St. Roch School. His discernment became more focused while at Roncalli, and he realized that, no matter what vocation to which God called him, “we are called to lay down our lives for others.”
“My search for my future in general was asking how I was supposed to do that,” Hansen said.
He found encouragement for his discernment from his fellow students at Roncalli.
“If I mentioned that I was interested in the priesthood, they were so supportive,” Hansen said. “They thought it was so cool. They’d ask me questions about it. It was an environment that encouraged it. You don’t expect reactions like that from high school kids.”
Hansen ultimately decided to become a student at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Ind., after graduating from Roncalli.
Soon after arriving at the all-male college, Hansen started exercising the faith-filled leadership skills he had seen growing up, getting involved in the college’s Newman center and trying “to take a lead in building a deliberate Catholic community where I could.”
In his sophomore year in college, Hansen served as the student president of the Newman center and was drawn to “getting the Gospel out to as many people as we can.”
His continued love for his faith and taking opportunities to lead others in it led Hansen by the end of his sophomore year at Wabash to discern becoming an archdiocesan seminarian with the help of two priests: Father Douglas Marcotte, an associate vocations director for the archdiocese, and Father Sean Danda, pastor of St. Malachy Parish in Brownsburg, who then served as Hansen’s spiritual director.
“They were honest about me having thoughts about the priesthood, but not really doing anything about them,” Hansen recalled. “It didn’t seem so obvious to me until I talked to Father Danda about them.”
During that time, Hansen visited Bishop Simon Bruté College Seminary in Indianapolis.
He found the fraternity among the seminarians there similar to what he had experienced at Wabash, “but under the guidance and banner of the Church.”
“A lot of what I learned in that visit was the importance of, not just fraternity, but sacred fraternity in terms of men bonding together specifically because of their faith,” Hansen said.
‘Lay it all on the line like Christ did’
In the fall of 2020, Hansen was an archdiocesan seminarian at Bishop Bruté and taking classes at nearby Marian University.
Two years later after graduating from Bishop Bruté and Marian, he began priestly formation at Saint Meinrad.
During his four years as a seminarian, Hansen has come to understand with more clarity the thread of faith and leadership woven into his life from grade school to the present.
“I don’t think I knew how to articulate it back then,” he said. “But what I was trying to do was to give my life for others, not just to do a good thing for others, but to lay it all on the line like Christ did.
“For me, priesthood has always been the answer, and I’ve kind of come to realize that.”
That realization has happened through the formation he’s received in the classes and community life at Bishop Bruté and Saint Meinrad, but also in a trip he and other seminarians made in January to the town in Guatemala where Blessed Stanley Rother ministered as an American missionary priest and died as a martyr in 1981.
It also happened in ministry in the summer of 2021 at St. Joseph Parish in Shelbyville and St. Vincent de Paul Parish in Shelby County.
Father Michael Keucher, at the time pastor of St. Joseph and sacramental minister at St. Vincent, was his ministry supervisor.
“I don’t think he has ever met a stranger,” Father Keucher said of Hansen. “Sam takes a genuine interest in the people in front of him and is present to them. He is just the kind of guy people like to be around. He’s fun, thoughtful, prayerful and just kind to everyone.
“Sam is a hard worker, but at the same time he knows how to have fun while doing it all. I don’t think he thinks ministry is work at all.”
The leadership qualities that Father Keucher saw in Hansen in 2021 were apparent to Mary Ann Chamberlin much earlier. She was his middle school social studies and religion teacher at St. Roch.
“He was just one of the kindest students that I ever had,” said Chamberlin, still a teacher at St. Roch. “He had a great sense of humor and still does. He was an outstanding student and worked very hard. He was in all the sports and did extracurricular activities.”
Chamberlin is happy to see such growth in Hansen, whom she has known since his time at St. Roch.
“He talked even back then about wanting to become a priest,” she said. “It gladdens my heart that he stayed with that. He has so many qualities that will make him a very good priest and pastor. He listens to people.
“He certainly has a servant’s heart. He also has the leadership style of leading by example.”
(For more information about archdiocesan seminarians and about a vocation to the priesthood in the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, visit HearGodsCall.com.) †
