Fr. Dan Molochko

I was baptized in the Russian Orthodox Church as a baby. My father is Russian Orthodox and my mother is Catholic. My brother and I were raised going to both churches. One weekend we would go to the Orthodox church and the following weekend we went to the Catholic church. I didn’t generally like going to church as a kid just because I couldn’t sit still for very long. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the Orthodox church more because there were more “smells and bells”. I was an altar boy in the Orthodox church, but really only because the cassocks they wore looked cooler than what the altar servers in the Catholic church wore. I was generally ambivalent to the faith until I was in high school. We went to church, we prayed as a family, we learned about the saints, but I never had a moment where I knew God was real until I was in high school.

During Lent of the year 2000, I had a very powerful experience with the sacrament of confession, where I no longer questioned whether God was real or not. I knew without a doubt that He was real, and I also knew that I had to be 100 percent in or not at all. There was no middle ground. From that moment I tried learning everything I could about the faith, I started going to daily Mass before school as soon as I could drive. I was going to Steubenville Youth conferences in the summer and became a leader in the youth group during the school year. Towards my Junior year of high school, I started to wonder if God might be calling me to the priesthood. When I started to look at colleges, I knew that I wanted a small catholic school, and having been to the Steubenville Youth conferences, Franciscan University was the only one I thought about going to. I applied and was accepted and the first time I ever visited the campus was when I showed up for Freshman Orientation. By the time I started College I was pretty sure that God was calling me to be a priest. As soon as freshman year orientation started and I saw how many attractive Catholic college women there were, I knew God was making a mistake and that my vocation was certainly going to be marriage. So, for the next four years I was actively seeking that woman that would be my wife. Spoilers, I didn’t find her.

During my last year in College, I turned 21, started drinking for the first time ever, and quickly realized I liked partying and getting drunk more than anything else. My faith became thin, my vision for the future clouded in bad decisions, and started to self-destruct. College ended and I graduated with a Bachelors of science in Early Education and moved back home to Virginia Beach, Virginia and enrolled in paramedic school. During my time in paramedic school I was more worried about drinking and passing my classes than I was worried about being Catholic or what God wanted me to do. I met a young woman who was also in paramedic school with me who liked to drink as much as I did and was working towards the same goals as me. So we started dating and over the next few years had a tumultuous relationship. Neither of us were ready to be in a serious relationship, but we were too stubborn to realize it. At one point, she was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of Breast cancer and given 6 months to live. We decided the best thing to do at that point was to get married, so we did. We were married by a justice of the peace, and found out quickly after that she was pregnant. The doctors told her that her chances of survival went down drastically if they waited until she delivered to start cancer treatment. So she left me and decided to have an abortion. We were married for 21 days.

This series of life choices and events lead me to start drinking very heavily and acting recklessly. I was fired from a job for still being drunk when I came to work, I was lost and in so much pain. I started to look for anything to make it better, and it was around then that the allure of leaving everything behind and going somewhere that I didn’t know anyone and no one knew me started to become appealing. I started to look at finding the most dangerous job I could as a paramedic that would take me away from where I was, even if only physically. I found a job working as a paramedic contractor for the United State Army in Kuwait. As soon as I got hired, I packed my bags, put everything worth keeping in a storage unit, and left America. I figured I would take the contract in the Middle East, and if I got blown up that would be better than living with the pain of daily existence back home. If I didn’t die, then I would come home with a big bag of cash and deal with my problems later and with much more money. I left on Feb 12th 2012. Once I arrived I realized that my wish to be unknown had been granted, but along with that came severe loneliness. I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t speak the language, and I didn’t know the culture. I was lost.

I found myself going to daily mass, because at least for 30 minutes a day I would have people who were like me. People whose liturgical language I spoke. A place where I knew the culture of Mass. It became very clear to me that the Army Chaplain, Fr. Raj Kopec, was filled with the Holy Spirit, because his daily Mass homilies were fire. So I started going back to church, went back to confession, started praying again every day, and even asked Fr. Kopec if he would meet with me for spiritual direction. He agreed, and in our 3rd meeting, he asked me if I had ever thought about the priesthood. I reminded him how I was the divorced father of an aborted child who probably had a drinking problem and he left it alone. Over the next two weeks in between our meetings, my mind was consumed by the thought of being a priest. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t be at Mass and watch Fr. Kopec without wondering if I could do what he did. So during our next meeting I sheepishly broached the subject. He quickly helped me get an annulment and we started to seriously discern whether I was called to the priesthood or not. When my contract was coming to an end, he finally looked at me and said “It’s time for you to decide. Apply to seminary and see what happens, or never think about this again.”

I came home from the desert on Feb. 14 2013 and took the next two weeks to reacclimate and called the vocations director for the Diocese of Richmond. By June 1, 2013 I had been accepted as a seminarian and started school that fall. Seminary was hellishly difficult, both because of the academics and some of the terrible personalities of both professors and students one has to endure sometimes. Despite it all, every time I wanted to quit the Lord would remove whatever obstacle was in my way and I was ordained a priest on June 1st, 2019. Even with the trials of seminary I have known more joy and more peace finally living the vocation the Lord wants me to be in. I could not imagine doing anything else that would be as fulfilling.