May 29, 2025 // Bishop

‘On This Journey to the Priesthood Together’

Scott Warden

Editor-In-Chief

Former Saint Joseph High School Classmates to Be Ordained as Priests

Ask anyone from the South Bend area and they’ll tell you: It’s a small Catholic world. Everyone knows everyone, or at least that’s how it seems. You might not know a particular family at, say, Holy Cross or St. Adalbert or wherever, but your mom and dad probably do, or your grandparents knew their grandparents. That’s how it is – how it’s always been.

With that said, it’s impossible to say exactly when Deacon Andrew Barnes and Deacon Nicholas Monnin first crossed paths. They could’ve faced off at a Little League game or sat near each other at the Saturday vigil Mass at St. Matt’s. They could have locked eyes passing through the candy aisle at Martin’s. Who knows?

Deacon Barnes, though, is willing to venture a guess. As he remembers it, it was when he was in grade school at Holy Cross and Deacon Monnin was at the Cathedral School of St. Matthew.

“We used to have the Masses at the Notre Dame basketball arena for all the grade schools, right around All Saints’ Day,” Deacon Barnes said. “And before I met him, I do remember this student cantoring at Mass with this really deep, beautiful voice. I didn’t know him yet, but then after the fact, just a few years ago, I realized, ‘Oh yeah, that was Nick.’”

Despite growing up in such close proximity, the two seminarians didn’t actually meet until they were in the same graduating class at Saint Joseph High School.

And just as they did in the spring of 2017, the two will once again celebrate a life-changing milestone together. On Saturday, June 7, Deacon Barnes and Deacon Monnin will lie prostrate next to each other on the sanctuary floor at St. Matthew Cathedral – the same church where each man was baptized 27 years ago – before they are ordained as priests for the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend.

The two weren’t particularly close during their four years in high school, they told Today’s Catholic. If you want to be technical about it, the fact is, they haven’t been all that close recently, either, at least not as it relates to distance. As Deacon Barnes was studying for the priesthood at Mount St. Mary’s in Emmitsburg, Maryland, Deacon Monnin has lived and studied at the Pontifical North American College in Rome.

But it wasn’t always that way. After graduating from Saint Joseph, both were planning to continue their schooling at Marian University in Indianapolis – Deacon Barnes on the college’s main campus and Deacon Monnin, who had already been accepted as a seminarian for the diocese, at nearby Bishop Simon Bruté College Seminary, whose students take courses at Marian.

While Deacon Monnin had discerned a priestly vocation during high school, the idea of entering seminary hadn’t crossed Deacon Barnes’ mind. Early on at Marian, he began asking God, “What do you want to do with my life? … But very quickly, every time I entered the chapel, the priesthood and the seminary started popping into my head.” For more than a year, he said he was “making excuses, telling the Lord, ‘I can’t do this.’ All that time, He kept drawing me closer into friendship with Him.”

Deacon Barnes said it early in his sophomore year that “this call kind of kept increasing, and I needed at some point to take the jump and see what the Lord was offering. And so, I did it; I entered junior year.”

Deacon Barnes kept his discernment private, so much so that Deacon Monnin told Deacon Barnes that he remembers “being surprised that you were entering seminary, only because we never actually heard it from you. But nobody was actually surprised – because of who you were: a man who cares deeply about his faith, who was searching for God’s call in his life.”

Each said their relationship grew by leaps and bounds during their two years together at Simon Bruté, and while it hasn’t faltered in the years since they moved on to major seminary – Deacon Barnes to the Mount in Maryland and Deacon Monnin to the NAC in Rome – the time difference, the miles between them, and the busyness of seminary life has made keeping in touch a challenge.

Last fall, though, they reunited – 5,000 miles from South Bend. Deacon Monnin chose Deacon Barnes to vest him during his diaconal ordination Mass, which was celebrated at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

“It was really a wonderful moment,” Deacon Monnin recalled, “because we are on this journey toward the priesthood together. And, yes, we’re in different seminaries in two different countries, but we’re being formed for the priesthood for the same diocese, and we’re going to be ordained at the same Mass. It was a moment, really, for us to recognize the call of the other person. … It’s really a beautiful thing for us to be on this journey together, to be able to accompany each other even from a distance.”

“And when we’re home,” Deacon Barnes chimes in, “we pick up right back where we were.”

Soon, they will be together again, shoulder to shoulder on the floor of St. Matthew Cathedral, steps away from the baptistry where each was anointed into the Body of Christ, and where they will be ordained to serve as His holy priests.

This synergy isn’t lost on either of them.

“What we’ve found out … is that Andy and I, our lives have been intertwined from the get-go,” Deacon Monnin said. “In a particular way, this completes what we began at baptism. In being baptized, you’re made priest, prophet, and king. And so now we’re completing that priestly formation that we began at baptism. And by God’s providence, we get to do that in the same place that we were baptized.”

Deacon Barnes concurred, saying: “Not only were we baptized together, but being high school classmates, seminary classmates for a time. … It’s just God’s providence that everything has lined up for us the way it has. I’m really looking forward to it, and I couldn’t have asked for anything better than to be lying next to this guy on the marble floor of St. Matt’s.”

Scott Warden is editor-in-chief of Today’s Catholic.

Ordination to the Priesthood

When: Saturday, June 7, at 11 a.m.

Where: St. Matthew Cathedral, South Bend

Who: Deacon Andrew Barnes and Deacon Nicholas Monnin

Livestream: diocesefwsb.org