Hello.  Welcome.  I imagine you’re here because you have several questions.  Allow me to do that really annoying thing where I try to anticipate them and just start answering before you can even ask…

Who are you, anyway?

Fascinating question!  I’m surprised you got this philosophical right off the bat.  Who are any of us, really?

But the simple answer is that I am Father Mike Conway.  I am a Roman Catholic priest of the Diocese of Pittsburgh.  (Here I should note that views expressed on this blog are mine and mine alone.). I was ordained a priest on June 28, 2014.  I have a BA in history from Wheeling Jesuit University, which I earned in 2002.  I wanted to be a teacher, but when that particular job market turned up no leads, I decided to get into the financial world.  Turns out I was pretty good at working with mortgages.  I did that for a number of years, but it wasn’t too long that I felt called in another direction.  Providentially (or not) the financial meltdown of 2007 destroyed the company I was at, and made it that much easier to enter the seminary.  So I did.  I started at Saint Paul Seminary in August of 2008.  In 2010, I earned an MA in philosophy from Duquesne University.  The bishop then assigned me to further studies in Rome, so I moved to Italy that summer.  In 2013, I earned (somehow) an STB from the Pontifical Gregorian University.  I was ordained a deacon that fall at St. Peter’s Basilica.  I then started advanced studies in dogmatic theology at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome.  I finished that program in June of 2015.  My thesis was on the order of the sacraments of initiation.  That summer I returned home and was assigned to Immaculate Conception Parish in Washington, PA.  Had a good run down there, and then in July of 2017, the bishop asked me to take the reins of Saint Richard Parish in Gibsonia.  Did that for just over a year, and had a lot of fun doing it, until the bishop decided to send back to Washington.  I moved back to IC, and was chaplain to California University of PA, Washington and Jefferson College, and Waynesburg University.  While there, I also picked up some part-time side gigs, teaching at one of our high schools and adjunct lecturing at St. Vincent Seminary. That only lasted a year, and then circumstances in the diocese changed again…and I was reassigned as parochial vicar to eight (yes, 8) parishes in the Duquesne/Homestead/Munhall/West Mifflin/Whitaker area.  Oh, and I’m part time chaplain at a high school, too.

That was long-winded.  And what’s this blog about, anyway?

I have no idea.  I can already tell you that I’m not going to be updating it on a regular basis, but I do hope to write at least one post a week.  Some people have asked me to post my homilies here, but I rarely write those out anyway…so this might be a collection of the cliff notes version of my homilies, and maybe some other theological rants that bubble to the surface.

And probably some non-theological, non-church kind of stuff, too.

And what does “Venite prandete” mean?

Loosely translated, it means, “Come and eat.”  We see it in John’s Gospel, in one of Jesus’ post-Resurrection appearances.  The apostles had been out all night fishing, and when they returned to shore, Jesus was there, cooking some fish over a charcoal fire.  He said to them, “Come, have breakfast,” or, in Latin, “Venite, prandete.”

I was traveling with some priest friends over our Easter vacation our last year in Rome, and they decided that this was MY passage.  I have no idea why.  I am not at all a morning person.  But I do like breakfast.

Anyway, it’s Latin, and therefore it makes it sound fancier.