Columbia Newman Center helped Jesuit priest find his calling

It was like heaven. We were all there, and everything was healed, and everything was okay.”

Jesuit Father Daniel Everson

Daniel was feeling drawn to the Priesthood, but marriage was still very much on his mind.

He and Bridget, a fellow University of Missouri student and fellow parishioner of the St. Thomas More Newman Center in Columbia, had gone on their first date on the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows.

“That was a little wink from the Holy Spirit,” he recalled, “as if to say, ‘You can do this, but it’s going to be a hard thing.’ And it was.”

Daniel had been open and honest from day 1 about where the Holy Spirit might be leading him.

About a year into the couple’s relationship, he knew he had to break it off and give his full attention to priestly discernment.

“That was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” recalled Jesuit Father Daniel Everson, a 2012 University of Missouri graduate who was ordained to the Holy Priesthood this past spring.

“She came and knocked on my door, and we stood there quietly,” he recalled. “That’s when I told her I am called to be a priest.”

The same Spirit

Fr. Everson began his life in St. Louis.

His parents were friends with a Jesuit priest at Saint Louis University and wanted their son to be baptized in St. Francis Xavier “College” Church.

The church was closed for renovation, so the Baptism took place across the street in the chapel of Jesuit Hall, a residence for priests on campus.

His parents forgot to bring the white baptismal gown they had bought for the occasion, so the priest wrapped the white stole from his vestments around the newly baptized baby.

“I think the Holy Spirit was sending us a sign early on that this is where I would end up,” Fr. Everson surmised.

He went to Our Lady of Sorrows School in St. Louis and later became friends with the pastor, Monsignor James Telthorst.

In sixth grade, he and his classmates were given a choice of four Scripture passages to read and summarize for homework each evening.

Daniel would tackle all four and quietly read his summaries in his bedroom, like he was preaching a homily.

“I look back and see that now as an inkling that preaching was something I wanted to do,” he said.

“And it still is something I want to do — to have that role and the training and the preparation and the privilege of proclaiming God’s Word in that way.”

But even more than that, he was set on becoming a professional baseball player.

He planned to make the varsity team his freshman year at Saint Louis University High School (SLUH), land a baseball scholarship to a prestigious university and tear up the Major Leagues after graduating.

That’s not how it went. He struggled to make the freshman team and then struggled some more.

He sank into despondency, calling God’s existence into question and all but ceasing to pray.

But he did agree to help with a Catholic retreat for the eighth-graders in his parish.

While taking part in the rituals and helping put on a skit about the Paschal Mystery — the life, death and resurrection of Jesus — he was overcome by the power of God’s mercy.

“I had been turning away from God for about a year,” he recalled. “It was so powerful to witness that dramatization of God’s love, to realize that that God would take me back.”

He looks back on the following Holy Week as “when I decided to really be Catholic.”

“Maybe I’m not a professional baseball player, but I am a child of God, and this is really where I want to be,” he remembers thinking.

He joined his parish’s newly formed youth group, which grew to include four neighboring parishes.

Msgr. Telthorst invited him to proclaim the readings at Sunday Mass and to serve as youth representative to the Parish Council.

“That was a great opportunity to get some experience to help run a parish and be an active Catholic and an adult Catholic,” said Fr. Everson.

For a high-school theology class, young Daniel had to interview someone he knew about the Christian choices they had made, including their vocation.

He chose Msgr. Telthorst.

“And that, I would say, was the foundation for spiritual direction,” said Fr. Everson. “He and I never labeled it that, but we would certainly met regularly after that.”

When Msgr. Telthorst was reassigned, he wrote a farewell reflection in the parish bulletin on a passage from “Lumen Gentium,” the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church:

“Remember that the same Holy Spirit that descended on the Apostles is the same Holy Spirit that is in us and moving in us today.”

Sweet home

The future priest’s career plan turned from baseball to journalism.

He chose to go to the University of Missouri, because he liked the Journalism School there and the welcoming spirit at St. Thomas More Newman Center.

He wound up spending most evenings at the center.

“There were activities, whether social or catechetical or communal or service, and if I could be there, I was there. I just loved it,” he said.

Questions about his vocation inevitably reemerged.

“I thought about how I was doing two things at this university: journalism and ‘Catholic stuff,’” he said. “I was getting a lot more peace and joy out of the Catholic stuff.

“It was like: ‘This is where you are most yourself, where God has called you to be, and you experience the peace and joy in that,’” he recalled.

The Dominican priests who staffed the Newman Center at that time gave powerful witness and inspiration, notably through their excellent preaching.

Daniel had contacted the Chicago province of the Dominicans and began seriously considering that order.

Then, he and Bridget met. He called the Dominican vocation director and asked for permission before they started dating.

“He was very supportive,” Fr. Everson recalled. “He said, ‘Yes, this is part of your discernment process. But be transparent with her.’ And I was. From the beginning, I was open and honest with her.”

They dated for about a year before he broke both of their hearts.

He thought clarity would come right away after that, but he instead remained restless and unsure.

Newman Center Campus Ministry Director JoAnn Schull suggested that he sign up for the Jesuits’ Alum Service Corps (ASC).

He applied, got accepted and was placed as an ASC volunteer on the faculty of DeSmet Jesuit High School near St. Louis.

He also went on retreats and read books about discernment. A Come and See weekend with the Jesuits at SLU found him praying silently in the chapel where he had been baptized.

“As I began noticing that I was feeling at home, it dawned on me that this was, in fact, my spiritual home — my spiritual home base where it had all started,” said Fr. Everson.

He contacted the vocation director for the Jesuit province the next day and began the application process.

“A lot of peace”

The Jesuits are a Catholic order of priests and brothers founded nearly 500 years ago by St. Ignatius of Loyola.

Their motto is “For the Greater Glory of God.”

With more than 15,000 priests, scholastics and brothers worldwide, they are the largest male religious order in the Catholic Church.

Jesuits are widely known for their colleges, universities and high schools, but Jesuits also minister in retreat houses, parishes, hospitals and refugee camps.

Pope Francis is the first Jesuit to become pope.

The USA Central and Southern (UCS) Province of the Jesuits serves in 12 U.S. states, Puerto Rico and Belize and has approximately 350 men who serve as pastors, administrators, educators, spiritual and retreat directors and in other roles.

Fr. Everson entered the Jesuit Novitiate of St. Stanislaus Kostka in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, in 2013.

After professing first vows in the order, Fr. Everson completed a master’s degree in social philosophy at Loyola University of Chicago, where he served as chaplain of the softball team and made weekly visits to a shelter for migrant youth who had crossed the border without a parent or legal guardian.

His regency, or ministerial assignment, was at Arrupe Jesuit High School in Denver, where he taught freshman theology and coordinated the community-service program.

While earning his Master of Divinity degree from the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University in California, he served as a small-group faith-sharing facilitator on the main Santa Clara campus.

He was ordained a deacon last year and assisted the pastor of St. Ambrose Parish in Berkeley, California.

Sheep grace

On June 8, 2024, in St. Francis Xavier “College” Church in St. Louis, Archbishop Emeritus Robert J. Carlson ordained Fr. Everson and another Jesuit to the Holy Priesthood.

Fr. Everson wept while each fellow Jesuit priest of the province came forward to lay hands on his head after the archbishop had done so.

“That was the most powerful moment of the ordination for me,” Fr. Everson said.

In addition to his own family and many friends from the Newman Center were Bridget, her husband, their two children, and her mother.

Fr. Everson had attended Bridget’s wedding several years previously, with many mutual friends from Columbia.

“It was like heaven,” he recalled. “We were all there, and everything was healed, and everything was okay.”

The new priest is back in Denver, serving as assistant principal for mission at the Jesuit high school where he had spent his regency.

He asserted that Jesuits are difficult to pigeonhole and that no two are exactly alike.

He called to mind an address that Pope Benedict XVI, now deceased, gave to Jesuits from all over the world at their 2008 General Congregation in Rome.

“He basically affirmed that as Jesuits, we often find ourselves on the frontiers of society and the frontiers of the Church and the frontiers of the intellectual world and the frontiers of the social world, and literally on the borders that migrants are crossing,” Fr. Everson noted.

“He basically said, ‘That’s where Jesuits always have been and that’s where the Church needs us to be: on the frontiers,’” he said.

It’s where Fr. Everson is convinced he belongs.

“Jesus compared the Church to a flock of sheep,” he stated. “You have pastors who hold the center, and you have sheepdogs that are on the edge of the flock and sort of keep the sheep from wandering too far away.

“I very much like that image to describe the Jesuits, at least to describe my vocation,” said Fr. Everson. “We’re not all going out to places where no one has heard of Jesus. But, we’re often reminding people of the Good News — a re-evangelization, an invitation to stick around, that you do not need to leave the Church.”

Grateful to the people of St. Thomas More Newman Center Parish and of the Jefferson City diocese, Fr. Everson asked for prayers to be “a good sheep dog” — “that I can be on the margins, on the frontiers of the Church in such a way that keeps people IN the Church and even brings some people who’ve left the Church back in, while remaining in the Church myself.

“That I be a minister who helps people come to Church for the first time or come back to the Church if they’ve already been here,” he added.

He also requested prayers for unity throughout the Church, which is supposed to be one of  its defining marks.

“We’re not all the same,” said Fr. Everson. “And yet we’re called to be one. That’s what Jesus is asking of us. He’s not asking us to agree on everything, but I do think he’s asking us to be united across difference.”