He Wasn’t Even Catholic — But God Was Calling Him to Be a Priest: Father Jeff Wilborn’s Story

The motorcycle crashed, the girl left, and God called.

(Photo by Neil McDonough)

By Ryan Bagley

When thinking about how someone might start their journey to Catholicism, a few familiar situations often pop up. They may have been inspired by friends who practice the faith, had a moving experience during a church visit or even faced a life-changing moment like a close brush with death.

For Father Jeff Wilborn, it was a combination of the three that led to his conversion, but a deeper call was already guiding him.

“I was called to be a priest before I was called to be Catholic,” said Father Wilborn, pastor of Our Lady of the Plains in Byers. Looking back, he describes receiving that call as “the first instance of the Lord tugging at my heart.”

Growing up as an only child in Aurora, Father Wilborn had very little exposure to religion. He briefly attended Sunday school at a nondenominational church and once waded a few pages deep into the massive family Bible, but these experiences left little in the way of a lasting impression.

Father Wilborn did, however, have one Catholic friend.

“I remember having to wait to play until he got back from Mass,” he said. “In retrospect, that consistent witness was certainly an influence.”

That friend’s influence would eventually become even more significant, but Father Wilborn was not yet open to anything beyond a general belief in the existence of a God.

In middle school, he wanted to attend the Air Force Academy, but his poor eyesight ended that dream.

“My eyesight was my big ‘No’ from the Lord,” he said. “I see it as a great gift now.”

By the time he graduated high school, Father Wilborn had lost interest in continued education. He devoted his time to his girlfriend, with whom he lived for two years, and to racing motorcycles.

While testing his motorcycle’s new radar detector, the 19-year-old experienced an unforgettable act of God. Distracted by the radar detector, he failed to notice the car in front of him had stopped at an intersection. Father Wilborn struck the car at 40 miles per hour. He flipped over the roof of the car, brushing it with one shoulder and landed unhurt 20 feet in front of it.

It was a miracle, Father Wilborn believed. He had been saved by divine intervention. But this experience did not prompt any deeper religious reflection.

“At that point, I hadn’t read the Bible as an adult, so I had no context,” he said. “I just knew God did it, and I went back to my pagan life. [God’s existence] was always kind of in the back of my head. I remember riding my motorcycle and having a sense of God’s existence, but it wasn’t time for anything more than that.”

About a year later, God would work on his heart again.

“I remember being consumed with a desire to marry my girlfriend,” he said, “and that exact day I was thinking about asking her, she came home and said she was leaving. It devastated me at the time, but it was the necessary vacuum in my soul that God needed to create in order to make space for him.”

Not long after this breakup, Father Wilborn met a different girl at a party who had a fiancé at the Air Force Academy.

“Oh great, he’s got my dream life, and I can’t do either one,” he remembered thinking of this man with a fiancée and a career in the Air Force. “I wasn’t particularly bothered by it, but I thought it was funny.

“[This girl and I] stayed up all night talking about God and what Heaven would be like. It really opened my heart once again to the Lord,” he continued.

Inspired by this unexpected conversation, Father Wilborn borrowed a Bible from his childhood Catholic friend, started at Genesis, and spent the next year reading it.

“I just remember reading about a priest and the thought going through my head of ‘What if I were a priest?’” he said.

Although he laughed it off in the moment (after all, he had no idea what a priest did — he wasn’t even Catholic!), that question took root in his mind and only grew when he began reading the New Testament.

“When I switched to the New Testament, that’s when things clicked and came alive,” Father Wilborn said. “I could picture Jesus and who he was talking to.”

Father Wilborn not only pictured Jesus’s historical audience but also felt as though Jesus were speaking directly to him and teaching him how to pray. Scripture came alive in Wilborn’s imagination, and faith began to grow from that.

As his faith grew, Father Wilborn struggled, not with the prospect of becoming Catholic but with the ever-stronger call to the priesthood. He knew very little about what it meant to be a priest, but he did know it would mean a life of celibacy.

“One night, I found myself in the parking lot of Queen of Peace Parish in Aurora,” he said. “It was about three in the morning … and at this point, I still hadn’t been inside a Catholic church. All that I knew about the priesthood, aside from my feeling called, was that you could not get married. And that was big! I’m an only child. That means no grandkids for my parents. So, feeling the weight of that in my heart, especially for my mom, I sat in that parking lot, and I let the Lord have it. … I sat there for what must have been 20 minutes, yelling at some statue on the roof.”

He later learned it was a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

After several conversations with his childhood friend, Father Wilborn realized the next step in his faith journey was to go to Mass, which he did at the same Queen of Peace Parish. He was overwhelmed by the beauty of praying with others for the first time in his life and particularly struck by the Eucharist.

“I knew right away Jesus was present in the Eucharist,” Father Wilborn said. “No one had to tell me he was there.”

He returned to Mass the following Sunday and the Sunday after that. He soon realized that “it was where I wanted to be” and enrolled in RCIA in the autumn of 1990.

For Father Wilborn, the Rosary and Adoration both played a crucial part in his formation during this time.

“I literally started living in the adoration chapel. I’d be there at 2 am and in the middle of blizzards. I didn’t want to leave Jesus alone,” he shared.

All the while, Father Wilborn’s call to the priesthood intensified. He discussed it with a deacon who was helping with RCIA, and the deacon encouraged him to speak with the archdiocesan vocations director after he was baptized.

So, following his Baptism at the Easter Vigil in 1991, Father Wilborn met with Monsignor Tom Fryar, then-archdiocesan vocations director. After hearing Father Wilborn’s story, Monsignor Fryar reduced the customary waiting period for converts who want to enter seminary from three years down to just one.

Father Wilborn spent that year involved in parish ministries at Queen of Peace and began his application for seminary.

“I told everyone in my life but my parents,” said Wilborn of his application for seminary. He struggled to find the courage to tell them about his desire to become a priest, and as the day he would be leaving for seminary loomed, he prayed his first novena to the Sacred Heart of Jesus for guidance.

“On the eighth or ninth day of the novena,” said Father Wilborn, “Mom approached me in the kitchen and said, ‘Me and your father think you might want to be a priest.’ I put them at ease by describing the process [of seminary] and how it was designed to take discernment [of the priesthood] seriously.”

Years later, Father Wilborn was ordained a transitional deacon in Rome by then-Cardinal Ratzinger on October 7, 1999, the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. He was ordained to the priesthood on July 1st, 2000, the feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

“Our Blessed Mother has been there all the way,” he said. “[Ordination] was just an incredible grace. There was lots of joy.”

In his 25 years of priestly ministry, Father Wilborn’s appreciation for the mystery of God’s love has deepened, “especially in the sacrifice of the Mass,” and he hopes one day he will be able to share the joy of the sacraments with his parents.

He encourages those considering Catholicism to “take that leap of faith and do it.”

“Keep an open mind and heart,” he said. “There are people who go into the process doubting certain aspects of the faith, looking for things to be proven before assent. I tried to come in with a blank slate. The deeper understanding of the mystery will become clearer as you go. Even to this day, I ask the Lord, ‘Teach me how to pray.’ Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know. Just surrender to what’s in front of you and trust that the Lord will provide the rest.”