In his first year at Corpus Christi College, the diocesan seminary for Victoria and Tasmania, Rhys Lowther was sent to visit a nursing home. There, he got to know an old nun, who gave him a copy of True Devotion to Mary by St Louis de Montfort. ‘She looked me in the eye,’ Rhys remembers, ‘and said, “The priesthood of Jesus was formed in the womb of Mary. You’ll never have a priestly heart unless you allow Mary to form it in you.”’

‘Our Lord took his human nature from Our Lady, and his nature is what makes him a priest, a mediator between God and humanity,’ Rhys says, observing that in some ways we are asked to do the same thing. Pointing to the way Christ asks Mary to cooperate in his redemption of the world, he says, ‘In my vocation, that’s very much what I see Christ asking me: to lend him my nature so that he can continue the work of redemption on earth.’

From his high-school years, Rhys knew that he wanted to enter the seminary. As he grappled with the ‘big questions’ in life—‘Is there meaning to life? What is my place in the world?’—he started attending Mass and getting involved in the life of the Church, especially through the sacrament of Confession. ‘That marked a big time for me,’ Rhys says. ‘[It] led me to have a more personal relationship with Our Lord.’

It became clearer to Rhys that God was preparing him for something. ‘God was working in my life,’ Rhys says, ‘preparing me to give myself to the mission of the Church … He was asking me to be a priest and to serve him as a priest.’