CENTRAL FALLS — Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost had only just become Pope Leo XIV days earlier. Inside St. Peter’s Basilica, a wide-eyed seminarian from the nearby Pontifical North American College in Rome found himself among the chosen few asked to serve during one of the first Masses of the new Holy Father’s nascent pontificate. A year removed, Mateusz Puzanowski still shakes his head in pleasant disbelief. “I wasn’t even a deacon at that point. I was an acolyte,” the Rhode Island native reveals.
“Still can’t believe it!” adds his mother, Aneta. “We never would have expected that, going back a few years with his having struggles in college. But … here we are!” This Saturday at the Cathedral of Ss. Peter and Paul in Providence, the large, extended Puzanowski family – many of them having traveled from Europe — will gather to watch their 30-year-old Mateusz become ordained as one of the two newest priests in this diocese.
As geographically far away as Rome and Vatican City are from Rhode Island, they aren’t nearly as far conceptually as this notion once was from Mateusz’s mind — that he’d one day come face to face with and serve alongside a Pope. Only a decade ago, he doubted he even wanted to become a priest.
THE POWER OF PRAYER
Aneta and Krzysztof Puzanowski did not know one another when they each emigrated independently from their native Poland to the United States decades ago. The couple first met in Providence through a mutual friend, later married, and eventually settled in Lincoln, where they raised their two sons, Mateusz (the elder by a year-and-a-half) and Dariusz. The Puzanowskis have long been active parishioners at St. Joseph’s Church in Central Falls, which serves a large Polish-American community. “It’s a focal point, church, for us,” Aneta declares.
Throughout his upbringing at St. Joseph’s, Mateusz frequently heard a chorus of what he viewed back then as unsettling prophecies. “A lot of the older Polish ladies,” he recalls, “would always tell me that I’m going to make a great priest, that they’re praying for me to be a priest. It was a nice sentiment, but I didn’t really like it, because it felt like somebody else was determining my life for me, and that kind of pushed me away.”
In 2014, it pushed him to Easton, Massachusetts, where, upon graduating from Lincoln High School, he enrolled at Stonehill College, the bucolic beauty of its campus having won him over instantly. Despite—or perhaps in part because of—Stonehill’s Catholic foundations and influences, Mateusz embraced this new “freedom,” as he understood it then, but outside the practice of his Catholic faith. Yet, the more he stepped away from the faith, the more he suffered.
Three years into his college experience, an utterly unfulfilled Mateusz began questioning life’s most important questions. Yet, in the depths of his heart, he felt another overwhelming sensation he still has trouble explaining. “You could call it the supernatural or the spiritual, but I just knew that people were praying for me. Specifically my mom, my main intercessor, because she’s very devoted to Our Lady, praying the rosary, but also my dad and other family members, people at church.”
Aneta maintains, “I prayed for him like I prayed for my other son. In my prayers, I offered my sons, both of them, for the glory of God. That’s what I always say. ‘My sons are for your glory, Lord. Give them all the necessary graces.’ I didn’t pray for [Mateusz] to become a priest, just for all the necessary graces.” Mateusz wanted clarity in his doubt, so he returned to the familiar—starting with going home on weekends.
“My last resort was religion, the Christian faith,” he concedes. “I had nothing else. That’s what I was brought up with, but I didn’t really believe it at that time. I was just thinking, ‘I have nothing else, I’m going to give this a shot.’
“One weekend I was packing up, and I saw a rosary sticking out from in between a couple books on a little bookshelf that I had. I don’t know how it got there, but it caught my eye, and I thought, ‘You’re going to need this.’”
THE OLD COLLEGE TRY
By his junior year, even Stonehill’s serene surroundings couldn’t pull Mateusz out of his emotional freefall. On a call home in the middle of one difficult night, Aneta reminded him that Stonehill offers several on-campus chapels and private places to pray. “I suggested that he go and sit there and pray. If there’s the Blessed Sacrament, just sit there and don’t say anything.”
At the start of that school year, Mateusz had met, by chance, another student who was involved in campus ministry. The young man mentioned that if Mateusz ever needed to talk about faith, he could contact him.
Mateusz went upstairs to the chapel inside his dormitory. Shortly thereafter, that student walked in, entirely coincidentally. He simply wanted to say a quick prayer before going to bed. The student then sat with Mateusz for the next two hours. “From that moment, everything shifted,” Mateusz says. “I started going to mass, ended up going to confession. I was spending any time I had in the chapel because … it actually helped. Jesus changed something in me.”
Mateusz started taking theology, surrounding himself with campus ministers, becoming friendly with some of the priests, and praying the Rosary. “Step by step,” his mother remarks, “I could see, he was getting happier.”
The likeminded people with whom he was associating also began raising the question he’d heard and been repelled by so often before—Had he ever considered the priesthood? “And now it’s being brought up again,” he continues, “but I had a new vision, new eyes to see it afresh, and I thought, ‘Maybe there’s something to this.’”
ROME, IF YOU WANT TO
After four challenging years at Stonehill, Mateusz graduated in 2018. While still “figuring things out,” he immediately entered the workforce, joining his father in the construction business at the time and taking graduate courses in history at Providence College. Meantime, his parents continued to pray. “The most important thing,” Krzysztof asserts, “was to find a way for him to be with God. Not to be a priest. This is his decision. We were praying for him to live with God, to be close to God.”
The Puzanowskis’ pastor at St. Joseph’s recommended that Mateusz go to a vocations event or at least contact someone in the diocese to discuss his options to join the seminary, which he eventually did.
“I’ve never looked back,” says Mateusz. “It was the best decision.” In autumn 2020, he entered Our Lady of Providence Seminary as a pre-theologian, studying philosophy for two years. After his time in college seminary, Bishop Thomas Tobin sent Mateusz to the Pontifical North American College, where he earned a Baccalaureate in Sacred Theology and is finishing his Licentiate in Canon Law.
PERFECT TIMING
Dariusz and his wife expect their first child soon, meaning Aneta and Krzysztof will be grandparents. And, after this Saturday’s ordination Mass in Providence, parents to a Catholic priest, their firstborn son whom they describe as artistic, compassionate, and a good listener. If there’s any aspect of his life in which Mateusz can improve, Aneta is quick to point out with a laugh, “Well, he’s always late.”
While he may have arrived at the priesthood later than others may have expected, he appears now to be right where he is meant to be. “He’s been gone for four years,” Krzysztof concedes, “so, maybe he’s changed in other ways.”
Indeed, their son has changed—or perhaps, has been changed, by the mercy and goodness of God, for whom Mateusz will lay down his life on his ordination day.
