Msgr. Patrick O’Dea Reflects on His Time as Rector and Vocations Director at Serra House

This fall, Msgr. Patrick O’Dea will be celebrating his 41st year as an ordained priest. Almost a full decade of that time was spent as Rector and Vocations Director at Serra House, the downtown satellite location of St. Augustine’s Seminary.

During that period (from 1991-2000), Serra House was independent from St. Augustine's Seminary, yet as Rector of Serra House, Msgr. O’Dea worked very closely with the rector of St. Augustine’s on communications and updates. 

“At that time Serra House was very distinct from the Seminary,” recalls Msgr. O’Dea. “The relationship was there. When (the late) Fr. Sean O’Sullivan helped form it (in 1983) under then Cardinal Carter, he formed it a bit like a novitiate. It was a separate kind of house. It was developed to be a place for discernment. It was for men who perhaps weren’t ready yet to enter the seminary or were still discerning whether they wanted to enter the seminary. We never called it a pre-seminary house, but it essentially, philosophically, was that.”

Serra House officially united as a single entity with St. Augustine’s in 2017.

When Msgr. O’Dea was asked by then Cardinal Ambrozic to head up Serra House in 1991, he had been a priest for 10 years and had served as an associate in various parishes.

Born in Ireland and raised in Rochester, NY, Msgr. O’Dea was ordained September 19, 1981 at Holy Trinity Monastery in Baltimore and then sent to Toronto to serve. As a Trinitarian father, he eventually felt called to the diocesan priesthood and an arrangement was made between his Order and the Archdiocese for him to transfer to the Archdiocese.

“Because I had come from an Order, I wasn’t really known by everyone in the Archdiocese, so I was shocked when Cardinal Ambrozic asked me to take the position at Serra House. He told me to think about it for a couple of days. I remember my pastor saying ‘you can’t say no to the Cardinal.’ I didn’t.”

He took the responsibility and privilege very seriously, quickly working on initiatives promoting vocations as Vocations Director while simultaneously fostering and nurturing the men at Serra House with their discernment process as Rector.

One successful initiative he launched was the “Called by Name” program. 

“Parishes were asked to nominate men and women who may be called to religious life. A number of priests today say that they came to the Seminary through the Called by Name program. We ran that program for a number of years.”

Msgr. O’Dea says the greatest joy he still experiences is seeing the men who were discerning at Serra House when he was there now serving the Lord as priests themselves.

“There is the personal joy of working with men who are discerning the priesthood and then seeing them ordained,” he says. “I would imagine it is a lot like seeing your child get married.”

“We just had two of our interns (from Serra House) recently ordained,” he says, referencing Fr. Martin Lugo Tapia (ordained Nov. 5, 2021) and Fr. Fraser McLaren. (ordained May 14, 2022). “So our vocation work is still ongoing many years after leaving Serra House. That is a continued blessing.”

Msgr. O’Dea is currently Pastor of St. Edward the Confessor in North York.