When Salvador Hallegado first felt called to the priesthood, he was in high school—as a teacher, with plans to finish a law degree and work as an attorney. One day, travelling home from school in a jitney with a Dominican nun who was a friend of his aunt, Fr. Salvador told her that he was having second thoughts about pursuing a law career. He felt called to become a priest, he said.

Three days later, he met the superior general from a religious community in Rome. In short order, Fr. Salvador made arrangements to study philosophy at the community’s seminary in Rome when his law degree was finished. But Fr. Salvador soon decided that the religious community wasn’t for him, so he began studying theology with the Basilian Fathers in Colombia. Still, Fr. Salvador said, the “rigidity” of religious life bothered him.

“I am a very sociable person, and I like to meet people and pursue so many initiatives,” he said. “With religious communities, you are more limited to their charism.”

A Basilian father suggested that Fr. Salvador’s vocation to the priesthood could be put to good use in the United States, so he came to join his sister in Chicago and began working with Father Thomas McQuaid to discern his vocation.

Now that he is ordained, Fr. Salvador focuses on ministry by “accompanying people on their journeys.”