Rain will water the earth

CORY PAUL FORD

Age: 27

Home parish: Ascension of Our Lord, LaPlace

Diaconate internship: St. Ann Church and Shrine, Metairie

By BETH DONZE
Clarion Herald

When Cory Ford was 11, his grandfather told him something “out of the blue” as the two were out driving together: “I think you’d make a great priest someday.”

“No kid wants to hear that,” said Ford, smiling. “I laughed at him. I said, ‘You’re crazy,’ and I didn’t think about it much.”

Looking back on the exchange, Ford said the seeds of his vocation to the diaconate – and ultimately to the priesthood – received a good watering that day, having already been sown in a rich layer of Catholic soil.

“We went to church every weekend as family – unless you were sick. It was always (priority) No. 1,” said Ford, the third of six children whose great grandparents were among the first parishioners of Ascension of Our Lord Church in LaPlace and whose elders were involved in everything from the Knights of Columbus, the Altar Society and counting the collection money on Mondays.

Although Ford was an altar server, thoughts of the priesthood were far from his mind. The kid with a passion for tinkering with cars and generally figuring out “how moving things worked” had set his sights on becoming a mechanical engineer.

But a string of five Confirmation Masses Ford attended over a span of six years began chipping away at his career plans. Ford noticed that Archbishop Gregory Aymond would close each of the liturgies with the same jarring statement: “I know there are young people sitting in this church today who have a call to the priesthood or religious life.” 

The archbishop’s words reminded Ford of his grandfather’s observation in the car: “I think you’d make a great priest someday.”

“I thought if someone else is saying it, maybe it’s something I should think about,” said Ford, admitting he continued to have misconceptions of priestly life. “I thought of a priest as ‘that old guy who lives alone in the house next to the church,’” he said. “Nobody wants to be that.”

But with the idea still resonating, Ford pulled the archbishop aside at the reception of his own confirmation in 2011.

“I asked him, ‘Do you really believe when you say that (about the presence of vocations in the pews) or is that just something you say?” Ford recalled. “And he says, ‘No, I 100% believe it every time I say it!’ I couldn’t get it out of my head. It was like a song that got stuck in your head, but for six months.”

Meanwhile, Ford’s career plans seemed to be coming together. The Destrehan High School senior was enrolled in a St. Charles Parish program that permitted students to spend half the day off campus to pursue advanced studies in their field of interest; and he had received early acceptance into the engineering program at Louisiana Tech in Ruston, one of the best engineering schools in the country.

Vocational clarity came when Ford’s younger brother asked him to be his confirmation sponsor. During the consecration of that Confirmation Mass, Ford felt the church “going silent” for what seemed to be five minutes. During this “pause,” he heard a voice behind him saying, “Cory, follow me.”

“I turned around because I thought somebody was messing with me,” Ford said. “We always talk about light bulb moments, but this was like a ‘Bat Signal’ moment – a big old light that blinded me,” Ford said.

Gallbladder surgery in Ford’s first year at St. Joseph Seminary and a lung infection the summer before he entered Notre Dame Seminary now seem relatively minor compared to what would face him in January 2020: he was diagnosed with Stage 3 melanoma after having a mole removed from his back.

“Within two weeks of that diagnosis, I was on the table on Feb. 14 – Valentine’s Day,” said Ford, sharing that surgeons worked for six hours to remove an 8-by-3-inch section of his back.

Ford was laid up for four months, nursed at home by his mother and brother. He got the all-clear in April 2021, after undergoing 15 months of immunotherapy, which stimulates the immune system’s natural ability to recognize and kill any lingering cancer cells. He returns to the doctor every three months for checkups, but says cancer has taught him to be “a better person.”

“It was probably one of the most formative things I’ve ever done,” Ford said. “I learned what it meant to suffer. I learned what it meant to be helpless, because where they cut me on my back, I couldn’t move by myself. Someone had to help me out of bed for three months. I learned humility through it.”

For support, Ford turns to the Letter of St. James and its wisdom on enduring life’s trials. He is partial to James 5: 7-8: “See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. You, too, must be patient. Make your hearts firm, because the coming of the Lord is at hand.”

“We suffer for the same reason a farmer plants during a drought,” Ford explained, “because eventually, the rain is going to come and we’ll have a beautiful garden!”

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