Looking down into the dirt, Father Isaac Falzon watched as a teardrop fell onto the ground.
He was at work polishing a handrail when the sudden realisation washed over him: life was horrible.
He took himself to the bathroom and knelt down by the toilet bowl. He prayed, pouring his heart out hoping God would hear.
“God, look. If you’re real, I need you to show me. I need you to help me, and fix me, and relieve this pain inside,” he recalled praying.
Morning mass on a Sunday was a customary part of being in the Falzon family. The only exception to this, he recalls, was when his father ran over the family cat, Moet, the fluffy white ragdoll, while on their way to church.
“We had to take the cat to the vet so we missed mass,” he said.
Now based on the Sunshine Coast, Fr Isaac’s faith as a child was a given, a part of life. But as he entered his teenage years, his connection to church began to dwindle.
“I was a happy lad until grade eight,” he said. “People would call me names, spit on me … throw my books everywhere, tip chemicals into my bag.”
Severe bullying at the hands of his peers led Fr Isaac to develop depression, a burden that he carried with him for the next 14 years. He said it left him stumbling, wrestling with a war inside his heart.
Although he was away from the church he still found himself occasionally going to mass, even wagging school some days and ending up at the cathedral in Brisbane.
For a long time, life was paycheck to pub. He knows now he was trying to soothe that pain in his heart, filling it with what the world said would make him happy: a girlfriend, a nice car, money.
Deep down, Fr Isaac was searching for love. But everywhere he looked, he couldn’t find it, leaving him feeling empty.
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Not long after his plea at the side of the toilet bowl, Fr Isaac was offered the opportunity to go to Uganda with his father.
“I went with this mindset of ‘I’ve got everything…what can these people show me?’ but … I encountered everything I didn’t have,” he said.
The people Fr Isaac met on his Ugandan travels had nothing but the clothes on their bodies. But they had the things he was so desperately searching for: love, happiness, joy.
“They all had one thing in common,” he remembered. “They all loved God.”
The day Fr Isaac got back, he sent a text to the director of NET Ministries, an organisation dedicated to helping young Catholics with their faith, offering to volunteer some time for their upcoming Ignite conference.
“He must have misunderstood what I was saying because I ended up doing a year with NET Ministries the following year,” he said.
Fr Isaac knew that life couldn’t keep going the way it was, and decisions had to be made.
He began looking at his life through the lens of ‘vocation’, rather than career, and began sifting out different options.
During this year of mission, Fr Isaac felt the call to go to the Catholic seminary.
“People would come up to me and said, ‘have you thought about the priesthood?’ … and it sort of kept happening,” Fr Isaac said.
He never felt as though God was telling him to become a priest, but felt like he was being drawn to the Catholic seminary.
“I think that’s a trap we can fall into a lot of the time is that we wait for a certainty from God, but God waits for us to make a decision … In my experience of God, He will never say ‘well yes, this is 100 per cent what you need to do’, because it requires commitment and effort on our behalf to make that move.”
Fr Isaac was ordained as a Catholic priest on June 29 – the culmination of seven years of study, prayer, discernment and faithful surrender.
The vow of chastity, he said, “is an interesting topic … because it’s so contrary to what the world says these days; to what the world portrays as normal”.
Fr Isaac dispels the idea that priests are devoid of experiencing intimacy within the relationships they have. Priests, he said, are meant to have intimate connections with all of their parishioners, giving time to help guide them on their spiritual journeys. This is what Fr Isaac loves most about what he does.
“The world says intimacy means sex. But intimacy can be emotional, intellectual … it doesn’t have to involve the sexual side of it,” he said.
This aspect of life for Fr Isaac as a Catholic priest is not a concern.
“I had girlfriends in the past and it just wasn’t right. I’m happy to leave that. That’s not where I’m meant to be,” he said. “The priesthood is and that’s something I choose to freely uphold.”
Fr Isaac now spends his days in service of the Stella Maris Parish in Maroochydore and the Catholic schools of the Sunshine Coast, living in the presbytery that has a view of the city centre.
The latest figures from the Official Catholic Directory show that 304 men were training to become priests in Australia in 2021. That figure has almost doubled since 1991, when there were only 172 men in training. Although these numbers fluctuate over the years and have declined by a quarter since 1971, Fr Isaac feels that the Holy Spirit is still very much alive around the country.
Census figures show that between 2016 and 2021, the number of Catholics dropped from 22.6 per cent to 19.9 per cent, a drop of just over 200,000 people in five years.
Fr Isaac feels that general parishes have not yet caught up with the ways young people are engaging in the church.
“Twenty years ago … all we had to do was open the door,” he said.
But he also sees clusters of faithful youth gathering in particular Christian churches around the Sunshine Coast and Gold Coast, like the traditional Latin community and the Immanuel communities.
“It’s full on the weekend. Like you can’t sit down because there are so many people there. Young families, young kids,” he said.
Fr Isaac believes investing in children’s ministries will help engage more young people in their faith.
“That will progress into a youth group … into a young adults group, and whatever else comes after that … but it also requires a holy priest and holy people … the church needs people that pray, that love God, that want to be led by God,” he said.
Emily Obst is a student at the University of the Sunshine Coast.
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