Earl Fernandes completed two years of medical school before embarking on a higher path of healing.

“I was thinking about the priesthood,” he recalled, but his reflections weren’t new. As a boy growing up in a devout family, he’d contemplated a vocation. As an undergraduate biology student, he’d been deeply inspired by an Irish priest he met during studies in England. As part of that same European sojourn he’d visited St. Peter’s Basilica and, falling to his knees before St. Peter’s Tomb, felt a vivid call to religious life.

He never considered priesthood a radical change in direction from his medical ambitions.

“There’s a lot of the same skills,” he says. “Sin is a type of sickness and Christ is the physician.”

The call would lead him away from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine in 1996 to a house of spiritual discernment in Rome at age 24.

A year later he entered Mount St. Mary’s seminary in Cincinnati. There, he earned a master’s degree in divinity and a Master of Arts in theology. Ordained in 2002, Father Fernandes went on to work and teach for two years at Holy Angels Church and Lehman Catholic High School in Sidney, Ohio, before pursuing a pontifical doctorate from Alphonsian Academy in Rome.

Today, he’s academic dean at Mount St. Mary’s, where his education in science and health care has been an asset as an associate professor teaching sexual and medical ethics. He serves as administrator for Sacred Heart parish in Cincinnati’s Camp Washington neighborhood. He writes scholarly articles in his field, serves at times as a marriage tribunal judge, functions as chaplain to the Catholic Medical Association, and is a member of the advisory board for Pregnancy Center East.

Father Fernandes is well-known to Catholics across the archdiocese for his appearances on Sacred Heart radio and for his monthly Catholic Telegraph column “A Question of Faith,” where he answers reader questions.

“For a long time I was just writing about miscellaneous topics,” he said, but that began to change during the Year of Faith in 2012-13. “Steve Trosley [the Telegraph editor] told me they were getting a lot of questions about the Catholic faith, so I began answering these. Catholics have all kinds of questions and difficulty explaining things to friends or to their kids.”
A son of immigrants, Father Fernandes was born and raised in Toledo, Ohio. His father was a physician specializing in internal medicine; his mother was a teacher. “My parents and two older brothers came here from India in 1970,” he said. “It was during the Vietnam War when there was a shortage of physicians here, so the government was giving green cards to them.” His father initially received lodgings from the Sisters of Mercy so he could work at a Toledo hospital.

“He helped save lives and he cared for all human life, born and unborn,” Father Fernandes said. “For me, being a doctor was about devotion to life. As a priest, it’s to help people live eternally.”

Today, three of Father Fernandes’ four brothers are physicians, along with two sisters-in-law. So how did his family feel about his priestly vocation?

“My father was very supportive,” he said. “My mom is very devout but had concerns. When she saw I was happy, she came around. She’s a teacher who had five boys. I was taught by a great teacher.”

His post at Sacred Heart parish represents a homecoming of sorts because he attended that church when he was a medical student. Sacred Heart draws parishioners from more than just its neighborhood, in part for its Masses in Latin and in Italian. Father Fernandes celebrates Masses there every Sunday in Latin and English, and in Italian on the first Sunday of each month.

He repudiates the stereotype that those attending Latin Masses are predominantly elderly Catholics motivated by nostalgia.

“Most of them are young,” he said. “They’re looking for reverence and beauty, a sense of transcendence, and to be connected to their parents and grandparents, the generations of faith.

“The Latin Mass is also quiet. There’s so much noise and business in our lives. They enter  into the liturgies interiorly and love it for its tradition, the Faith of their fathers.

“At the confessions for the Latin Mass I’ll get Spanish speakers, French-speaking Africans, many kinds of people,” he said. “Latin Masses provide a universal experience, a sense of mystery.”

Father Fernandes re-instituted Italian Masses at Sacred Heart, appropriate to parish origins as an Italian church in 1890 at Fifth and Broadway in downtown Cincinnati.

That original property was sold to Procter & Gamble amid P&G’s headquarters expansion, and the Sacred Heart flock was merged in 1970 with its namesake parish in Camp Washington.

(For more than a century Sacred Heart has held to the tradition of sponsoring its regionally renowned Italian dinners twice a year, on Palm Sunday and in October, affairs that always draw long lines. This year’s fall dinner will be Oct. 18.)

As with the Latin Masses, the ones in Italian have largely drawn younger people. “I thought it would mostly be older Italians,” Father Fernandes said. “Most are actually younger Italo-Americans. We get Italians who work for P&G or GE or are UC students.”

Given his parish’s geographic and demographic peculiarities, Father Fernandes’ initial prognosis wasn’t all that optimistic for Sacred Heart would meeting its One Faith, One Hope, One Love target. His fears proved unfounded. The parish already has raised nearly 150% of its local goal.

“I’m absolutely flabbergasted,” he said. ”It’s not that our people aren’t generous; they are.  But very few people live in the parish. They come to Mass and go home elsewhere. Many are elderly and on fixed incomes. Very few have kids in Catholic schools; we have a lot of home-schoolers. People drive in and leave, and they didn’t know each other. This campaign helped build a sense of the parish.”

His prescription was to impart a clear understanding of the campaign’s lasting benefits. In appealing for support of Catholic education, Father Fernandes’ enthusiasm came from the heart.

“I’m from a family Immigrants who faced discrimination in public schools,” he said. “What’s the alternative to Catholic schools unless you’re called to the gift of home schooling?”

He and his executive committee also emphasized the direct aid to the needy offered by Catholic Charities and Social Services.

In the case of other campaign components, Father Fernandes took pains to explain the difference between One Faith, One Hope, One Love and the Catholic Ministries Appeal (CMA).

And his work at the Athenaeum offered an authoritative perspective for speaking to people about the campaign’s priority of fostering vocations.

”Those dollars from CMA don’t cover our costs,” he said. He noted how, with recent rises in the number of seminarians, “we had to add eight suites of rooms. Without supporting the seminary we won’t have priests and deacons. What’s going to be good for people is the sacraments. It is the priest who brings them the sacraments.”

Support for vocations was another priority that exerted impact on prospective donors, he said. Despite Sacred Heart being what Father Fernandes called “our tiny parish of 140 or 150 people,” it boasts four parishioners who are current seminarians.

A deacon, Alexander McCullough (pictured at right with Father Fernandes), is in his final year at the Athenaeum. Two others, Steven Schreck and Patrick Lorenz, began studies there this month. Still another, Dean Spoor, is a seminarian with thePriestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP).

Ultimately, Father Fernandes attributes the campaign success to two great phenomena. “The first is God’s grace,” he said. “The second is people cooperating with God’s grace.”

To see video of Father Fernandes discussing his vocation, click here.