TWO Brisbane married men Conrado Medequiso and Paul Jensen will be ordained to the permanent diaconate at St Stephen’s Cathedral on November 25.
Mr Medequiso, a father of four, is a parishioner at Our Lady of the Southern Cross, Springfield.
He has worked as an internal auditor for the Ipswich City Council for more than a decade.
Originally from the Philippines, Mr Meqequiso entered the Catholic Church in his third year of secondary education from his Protestant background.
He had felt a calling to the priesthood at an early age but because of significant discouragement from the entrenched Protestantism in his side of the family, he did not pursue it.
“Being the only boy in the family, how can a Protestant father accept that his son would become a celibate priest,” he said.
He remembered it had been a trial for his faith, but he emerged stronger for it.
Mr Medequiso married his wife Lana and they had four children.
His family moved to Australia in 2007 and came to Brisbane in 2011.
He said his family embraced his journey to the diaconate and his wife had been an incredible support.
All of his children had followed career paths into the medical field and did not follow their father into auditing, he said with a laugh.
Building strong families had always been core to his faith and it would be a focus of his ministry.
He had been a member of Couples for Christ since 1989.
“Having a strong family, being the smallest unit in society, … actually makes the society stronger,” he said.
He said his own parish, Springfield, had a good showing of young families in the pews.
He wanted to continue inspiring families and fathers in particular to step up.
As ordination day looms, Mr Medequiso said he felt some anxiousness because he would be “issuing a blank cheque”.
“I am hopeful and excited as well because God is leading me, whatever the journey will be,” he said.
“I know that God is with me,” he said.
Mr Jensen, who is the director of mission and formation at Centacare and a pastoral director at Holy Spirit Seminary, is a parishioner at Our Lady of Mt Carmel, Coorparoo.
He is married to his wife Karen and has three children and one grandchild.
He was born in Sydney and at the age of six weeks, his family moved to Papua New Guinea.
They moved to Denmark briefly and returned to Australia after PNG’s independence in 1975.
He was baptised in the Methodist Church, confirmed in the Uniting Church as a child and ordained in the Uniting Church in 1991.
He spent 20 years ministering in the Uniting Church, reaching a leadership role that shepherded the equivalent of a Catholic diocese.
“To relinquish that was a very difficult process, but also a necessary process, something that I took two years to discern,” he said.
He was received into the Catholic Church at Easter 2011.
Catholicism had always been an interest of his.
An early influence had been The Seven Storey Mountain by Trappist Monk Thomas Merton, which he read at age 19.
“I was profoundly impacted by that and had a deep attraction to Catholicism,” he said.
“Certainly it was a growing conviction over the years really then just crystallised itself for me.”
He had been happily living the life of a layperson in the Catholic Church for about 10 years.
He said he found fulfilment in his activities in his working, parish and sacramental life.
At the end of the 2020, he said, he felt a “warm wash of the Holy Spirit” and a calling to consider the diaconate and was accepted.
In the lead-up to his ordination, he has felt a deep sense of self-emptying and feels prepared to be of service in whatever way the Church calls him.
