New campus minister at St. Catherine Newman Center

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Fr. Cody Hyacinth Jorgensen, OP

SALT LAKE CITY — Saint Catherine of Sienna Newman Center has a new director of campus ministry. Dominican Father Cody Hyacinth Jorgensen, who was ordained on May 31 in San Francisco by Bishop Oscar Cantú of San Jose, will also serve as chaplain.

Fr. Cody is a Catholic convert. He grew in a non-denominational Christian family in a small town in Washington. His interest in the Catholic Church grew as he finished high school.  At the University of Washington, Seattle, he got to know the Dominican friars and began to attend the Newman Center.

“That’s where I got baptized,” Fr. Cody said.

Immediately after being baptized, his vocation to become a Dominican friar become very strong. He asked himself what gift he was going to make of his life, and that question “led me to the Dominicans,” he said, adding that he had what he can only describe as a strong mystical experience.

“God was calling me into the Church,” he said. “It was really a profound call of God to come to the Church. This encounter was a very strong encounter, and it was very specific and continuous,” said Fr. Cody, adding that “many people in their discernment focus on that bold intellectual decision, but in my discernment, in my conversion, there was something that was radically oriented to how the Sacrament of Baptism works.”

After receiving baptism, a person’s whole life changes, he said.

“This gratuitous gift of God is mystical, the graces that God gives you, the new life that is born within you – everything comes after that,” he said.

Although he felt a strong calling to the priesthood, canon law prohibits converts from entering religious life until at least two years after their baptism.

“And in my particular province the requirement is three years,” said Fr. Cody, who belongs to the Western Dominican Province of the Most Holy Name of Jesus.

“Through those years I kept discerning, growing and understanding more the faith and the religious life,” Fr. Cody said.

He earned two degrees from the University of Seattle of Washington, one in biochemistry and the other in informatics, then entered the Order of Preachers a year after he graduated from college.

Following his ordination Fr. Cody offered several Thanksgiving Masses. The first one was at his priory in Oakland, Calif. Then on June 2, he offered a Mass in Utah at St. Catherine of Sienna Newman Center. In addition, he offered a Mass in Washington with his family on the Vigil of Pentecost.

Originally he was assigned to Seattle, but the situation changed so that he was sent to Utah.

The opportunity is unusual, he said.

“For a brand-new priest of our province to have a leadership role like this right after ordination is very special and unique,” he said. “Most of us, after our ordination, are assigning as assistant to the campus minister or associate.”

Although this opportunity might seem a bit intimidating, Fr. Cody feels committed to the mission of preaching and evangelizing, he said.

“It’s really exciting to be here in this very special and profound ministry of the Church in Utah, in the university. It’s a great honor and a huge task. The beauty of working with students, with young people that have so much energy with them, that are really always the future of the Church – it’s a great privilege,” he said.

Encouraging and supporting the students is his primary goal, he said.

“Students have the strong desire to proclaim the Gospel with their peers. When the students discover the Gospel there is a strong desire to share it, and they are really good at it. Campus ministry is supporting these new evangelical efforts of young people and being there, being open to the new things that they want to do and being always able and open to support them,” he said.

Seeing how the seeds were planted in young people and the gifts that God gives them is important, he said.

“Campus ministry is very charismatic, it is discerning where the Spirit is calling these young people in their lives, and how that is forming and shaping the future of our communities, the future of the Church – that is really exciting,” Fr. Cody said.