Rev. Peter Volz

Peter Jacob Volz was born in Orange County, California.

I first felt the call when I was very young, around 7 or 8 years old, and even though my parents encouraged me, the pull of the world turned out to be stronger, and as a teenager, I all but forgot about the call to the priesthood. When I was 20 years old, I was going to community college and working at a coffee shop, but I felt like my life had no direction and that I was just stuck doing the same things every day. I wanted to shake things up a little bit, and God opened the way for me to go help a missionary team of the Neocatechumenal Way, and I was sent to a team of catechists helping the evangelization in Utah and New Mexico.

Those six months were fundamental in my decision to enter the seminary. There were three of us on the team of catechists and we had no income or means of any kind at all; living completely on the providence of God and seeing how He provided food, a place to say, a car, and anything else we needed gave me a freedom that I had never experienced in my life. I was on an adventure with no security, spending all my time in evangelization and witnessing the Holy Spirit changing people’s lives as we spoke to them.

It was at that time that I felt the call to the priesthood again, missionary priesthood. In 2012 the initiator of the Neocatechumenal Way, Kiko Argüello, came to Chicago for a meeting with youth, and he made a call for young men who felt called to the priesthood. I stood up there in Chicago and was sent by lottery to the Missionary Seminary of Newark.