During Easter week, the desire to offer his life as a priest “came back with so much divine love” that he was “overwhelmed by the love of God.”
“At the same time, I was realist enough to know, there were many sufferings in peoples’ lives,” he said. After discovering the love of God, he felt “people have to know that, I can’t keep it to myself, it’s too incredible, too important.”
He asked God about his desire for marriage, but did not receive an answer. So he remembers praying, “I don’t know what you’re doing, but you know what you are doing. What you are doing is what’s best for me and the other people. So yes, I’ll do it.”
“I never looked back.”
When Lépine received a phone call from the Apostolic Nuncio in early July, asking him to come to Ottawa, he did not speculate about what the meeting was going to be about. The Nuncio told him of the Pope’s decision and asked if he would consider his call.
“Other than saying ‘yes,’ I’m not sure I realized quite yet what it implies.”
Lépine regards his 20 years in the priesthood as a “blank cheque,” an opportunity to serve through prayers, celibacy and obedience to his archbishop, Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte. He said he feels like the Centurion who told Jesus he was not worthy, but through faith, “I’ll be there to answer the call every step of the way.”
As a priest, Lépine taught theology and philosophy at the Grand Seminary Montreal, where he loved being exposed to the minds of young people searching for God, and could remain near to the teachings of the Magisterium and the Doctors of the Church. The Bible has always been “nourishment” for him, and he said he has learned so much through teaching.
Since 2006, he has served the Montreal parishes of Notre-Dame-des-Champs and Purification-de-la-Bienheureuse-Vierge-Marie as pastor.
He and Montreal’s other Bishop-Elect Thomas Dowd will be ordained to the episcopacy on Sept. 10 at Mary Queen of the World Cathedral in Montreal.
He said he looks forward to serving his archbishop wherever he is assigned.
Bishop-elect Christian Lépine on a path he didn’t envision
By Deborah Gyapong, Canadian Catholic NewsOTTAWA - Montreal auxiliary Bishop-elect Christian Lépine never envisioned becoming a bishop, or even a priest, though as a child he wondered about becoming a saint.
Growing up in 1950s Quebec, when the whole province was steeped in the Catholic faith, Lépine recalls kneeling at the age of five with his French-Canadian family every evening and reciting the rosary “like all of Quebec.” He recalls reading the lives of the saints when he was eight. “I was not thinking so much of being a priest, but I was thinking about being a saint,” he joked.
The oldest of four brothers and one sister, Lépine remained certain he would marry. It wasn’t until he was 25, sitting in his favorite rocking chair at Christmas, wondering what he was searching for, that he entertained the thought of becoming a priest. “What am I thinking about?” he wondered.
By then he had attended the Royal Military College in Saint-Jean, pursued an engineering degree at the École Polytechnique in Montreal and, after a year working at an engineering firm, returned to school to study economics and politics. He decided to wait for a couple of months to see if the desire for priesthood remained strong.
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