A sense of wonder leads Conor to the priesthood

Lifestyle – Judy Murphy meets newly-ordained Fr Conor McDonough who has made the journey from science to theology

Religion and science aren’t often seen as compatible bedfellows, but according to Galwayman Fr Conor McDonough who has just been ordained into the Dominican Order, they fit very well together.

Fr Conor was a science student at King’s College, Cambridge, studying Physics and Maths, when he decided to embrace religious life and switched to theology. It was a move that made sense for the Salthill-born student, who had been drawn to religion from childhood.

“There’s a great harmony between them,” he feels. “I love science and still do, but I love it with the heart of a believer. A lot of my college friends, especially in physics, were believers – evangelical Christians.”

Physics explores the basic principles of things, he adds. “You can see patterns, so ideally you are at the foundation of things and you can see the beauty at the heart of things.”

Conor grew up in Knocknacarra Road, the middle child in a family of five boys and a girl in a house where faith was very important.

There were inklings of a vocation when he was a child, but “that’s fairly common among Catholic young lads”.

He remembers singing the song Here I Am Lord at the Solemn Novena in the Cathedral when he was eight or nine, thinking he’d “do anything” for God.

But when he became a teenager, life moved in a different direction. Conor had always loved school and was a high achiever who, aged just 17, went to Cambridge to study science after completing his secondary education at St Mary’s College in Galway City.

His chosen subjects were Maths and Physics, but then his direction in life changed again.

“It was at Cambridge that I was taken out of my comfortable Catholic bubble where faith was a given and everyone believed. It wasn’t challenged until I went there,” says the 30-year-old.

In Cambridge, Conor had a “a lot of friends who were atheists” and who called upon him to really question his beliefs.

There was also a Catholic chaplaincy at the university, and “we’d meet, debate, pray loads and socialise loads. It was a great resource for me”.

Having friends who challenged him and who expected Catholics to have a high standard of behaviour helped Conor to discover a “love for living the faith and explaining faith, and for doing it with a community around me”, he recalls.

He realised that the early calling to religious life had never really disappeared and started exploring his options.

He knew he wanted to join an order and having done his research, felt that the Order of Preachers, better known as the Dominicans, was for him as “their message is what I was passionate about”.

That message was “about communicating the faith and the gospel and doing it with a community”, he explains, adding that the Dominicans also place a huge emphasis on continual learning, something that appealed to his academic nature.

Not all religious orders are the same and as Conor explains it, the subtle differences become apparent.

“The Benedictines are about the worship of God and contemplative prayer and the Jesuits are about communicating faith and the gospel, but they are more individualistic than Dominicans.

“Dominicans pray together four or five times a day, we eat together and we never live on our own.”

For more, read this weeks’s Connacht Tribune.