St.
Patrick P A R I SH
FR. GERMAN RAMOS Reflects on
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s Fr. German Ramos reflects on his path to the priesthood, he can see the hand of God in everything. Though his early faith journey followed a somewhat long and winding road with its fair share of obstacles, Fr. Ramos has no doubt that he is now right where the Lord intends him to be, serving the Church as a priest for the Diocese of Sacramento. Fr. Ramos grew up in a small village in Mexico. While his parents were nominally Catholic, the faith was not a big part of their life. However, the family did attend Mass once a week when a priest came to their village, and Fr. Ramos received all of his Sacraments of Initiation. With no access to an education beyond grade school available near his family home, Fr. Ramos went to live with his grandmother in a bigger town to attend high school. She asked that he go to Mass with her and join her for a daily Rosary. Soon, Fr. Ramos began to connect with his Catholic faith in a new way. “Little by little, my grandmother was instilling in me that love for the Church and for my Catholic heritage,” he says. “The priest was offering Catholic formation, so I began to learn about the core tenets of Catholicism, the history of the Church and the sacraments. I realized I had been missing so much — the Church gives us so much!” As Fr. Ramos was growing in faith, he was distressed by the young people in his school who seemed to turn their backs on this great gift. “I was going through high school and I began to see a lot of bad things,” he says. “My classmates were having premarital sex and they were doing drugs. They weren’t determined to focus on their studies and to eventually become something in life. I knew that wasn’t what I wanted for myself — I wanted a mission and a purpose in life. I began to cherish and appreciate my faith and the Catholic Church.” As his involvement in the Church increased, Fr. Ramos found more and more people were encouraging him to consider a vocation to the priesthood. Thanks to a weeklong seminary retreat, he realized that priesthood was the vocation that
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Fr. German Ramos was happy to be assigned to St. Patrick last September. He knew Fr. Estrella from seminary and has enjoyed working with him. He has also loved getting to know the faith community here. would make him fulfilled and happy. Having witnessed so many of his peers going astray during their high school years, Fr. Ramos had a great desire to facilitate the spiritual help and support they needed for a conversion of heart. As high school graduation neared, Fr. Ramos had discerned a strong vocation to the priesthood. However, that didn’t mean that his path there was getting any easier. “My father disliked the idea that I wanted to become a Catholic priest and said if I went to seminary, he would disown me,” he says. “On the one hand, I was so overjoyed and happy that God had shown me the way, but on the other hand, I was so deeply saddened and heartbroken because my father was so opposed to my decision. But I’m so glad that I had that courage, that spiritual strength to do what God was asking me to do. It was a tough decision, but the best decision.” Following his high school graduation, Fr. Ramos attended minor seminary in Mexico. During his first year of philosophy, a priest from Sacramento visited
