priests
PHOTO COURTESY OF FATHER STEVE MCDERMOTT
FATHER MIKE Spitzer, Father Steve McDermott (photo at left), and Father Paul Stenson (below), all belonged to the same fraternity at Temple University in Pennsylvania.
PHOTO COURTESY OF FATHER PAUL STENSON
From frat boys to fathers Three Sigma Pi brothers follow a similar path from the fraternity house to a “much greater fraternity”—the priesthood.
BY
ELENA PERRI
I
F YOU ASK Father Steve McDermott about his college days, he readily admits some shameful moments. A member of Sigma Pi Fraternity at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he and his fraternity brothers had a habit of hitting golf balls from the roof into nearby low-income housing projects. “Sigma Pi was a major drug house at the time,” says McDermott, who serves at Maternity B.V.M. Parish in PhiladelElena Perri is a freelance writer who lives in Havertown, Pennsylvania. She is a former copy editor of The Catholic Standard and Times, a weekly newspaper published for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
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phia. “The day I was supposed to move in, the frat house caught on fire.” A space heater that ignited sawdust from a building project caused the fire. His interest in the party-and-pranks frat house lifestyle started to wane after a 1989 trip to Medjugorje in Bosnia andHerzegovina, where the Blessed Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to six children on June 24, 1981. A radio-television-film major at Temple, a friend asked McDermott to help produce a video for the Oasis of Peace religious community, which is based in Italy. “When I came back from Medjugorje, I just started really growing up, and I was getting tired of the frat house scene,” says McDermott. Shortly after returning, VISION 2007
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