Inspiring the Next Generation of Priests

Father Joe at his home parish in Jersey City

Support from the Lilly Endowment is helping to cultivate leaders like Father Joe, who breathed new life into a Jersey City congregation.

Father Joseph Furnaguera can pinpoint the moment he became certain of his calling. It was the spring of 2012, and two paths stretched out before him. One led to law school at Rutgers; the other led to the seminary at Seton Hall.

Furnaguera attended an event for students who’d been accepted to Rutgers Law but hadn’t yet confirmed their enrollment. He listened as the academic dean spoke passionately about vocation and identity. “It hit me,” Furnaguera recalls.

“That’s not who I am. I felt more called to be a man who represents the Church.”

In the fall of 2013, Furnaguera enrolled in Seton Hall’s Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology (ICSST), quickly distinguishing himself as one of the program’s top first-year students. At the end of Furnaguera’s second semester, the Newark Archdiocese selected him to complete his training over the next five years at Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, an honor bestowed on one student per class. After studying in the shadow of the Vatican, Furnaguera was ordained in the summer of 2018 and “Father Joe” began his ministry the following year at St. Paul the Apostle in Jersey City’s Greenville
neighborhood. Since 2019, he has been promoted from parochial vicar to pastor, breathing new life into his congregation and rescuing a Catholic school along the way.

“I would be happy if I could stay right here the rest of my life and just continue reforming, reaching out, being on mission,” says Father Joe, now 36.

“My ambitions are for the community I serve.” Father Joe’s efforts at St. Paul’s are a testament to ICSST’s mission of developing Catholic leaders who go on to make a difference in their communities. For decades, the Seminary has benefited from the support of individuals and organizations who embrace this mission.

Among the top benefactors to ICSST and Seton Hall is Lilly Endowment Inc. Since 2002, the Indianapolis-based private foundation has made grants to the Seminary and the University that total more than $8.3 million, including a “Preaching as Hospitality” grant.

The grants have supported efforts to strengthen pastoral leadership and preaching, and to bolster Seton Hall programs that help students discern their vocations.

According to Dianne Traflet, J.D., S.T.D., associate dean for graduate studies and administration and assistant professor of pastoral theology, philanthropic support like that from Lilly Endowment has bolstered ICSST’s outreach and programming as well as enabling the seminary to cultivate changemakers like Father Joe.

“With the endorsement of Lilly Endowment and other philanthropic individuals and institutions, we will continue to offer superb preparation in all respects to men who are committing themselves to Christ and the service of His faithful,” says Traflet. “Father Joe is one example of the hundreds of extraordinary men who have
learned not only the sacramental and pastoral significance of the priesthood, but also the business of running a parish.”

At St. Paul’s, Father Joe’s business has ranged from restructuring the liturgy, parish council and finance council, to renewing youth initiatives, enhancing the church’s social media presence and resurrecting a parish feast that is now a highlight for the surrounding community. According to Father Joe, the number of weekly congregants has roughly doubled since he started. Ditto the weekly collection. “This parish had all the potential in the world, and I saw that from day one,” he says.

In 2023, St. Paul’s took Sacred Heart, an orphaned nearby elementary school with an unsettled future, under its wing. Together with Principal Joanne Gorman, Father Joe has streamlined operations while overseeing new initiatives like breakfast, after-school programs and extracurricular activities such as technology and art. Enrollment has risen from 154 to 172, Sacred Heart’s first increase since the Covid closures several years ago, and there are plans for the school to physically relocate to St. Paul’s. As Hoboken-based priest Father Alexander Santora wrote in The Jersey Journal, “The people of Greenville and beyond … are happy to call St. Paul’s, and now Sacred Heart School, home because of [Father] Furnaguera.”

Seton Hall is without a doubt where I received a foundation for what it means to be a priest. I almost saw my experience at Seton Hall as a microcosm of what a community should look like.”

The son of Cuban immigrants who settled in Elizabeth, Furnaguera grew up in Springfield and attended Seton Hall Prep his freshman year before transferring back to his hometown’s public schools. It was at Prep that Furnaguera, who’d been baptized Catholic but attended church only sporadically, first learned the “Our Father,” which he began to recite nightly. He played baseball at Rutgers University-Newark and pursued a major in philosophy, which sparked his interest in Catholic theology. A classmate from Furnaguera’s senior philosophy seminar referred him to the campus’s Catholic ministry, and his faith blossomed from there.

Furnaguera completed his sacraments through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, and, after graduating from Rutgers, embarked on a year of monastic living with the Community of St. John, a Catholic order whose home monastery is in Illinois. “I thought, why not take this year and build a foundation in my faith,” he says. “It was a very powerful year.”

After Furnaguera chose the priesthood over law school, he had to decide where to pursue his clerical education. During his year of discernment living at the Emaus House in Newark, he got to know Seton Hall’s campus from attending various events with the seminarians there. “There was a credibility and an academic rigor,” Father Joe says of his decision to attend ICSST. Courses that had an impact on him include Father Thomas Guarino’s class on systematic theology (“He was just on fire, a true scholar”), Professor Ellen Scully’s class on Roman Catholic doctrine (“I ended up using a lot of her notes during my time in the seminary”), and Father Doug Milewski’s class on Patristics (“Extremely inspiring”).

Though Father Joe completed his education in Rome, “Seton Hall is without a doubt where I received a foundation for what it means to be a priest,” he says. “I almost saw my experience at Seton Hall as a microcosm of what a community should look like.”

Father Joe hopes his story will encourage other young Catholic men to follow in his footsteps.

“I think they have to experience good examples of the priesthood,” he says. “Some of the priests I met at Seton Hall really gave me that example. I want more people to experience what the Church can do for them. When you encounter people who really love and are driven by the mission, I think guys will be inspired.”