By: By Jennifer Willems

Two pastors of St. Philomena’s Parish in Monticello will offer assistance to Deacon Joel Phelps during his ordination weekend.

The current pastor, Father Bruce Lopez, will be his vesting priest during the ordination liturgy. Father Patrick DeMeulemeester, who served in Monticello during Deacon Phelps’ first years in the seminary, will be the homilist for his first Mass, which is planned for Sunday, May 27, at 11:30 a.m. at St. Philomena’s Church. A reception will follow in the parish hall.

The priesthood wasn’t really on Deacon Phelps’ radar when he went to the University of Illinois in 2003. That started to change while he was living in St. John’s Catholic Newman Center.

He got involved in the Knights of Columbus and became a sacristan for St. John’s Chapel. With the encouragement of the other sacristans there he started to go to daily Mass, pray the rosary and seek out the sacrament of reconciliation more frequently — “a more faithful living of the Catholic life.”

Not only did he get to know the priests better, but he also started talking to other students at the Newman Center who were discerning seminary. His initial moment of discernment came the day Pope Benedict XVI was elected to the papacy.

“I was thinking seriously about what it means to be pope and to give your life over to that kind of service,” Deacon Phelps recalled. “Then my thoughts expanded to what it must be like for any priest to give his life over to the service of the church. That’s what led me to consider the possibility.”

At the end of his sophomore year he felt he was being called to the seminary, but decided to get his degree in accounting before making the change. That changed after he went to Emmaus Days.

“I talked to the priests and the seminarians and they helped me to see the main reason I wanted to wait to graduate was anxiety,” Deacon Phelps told The Post. “It wasn’t that the Lord was calling me to wait, but it was what I wanted.”

Unbeknownst to him, God had been preparing him for the seminary from the moment he arrived at the University of Illinois, he said, noting that “once I took the fingers out of my ears it was pretty obvious.”

Deacon Phelps went to Immaculate Heart of Mary Seminary in Winona, Minn., in 2005 and Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in St. Louis in 2007. Since being ordained a deacon last spring he has been involved in pastoral ministry at St. Margaret Mary Alacocque Parish in St. Louis, where he preaches every weekend, baptized several children, worked with the youth group and done some teaching in the school.

His summer assignments have taken him to Catholic Charities, where he worked with senior citizens, and to St. Vincent de Paul Parish in Peoria, the Catholic parishes of LaSalle, and St. Patrick’s Church of Merna in Bloomington and St. Mary’s in Downs.

Influential priests in his discernment have been Father Tom Holloway, Msgr. Stuart Swetland and Father Johndamaseni Zilimu at the Newman Center, and Father Joseph Hogan and Father Gregory Nelson, former pastors.

It was the rosary that he received from the Knights of Columbus during his first Lent at the University of Illinois that taught him how to pray, he said, calling it a “transformational experience.”

As he approaches ordination he is at peace.

“Every year there’s been a kind of growth and confidence and a call to continuing formation. There’s never been a strong moment of doubt,” Deacon Phelps said. “There’s been sort of a gradual sense of what I’m called to be.”