A gift to the Church in Maine

“I am so happy!”

Father Matthew Valles has been flying high ever since his June 29 ordination to the priesthood at St. John Church in Bangor.

“Every day has been the best day of my life,” he says. “It is very, very special.”

He says the first week after being ordained, he had the same thought every day.

“The whole week, it was like, ‘I’m a priest! I’m a priest!’ I kept on saying it. It’s like, ‘My Lord and my God, this is amazing,’” he says.

While he says the reality of being a priest has somewhat sunk in, it is still something he is trying to fully comprehend.

“I think I’ll be unraveling this mystery throughout my life. I don’t know how to explain it. I am the same man as before ordination. I see that. But then, there is something completely different, something other than me that is moving through me. It’s hard for me to understand, but I believe it is the Lord and His grace fulfilling this office,” he says. “Something amazing has happened to me, and some amazing things have happened through me because of the Lord Jesus and the way that He works through His priests.”

Father Valles says when he is celebrating Mass, he continues to be struck by the realization that the Lord has placed His trust in him.

“When I’m saying the prayers, and Jesus becomes present on the altar after consecration, I’m talking to Him, and it’s very, very intimate. When I’m saying, ‘Lamb of God,’ I’m saying it to Him. It’s just amazing. I’m amazed that He entrusted Himself to me.”

The day after his ordination, Father Valles remembers sitting in a side chapel of Holy Family Church in Old Town, prior to his Mass of Thanksgiving, and looking down on his hands, which had been anointed with sacred chrism the previous day by Bishop James Ruggieri.

“I spent some time looking at my hands just resting at the altar, and I kept just being amazed, knowing that my hands are consecrated. The same oil that was used to consecrate the altar was used to consecrate my hands. My hands are made for this,” he says. “Each day, when I touch the altar and kiss the altar at Mass, that anointing becomes really meaningful for me.”

Along with the anointing of his hands, Father Valles points to other poignant parts of the ordination rite, including lying prostrate before the altar while members of the congregation kneeled and joined in singing the Litany of the Saints.

“I really felt the love of the people. It was marvelous,” Father Valles says.

At the conclusion of the Litany of Saints, he knelt before Bishop Ruggieri, who laid hands on him in silence, after which all 42 priests present, one by one, did the same. Bishop Ruggieri then prayed the Prayer of Ordination, calling down the Holy Spirit and asking God to grant “to this your servant the dignity of the priesthood; renew deep within him the Spirit of holiness.”

Father Valles called that the most emotional part of the ordination rite, saying that, during it, he was making his own plea to God to “please make me a priest, just please make me a priest. People need this.”

Having been ordained a priest, Father Valles was vested with the stole and chasuble, symbols of the priesthood, by Father Wilfred Labbe. Currently the pastor of St. Matthew Parish in Limerick and St. Thérèse of Lisieux Parish in Sanford, Father Labbe formerly served as chaplain at the University of Maine in Orono when Valles was a graduate student there.

Once vested, Father Valles knelt before the bishop, who anointed his hands and presented him with a chalice and paten, counseling him to “understand what you will do, imitate what you will celebrate, and conform your life to the mystery of the Lord’s cross.” The chalice was bequeathed to Father Valles from the estate of Father John Skehan, a priest of the Diocese of Portland who passed away in 2022.

“It means a lot to me because Father Skehan buried my grandma, and his preaching was instrumental in my grandfather coming back to the Church, my mom’s father,” says Father Valles.

Father Valles is the first priest ordained by Bishop Ruggieri, who was ordained as bishop of Portland in May, and the two share something in common. Both were raised in Barrington, Rhode Island.

In his homily during the ordination Mass, Bishop Ruggieri recalled that when he was a priest serving in an inner-city parish in Rhode Island, he met Valles, who was attending a morning Mass there, and lamented that he was discerning for the priesthood for the Diocese of Portland, rather than Providence. Now, the bishop says that he sees it differently.

“Matthew was chanting the Gospel in Spanish. I was most impressed. And afterwards, I was most disappointed, thinking to myself, then as a priest of the Diocese of Providence, how did we lose this man? How did he not end up in the Diocese of Providence? Accepting God’s will, I moved on with my day, wishing Matthew well. Well, lo and behold, here I am,” the bishop said. “I’ve said many times to myself, looking forward to this day, ‘God, you really knew what you were doing.’”

Bishop Ruggieri called Father Valles’ ordination a gift to the Church in Maine.

“You are a gift to the people of God to whom you will be sent to serve. You are a gift to the Diocese of Portland where from today onward, you will teach, sanctify, and shepherd God’s holy people entrusted to you,” the bishop said.

Father Valles says he chose to discern the priesthood for the Diocese of Portland rather than Providence because it was in Maine where he found his vocation, although he says the seeds for it were planted when he was growing up in Barrington. He remembers coming home from preschool one day and telling his mother that he would not be able to marry his preschool girlfriend because he was going to be a priest.

He would later become an altar server, and in high school, he went on a mission trip to Jamaica, where he volunteered with Mustard Seed Communities, helping to care for children with disabilities who had been abandoned by their parents.

College brought Valles to Maine, the state where his mother grew up and his grandparents met and lived. He attended Bates College in Lewiston, pursuing a science degree. He describes those years as wonderful, yet challenging.

“I went through a sense of — I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know why I’m here. I went through some loneliness,” he says.

With a full schedule of studies, sports, and service, he had stopped regularly attending Mass, always intending to make time for it but not actually doing so until the summer between his sophomore and junior years. That is when he participated in an internship at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and was housed with three other students, two of whom were active Catholics.

“I would go to Mass with these guys, and I experienced a real sense of peace,” he says. “We would go to St. Cecilia’s on Boylston Street in Boston. Then, when I came back to college, I remember making a firm commitment to go each week.”

He decided the best way to ensure that he didn’t let that commitment slide again was to get involved in the parish. After attending Mass at the Basilica of Ss. Peter & Paul in Lewiston one weekend, he remembers being greeted Msgr. Marc Caron, pastor of Prince of Peace Parish at the time, which led him to inquire about service opportunities.

“I felt a prompting to ask about that. I remember coming out of the basilica and walking down the street and having that prompting and running back to talk with monsignor,” Father Valles recalls.

He became an altar server and master of ceremonies at the basilica, helping to guide the younger servers as Mass.

Father Valles says he began to again experience a call to the priesthood, but still unsure, he decided to apply to graduate schools, which led him to the University of Maine.

“My intent was to go to graduate school but to also be involved in a parish so that I could understand this call, and that worked out really well,” he says.

Father Valles became active in campus ministry, participating in Bible studies and eucharistic adoration and learning to pray the Liturgy of the Hours, the daily prayer of the Church.

“I started to pray the Rosary when I was in graduate school and to go to confession more regularly and to go for adoration and daily Mass. And we would have our really wonderful Wednesday suppers and Bible studies. It was a special time,” he says. “It was just a wonderful experience of Catholic-Christian community before seminary. I am very grateful for the friendships I made there.”

Father Valles says while in some ways he felt that he had everything he needed while in graduate school, at the same time, he was not feeling entirely fulfilled. He says he began to recognize signs that God was calling him to the priesthood, whether it was the vocation retreats that always seemed to easily fit into his schedule or the beauty and mystery of the fluorescent proteins he was looking at in the lab.

“I find it to be amazing that God can be so close to us but also so mysterious to us,” he says. “I found that the work that I was doing in physics was unraveling this mystery in one way, but I found myself wanting more and just thinking there is something that’s not quite being satisfied by my pursuit of physics, and it’s being more so satisfied by spending time in the church and doing things that priests do, like going to Mass, going to prayer, spending time with the FOCUS missionaries who are at the University of Maine.”

He considered becoming a FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students) missionary but instead applied to enter seminary. He began his studies at St. John’s Seminary in Brighton, Massachusetts, in September 2017.

“It was wonderful instruction. And I got to be with men who were intentional about asking, ‘OK, is God calling me to be a priest?’ or maybe, ‘He is calling me to be a priest, but how can I do this better?” So being in that environment was really wonderful,” he says.

And, according to Father Valles, it was fun.

“That was probably the most striking thing about it. I didn’t know that it would be as much fun as it was,” he says. “I had some wonderful professors and people who formed us, priests and laypeople, but it was really, really fun — OK, we’re going to go do this activity or we’re going to do this prayer session or we’re going to work in this parish here or we have this class project that we have to work on together.’”

He says during his time at seminary, he grew in understanding that the more he gave his life to God, the more God would make him the one he was called to be.

“He showed me that he would provide for me at each step,” says Father Valles.

The roughest patch occurred during his pastoral year at St. Paul the Apostle Parish in Bangor, which fell during the time of the pandemic.

“Attendance was kind of low. We had masks on. I was trying to do ministry things, but is this going well? I couldn’t tell,” he says. “I was having some difficulty figuring out how to insert myself in the parish and how to be involved.”

With the help of the priests of the parish, Bishop Robert Deeley, and spiritual direction and support from St. John’s Seminary, he was able to work through it. Now, he says he is grateful to have experienced it.

“It was probably the best thing that ever happened to me,” he says. “I felt I really had a good understanding of what parishioners are thinking about and looking for, and that informed my seminary studies for the next few years. So, it was really special. I was able to be a better seminarian because of it.”

He says he has come to realize that times of challenge can result in the greatest rewards.

“A lot of people experience rejection in life, and for myself, rejections have been some of the best moments in my life. I didn’t think so at the time, but later on, I realized that those times when I got a no were really, really good for me. I found that noes often led to the greatest yeses,” he says.

Father Valles says saying yes to God and being ordained a priest has left him at peace.

“Who am I? Why am I here? It’s all answered. A friend from graduate school texted me and sent me a Mark Twain quote that says, ‘The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.’ With my ordination day, I know why I am here,” he says. “This is the will of God, and following it is how I experience the greatest joy possible.”

Father Valles says it has been a beautiful journey for him, one that he could not have taken alone. He says he is grateful to the priests and laypeople who helped him along the way, many of whom attended his ordination Mass. He remembers his surprise at seeing familiar faces from across Maine and from his hometown in Rhode Island when he was distributing holy Communion.

“I was so happy. For me, it was a foreshadowing of paradise, the kind of reunion that I think we’ll experience,” he says.

Father Valles says he is now looking forward to serving the people of St. Paul the Apostle Parish, where he was assigned as a parochial vicar. He considers it his adopted home parish.

“There is a desire to minister to the people and to pay it forward to them because they invested so much in the community and also in me. I’m looking forward to that,” he says.

Father Valles says he wants to be a bridge to Jesus.

“Something that I am looking forward to is sharing myself as the Lord Jesus has shared Himself with me,” he says. “I want to bring access to grace, God sharing Himself with us. That is what I’m looking forward to bringing to people — bringing Jesus to people and people to Jesus and then getting out of the way.”

He says he will keep the people of the diocese in his prayers and asks that you do the same for him.

“If you could continue to pray for me, I would be grateful. I am still learning, but it is a blessed time,” he says. “I feel very blessed.”