Dominican Friar from Fort Worth Ordained to Priesthood
Fr. Titus Mary Sanchez, OP, celebrates his first Mass at St. Andrew Catholic Church where he grew up. Fr. Titus was ordained June 5 in Washington D.C. and returned to St. Andrew to celebrate a Mass of Thanksgiving, Sunday June 15, 2025. (NTC/Rodger Mallison)
FORT WORTH — Newly ordained Father Titus Mary Sanchez, OP, celebrated a Mass of Thanksgiving at his home parish of St. Andrew Church in Fort Worth on June 15.
The young man, then known as Adam Sanchez, graduated from St. Andrew Catholic School and began feeling called to preach the Gospel while attending Southern Methodist University.
He said, “The first time I ever thought about being a priest, I was 18. The desire to be a priest has grown through these 11 years. You get used to looking at [priesthood] in the future tense and don't even know how to form the present tense of the word.”
He was ordained to the priesthood June 5 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., then he will complete his final year of his licentiate in sacred theology (STL) at Dominican House of Studies.
Speaking with the North Texas Catholic just days before his ordination, he anticipated it would be strange to hear his voice with Christ consecrating the Eucharist: “Jesus said those words, then I said them, and Jesus said them. We both said them. There’s two speakers in one voice at Mass. What the priest causes with our Lord Jesus Christ, the Eternal High Priest, is humbling.”
A recent retreat had Fr. Sanchez focused on the prophetic aspect of the priesthood: “The Lord chooses the prophet before the prophet knew about God,” he said. “In the Gospel of John, Jesus says, ‘I chose you. You did not choose me.’ That's startling and humbling because in my case, He chose me to be a priest.
“There’s a line from the rite of ordination in the liturgy that the bishop says, ‘May God bring to completion the good work that He has begun.’ God started this. He loved me first before the foundation of the world. I'm somewhere in between the good work that He’s begun and the good work that He’s completing.”
What follows God’s call to the priesthood, Fr. Sanchez explained, is His enduring fidelity accompanying us in His call.
“God is quite persistent, and His persistency comes in the form of, 'I'll be with you,’” he said. “Moses said, ‘I'm afraid; I don't want to do it.’ And God's response is, ‘I'll be with you.’ That is a load-bearing phrase. The last phrase of our Lord Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew is, ‘and I will be with you until the end of the age.’ There’s a continuity here: God speaks in all times and places through His prophets, and in the case of the priest, Jesus promises to be with me until the end of my age.
“The spirituality of a priest is trying to understand that for the rest of his life,” he continued. “St. John Vianney talked about how a priest will never really quite understand what he received until heaven. He may die of fright to see how great of a gift that was — and how faithful I was to that gift. Even the saints, when they come before judgment, say, ‘Lord, I am sorry.’”
Fr. Sanchez explained that the hardships of priesthood, such as isolation and spiritual numbness, are matters of remembering God’s pledge of accompaniment to us.
“What about when [the priesthood] gets really hard?” he said in a mock-whine, laughing. “Yeah, buster, it's going to be hard. Find me the verse that says it will be easy. It's crazy to have that expectation. That's not the truth. The truth is that you will have a cross, that you will carry it, and Jesus said, 'I'll be with you.’ He gives sufficient grace to carry us through that. The priest has his own unique trials and joys, but nonetheless, the same ones of Jesus, and I’m no better than my master.”
Regarding the loneliness of the vocation, God is the path of holiness for the priest to love and be loved, he said: “It becomes a great suffering when the priest is under the impression that he's not loved, or he's not actually loving anyone. [But] you can't miss the link between Jesus having loved the priest, and in return, the priest loves Jesus back through the flock. There's no heaven for the priest unless he’s carrying the sheep with him: his salvation, his mission in life, his purpose is bound up with the flock. The priest only returns to Jesus with the flock.
“The pure heart isn't lonely because he dwells with God,” he added.
He asks for prayers of continual renewal for himself and his fellow priests.
“The bishop prays, ‘May the Lord renew deep within you the spirit of holiness.’ The bishop prays for that as he's ordaining us. The readers of the North Texas Catholic can pray for that the Lord would renew within me and my brothers and in all priests the spirit of holiness today and for the rest of our lives.”