For Fr Andy Richardson, the journey to priesthood was not a straight line. It was marked by early faith, deep loss, years of drifting, and, ultimately, a grace that would not let him go. Now Pastoral Director at St Mary’s College, Oscott, Fr Andy helps accompany seminarians...
For Fr Andy Richardson, the journey to priesthood was not a straight line. It was marked by early faith, deep loss, years of drifting, and, ultimately, a grace that would not let him go.
Now Pastoral Director at St Mary’s College, Oscott, Fr Andy helps accompany seminarians as they prepare for priesthood. He oversees pastoral placements, supports men in formation one-to-one, and helps them begin to put into practice the life they are being called to live. But long before he was helping others discern their vocation, he was wrestling with his own.
Raised Catholic, Fr Andy remembers being drawn to Christ from an early age. “There was something about Jesus I was really attracted by,” he says. That attraction was real, but it was tested early. When his father died suddenly while Fr Andy was still a teenager, everything shifted. The faith that had once felt natural became harder to hold onto.
Like many young people navigating grief and upheaval, he drifted. Church became distant. University life carried him further away, and by his own account he lived “this wild kind of student life.” Yet even in that period, the Lord had not stopped searching for him.
Looking back, Fr Andy can see that God was at work through friendships, conversations, and moments of quiet confrontation. One exchange in particular stayed with him. A Christian friend asked him two simple questions: did he believe in God, and did he believe that God loved him? Fr Andy recalls his answer clearly. Yes, he believed in God. But no, he did not believe that God loved him.
“That kind of summed up where I was really,” he says.
It is a striking moment, because it gets to the heart of vocation: not simply belief in God as an idea, but the gradual discovery that God knows us, loves us, and calls us personally. For Fr Andy, that discovery did not come all at once. It came through a time of struggle.
After university, while working as an engineer, he reached what he simply describes as “a depression, hit a low.” It was there, in a place of weakness rather than strength, that he began to hear the Lord calling him back. He started reading the Catechism. He spoke with a priest. He made a long confession. Slowly, patiently, the foundations of faith were rebuilt.
And then another question began to emerge: not only whether he believed, but what God was asking of him.
The call to priesthood did not arrive as an instant certainty. It began more like an interruption. A persistent thought. A possibility he would rather have ignored. “It just would not go away,” he says. “I was resistant to it, but it was a strong kind of niggle.”
There is something deeply consoling in that honesty. Vocation is not always dramatic. Sometimes it begins as a restlessness that keeps returning, a call that remains even when we would prefer another path. Fr Andy’s story is not one of instant clarity, but of steady surrender.
That surrender eventually led him to Oscott, where he trained for the priesthood from 2002 to 2008. Years later, he has returned not as a seminarian, but as a formator: a priest helping others listen for the same voice that once called him home.
What makes Fr Andy’s witness especially compelling is the way his own story has shaped his priesthood. He speaks with realism, tenderness, and pastoral depth because he knows from experience what it is to struggle, to doubt, to drift, and to be drawn back by mercy. His vocation was born not out of perfection, but out of encounter.
That is part of what gives hope to others who may be discerning their own path. Fr Andy does not speak as someone who had everything worked out from the beginning. He speaks as someone who learned, step by step, that God is faithful — and that His call is stronger than our confusion.
His advice to those who are searching is simple and grounded: do not try to solve your whole life at once. Begin with the next step. Speak to someone. Pray honestly. Be open. At some point, courage will be needed.
“It’s a step at a time,” he says, “but you’re going to have to take a step of courage at some point.”
In the end, his story is one of return: return to faith, return to the Church, return to the truth that God’s love is not abstract but personal. And from that return came a vocation that continues to bear fruit in the lives of others.
For anyone wondering whether God still calls, Fr Andy’s story offers a clear and hopeful answer: yes - patiently, persistently, and often in the very places where we feel weakest.
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