I am Fr. David Fulton, pastor of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Constance, Nebraska, St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Fordyce, Nebraska, and St. Boniface Catholic Church in Menominee, Nebraska.  Before this assignment, I was at St. Leo’s in Omaha and St. Bonaventure’s in Columbus as an associate pastor.  I was ordained in 2002.

After being born in Clarksville, Tennessee and living in Georgia for a couple of years, I moved with my family to Bardwell, Texas, where I lived until I was seven years old.  We then moved to Huntsville, Texas, where I spent most of my grade school and high school years.  In the summer before my senior year of high school, I moved to San Antonio with my parents.  At that time, I joined the Army Reserve and was attached to the 114^th Evacuation Hospital.  Three days after my graduation from high school, I went to Basic Training at Fort Bliss in El Paso and then returned to San Antonio and attended the Academy of Health Sciences at Fort Sam Houston, where I attended medical laboratory technician school.  After completing my military training, I entered the University of Texas at San Antonio in the spring of 1989.  I majored in Biology and Pre-Optometry.  In November of 1990, my reserve unit was activated for Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm.  On 1 January 1991, our unit was transported to Saudi Arabia for a five-and-a-half month tour of duty.  Despite missing a whole academic year, I still graduated in four years.  During my senior year of college, I worked for an optometrist in order to gain experience for optometry school.  During that year, I decided that I did not want to enter the profession.  Also, during that year, I started to take my faith life seriously and began to experience a real change of life.  I received the Sacrament of Confirmation the next year and soon was being asked by all kinds of people if I was going to be a priest.  The thought of becoming a priest had never crossed my mind.  However, people kept seeing it in me.  I ignored the idea of becoming a priest, because I thought that people were trying to do their part in fostering vocations to the priesthood.  It was only when two priests, who were strangers to me told me in confession that I was called to the priesthood that I felt that I should take steps to discern a priestly vocation.  Knowing in my heart that I was probably going to end up in a seminary, I was hesitant to take a full time job at the expense of someone else.  While I originally worked as a lab tech and phlebotomist at a San Antonio hospital, I, within a few months, started to substitute teach so that I would have more time to learn more about the Faith and to bolster my prayer life.  After several years of prayer and learning, and after a one-year stint working at a Catholic bookstore in San Antonio, I moved to the Omaha Archdiocese to enter its seminary program.  I spent my pre-Theology year at Kenrick Seminary in St. Louis before spending my four years in Theology at Mt. Angel Seminary in Mt. Angel, Oregon, where I achieved Master of Arts and Master of Divinity degrees.

As a priest, I am honored to celebrate the sacraments, especially the Mass, visiting the sick, teaching at school and I enjoy the variety of work in the priestly life. The priesthood is a very exalted vocation and with God’s help, I can do it justice through the way that I live it.