We invite readers to send short stories about the ways in which their lives have been personally blessed by the life and work of priests and religious in our diocese.

By Karina Fabian

For Father Valentine Zdilla, serving as a priest for the Diocese of Helena is like returning to his childhood.

Father Zdilla lived his first 18 years in southwest Pennsylvania, where his father was a steelworker and his mother owned a restaurant. They were faithful churchgoers, and he has fond memories of the community and priests of St. Ann’s. “I was very attentive to the sights, sounds, even the smells. I used to play priest in my room,” he said.

When he graduated from high school, however, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, so he opted to indulge his wanderlust and head out to California, where he worked in the food service industry at ABC studios. It was a fantastic experience. “I had 30 employees, and we served up to 1,200 people a day. I got a great education about people, about service, about work and about the struggles people could have, especially not knowing if their jobs were secure.”

He enjoyed his work, the money and the traveling he did, but he began to wonder if there was more. He had lost some of his church-going discipline, but not his faith, and he began to wonder if there wasn’t something more to the priestly play-pretend he’d done as a child. With the encouragement of a priest friend and another friend’s cryptic “You’re not getting any younger,” he decided to take a chance and in 1989, entered St. John’s Seminary. Because he needed his college degree as well, he graduated seven years later and was ordained in 1996.

He served in five parishes for the Los Angeles Archdiocese where he worked with a wide variety of people and situations: inner city parishes, large Spanish-speaking and migrant populations, parishes with sponsored schools, even one with 5,000 registered families. “Seminary was great, but we learn to be priest by the people we serve. They’re our best teachers,” he said.

While interning at his first parish, he met a couple who planned to retire in Montana. They invited him to visit their home in Polson. “I fell in love with everything: the beauty, the people and especially the church. It reminded me of my call to priesthood as a boy growing up in rural Pennsylvania.” For eight years, he would return to Montana in the summers, bringing his faithful companion, a black lab named Hector.

In 2004, he asked Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles to allow him a two-year discernment leave to see if he was called to be a priest in Montana, and in July 2005, he came to the Helena diocese. He served as administrator of Immaculate Conception Parish in Polson with Sacred Heart in Ronan and St. Joseph Mission in Charlo.

In March 2006, he moved to Bozeman as pastor of Resurrection Parish, where he also serves the campus at Montana State University. In June 2006, he officially became a priest of the diocese.


Published in The Montana Catholic, Vol. 23, No. 2, February 16, 2007.