2025 Vocations Awareness Supplement

Long journey of faith leads deacon from atheism to service in the Church

Deacon Michael Fish preaches a homily on Sept. 28 at a Mass at St. Boniface Church in Fulda. (Submitted Photo)

By Sean Gallagher

ST. MEINRAD—A quarter of a century ago, Deacon Michael Fish couldn’t have imagined himself believing in God, let alone serving the Church as a deacon.

In the spring of 2000, he set out on a journey of faith, vocation and ministry that led him and his wife Joy from their home in southern California to southern Indiana.

Along the way, Deacon Fish turned away from a life devoid of God to embrace a life wholly shaped by trust in him. He later discerned that God was calling him to serve the Church as a permanent deacon, being ordained in the Diocese of San Diego in 2010—a decade after his journey of faith had begun.

The path that led him and Joy to southern Indiana was shaped by another journey of faith—that of their son, Benedictine Brother Jean Fish when he discerned his vocation as a monk of Saint Meinrad Archabbey in St. Meinrad. (Related story: Monk finds his Benedictine vocation through prayer, community and art)

They moved to St. Meinrad in 2023, and Deacon Fish has been serving in St. Boniface Parish in Fulda and St. Meinrad Parish in St. Meinrad for the past 18 months.

‘I was blown away with who this Jesus was and what he said’

Deacon Fish grew up in southern California in a Jewish family. After taking part in his bar mitzvah when he was 13, he told his parents that he was no longer going to practice his Jewish faith, a decision which they accepted.

“For most of my adult life, I was, I would say, an atheist,” said Deacon Fish, 67, in an interview with The Criterion. “I had no God in my life, no faith at all.”

He and his wife Joy, born and raised a Catholic, married in 1980 in a civil ceremony. “I refused to get married in a church,” he said.

Deacon Fish and Joy have two sons—Scott, born in 1987, and Benedictine Brother Jean, born in 1990.

While Deacon Fish continued to reject any form of faith in God for himself, he allowed Joy to raise their sons as Catholics. In fact, he wanted the faith to be a part of their lives.

“I wanted my children to have what I lacked,” he said.

But when Scott was 13—the same age at which Deacon Fish had rejected his own Jewish faith—he announced to his father one Sunday morning that he was no longer going to Mass.

“I don’t know where this came from, but I looked at him and I said, ‘Well, I’m going to go. And if I go, you go,’ ” Deacon Fish recalled of his response to Scott’s announcement 25 years ago. “That’s how important it was to me that he have faith in his life and have God in his life.”

So, for the first time in his 20 years of being married to Joy, Deacon Fish attended Mass and continued to do so to provide a good example for Scott.

After about a month, Deacon Fish’s attending Mass with his family started to have an effect on him.

“I left the church and I just felt wonderful,” he said. “I felt incredible, actually.”

Deacon Fish had begun to believe in God. Yet he kept the beginnings of his belief to himself, not speaking of it even to Joy because he wasn’t sure if it would last.

But he soon ordered a Bible and had it delivered to the law firm where he worked as an attorney.

“It was a version where the words of Jesus were in red,” Deacon Fish explained. “And so I went right to the New Testament, which I’d never even heard of before, or read. I shut my door, and I spent the next eight hours reading everything in red. That’s all I did from Matthew to John, everything that Jesus said.”

The effect this had on him was clear.

“You could have picked me up off the floor,” Deacon Fish said. “I was blown away with who this Jesus was and what he said.”

He wasn’t the only person blown away by the entrance of God into his life.

“I was blown away,” said Joy, recalling when her husband told her that he had contacted her parish about taking part in what was then known as the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). “He had been so adamant about having no religion before. Then, it was just like, boom, God hit him all of a sudden on his head.”

‘I don’t know why you did this to me’

After first coming to believe in God, Deacon Fish dove in headfirst, learning as much as he could about the Catholic faith as quickly as he could.

Joy attended the RCIA sessions with him. It was an occasion for her to reinvigorate her own faith—and her relationship with her husband at the same time.

“He had all these questions, and he was doing all this reading,” she said. “I thought that I had to catch up. He knew more than I did. It was kind of a renewal for us in our marriage. We had something that was exciting to talk about.”

On April 22, 2000, Deacon Fish was received into the Church through the sacraments of initiation in a social hall at St. Gabriel Parish in Poway, Calif. The parish had not built its own church yet, so he was baptized in what he recalled as “a Walmart wading pool.”

“But, for me, it could have been the Jordan River,” Deacon Fish said. “I would have crawled on my knees to the parish to be baptized, if that’s what it took.”

Deacon Fish and Joy had their marriage convalidated in the Church soon after he was received into the Church.

He enjoyed RCIA so much in preparation for his own reception into the Church that he again took part in its sessions the next year at his parish. Then he started teaching in it and leading the parish RCIA program.

“Then a year later, I’m sitting in the back of the church and [my pastor] comes up to me and he says, ‘I want you to be a deacon,’ ” Deacon Fish remembered. “I had no idea what he was talking about.”

But, just like when he first explored the faith, he began learning about the diaconate. He also soon learned from the San Diego Diocese’s deacon office that he was too new in the faith to begin its deacon formation program.

“A couple of years later, the pastor came up to me and he says, ‘OK. It’s time. Call again,’ ” Deacon Fish said.

This time, in 2005, he was accepted into the diocese’s deacon formation program and was ordained five years later.

Joy accompanied Deacon Fish through all of his deacon formation classes. The experience strengthened their marriage just as her attending RCIA sessions had years earlier.

“We’d get out of class at 9 [o’clock] at night, we’d drive home, and we would talk all the way,” she said. “And then when we’d get home, we’d talk for hours about what we had learned. He had questions, and I had questions.”

As he approached his ordination, Deacon Fish experienced awe in the face of the journey that God had taken him on, but also determined to follow God’s call in his life.

“I said to the Lord, I said, ‘I don’t know why you did this to me. But … I’m ready,’ ” Deacon Fish recalled. “That’s how I always viewed it. This was the journey that I was supposed to be on.”

‘You are what you do’

That journey was affected by his life leading up to the start of it. And a large part of Deacon Fish’s life has been practicing law. He sees his work as an attorney as having had a good influence on his life and ministry as a deacon—especially in teaching and preaching.

“The art of lawyering is to take difficult concepts, either in the facts of the case or the law, and simplify them so that non-lawyers [jurors] or judges not familiar with that aspect of the law can readily grasp the relevant principles,” he said. “In much the same way, the art of teaching and preaching is to take difficult concepts, such as the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and simplify them so that they are meaningful to the people.”

And after having had such a powerful experience of baptism in his own life, Deacon Fish values preparing people for that sacrament and celebrating it. He keeps a list of the nearly 400 people he’s baptized, most of them infants, since he was ordained.

“I can’t tell you how sacraments work, but I can tell you they do change a person, because I experienced that as an adult,” he said. “How does this water with this prayer and this intention—how does that work? I have no idea, but I can tell you it does, because I’ve experienced that. I really was a different person after I was baptized. I could feel that.”

And he knows that he became a different person after he was ordained a deacon in 2010.

“You’re drawn to it because you are what you do,” Deacon Fish said. “You are what you think. And the more you visit the sick or participate in liturgy or whatever you do as a deacon, that becomes more who you are.”
 

(For more information on a vocation to the diaconate in the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, go to archindy.org/deacon.) †