As teenagers growing up in northeastern Pennsylvania, brothers Michael and Robert Bollinger had a secret they shared with no one, not even each other.

Each was interested in becoming a priest.

“We’re German-Irish. We just don’t say anything,” said Michael, now 30 and now known as Father Mike. “You should see our house. It’s quite quiet.”

The secret is out now: In May, the brothers were ordained a week apart, one for the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey, and one for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

To say this outcome wasn’t predictable is putting it mildly. As boys, they gravitated to sports. They dated girls in high school. As young kids into adolescence, neither considered himself all that pious.

“My mom dragged us to church,” Father Mike told the Register.

So when Michael, the older one, went out to breakfast with his mother, Karen, on a Saturday morning shortly after finishing his freshman year in college and told her he had an announcement to make, she had an inkling of what it might be — he was probably going to marry his girlfriend of three years.

She wasn’t expecting him to say he was about to enter a seminary. Nor did she expect her younger son, now known as Father Rob, to make a similar announcement a couple of years later.

How’d it happen?

Youth Program

The Bollinger brothers credit their mom and a youth group at their parish.

Karen Bollinger, who manages software applications for a company that creates computer programs for doctors, is a lifelong Catholic and churchgoer. Her husband John, a recently retired welding inspector at an engineering firm and a former commercial diver, is neither. So Karen — who treasures the app MassTimes.org, which locates Masses all over the world — took the four Bollinger children to Sunday Mass by herself.

It was neither optional nor popular.

But the boys’ interest in the faith developed after Michael joined a youth group at their parish, St. Agnes in Sellersville, Pennsylvania, about 30 miles north of Philadelphia.

St. Agnes and a neighboring parish, Our Lady of the Sacred Heart in Hilltown, had (and still have) a combined Catholic Youth Organization that was known more for sports than religion. About 20 years ago, the head of it asked Gregg Hoyer, a member of the parish, to try to add a faith component to it.

“We would pray at practice, and after practice I would give a little talk,” said Hoyer, 66, who years later (in 2020) was ordained a deacon. “The coaches were open to it, and the kids seemed to like it.”

In time, the after-practice talks led to a Bible prayer night, which started with reading a couple of chapters of the Bible followed by playing outside and then ice cream. Once a month, the kids would have dinner together, go deep into a particular Church teaching, and then finish with adoration of the Eucharist.

The kids called the youth group “BPI” — Bible, prayer, ice cream.

They made mission trips to eastern Kentucky and retreat trips to programs hosted by Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio.

“My thing was, let’s focus really hard on Christ and have a relationship with him,” Deacon Hoyer told the Register.

“You’ve got to keep focused on heaven. That’s the No. 1 thing. There’s nothing more important than your relationship with Christ,” he said.

He emphasized the Bible, Eucharistic adoration, Mass and service to others.

“There’s nothing more important than trying to get people to heaven,” Deacon Hoyer said. “You’ve got to tell them about it. And you’ve got to serve them.”

The Bollinger boys were inspired by Hoyer’s message.

“He transmitted a vision of faith for our life. I could see there was something real here, with all this faith stuff, all this Jesus stuff,” Father Mike said.

Father Rob told the Register that Hoyer opened up a world beyond sports and the other things he was mostly interested in at the time.

“The biggest reason it connected with me is that it was my first time seeing a normal man’s man be all in with the faith. His commitment/investment was contagious,” Father Rob said by text.

“Developing friends from that youth group fueled the same idea by surrounding myself with other high-school guys who found interest in the faith,” he said.

Out of the 50 to 60 kids in the youth group, the Bollinger boys became priests, a girl is now a Carmelite nun, another girl is now a Capuchin Franciscan nun, and Hoyer’s son is a Franciscan brother about three years from being ordained a priest.

Hoyer told the Register that the Bollinger brothers were popular and attentive in the youth group, adding that he expected “big things” from them. But he never saw them as future priests.

Father Mike

Father Mike, who is 6-foot-5, played golf, basketball and volleyball at Pennridge High School, a regional public school in Perkasie. He was the center on the boys’ volleyball team his junior year which went to the state championship final.

After high school, he went to Virginia Tech to study mechanical engineering, full of ambition and determined to get straight As. He had a serious girlfriend.

But toward the end of his freshman year, he felt a calling to be a priest. 

“It was tearing me up inside. It affected my relationship with my girlfriend,” he said.

He met with a priest at the university’s Newman Center. The next day, he broke up with his girlfriend. He quit his summer job.

He soon entered St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, intending to become a diocesan priest for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

But a spiritual crisis in the seminary came to a head during a 30-day silent retreat a couple of years in. He didn’t question his vocation, but a lack of peace in his soul stirred him up inside. He decided to leave the seminary.

Before he left, though, he encountered lay members of the Neocatechumenal Way, founded in 1964 in Spain, which, among other things, introduces small communities within waning parishes, often in depressed areas, to try to bring them back to life.

Now unencumbered by school, seminary or a regular job, he went on a mission at St. Joachim Parish in New Britain, Connecticut, going door-to-door inviting people to come to church and giving talks on the faith.

During that time he had a sort of conversion within his calling. Among other things, he came to see that he had unresolved anger, which he decided was unjust and needed to be replaced with gratitude.

A key factor in his healing was serving people living in difficult circumstances while living in difficult circumstances himself.

“I ended up extremely happy,” Father Mike said.

“I saw very quickly how much God was doing with me and how much he was helping me,” he said.

The insecurity of his existence with no paycheck forced him to rely more on God.

“We rely on Providence. For a year and a half, I was begging for gas to get around,” Father Mike said.

After the two-year stint, he entered a Neocatechumenal Way seminary in the Archdiocese of Newark. Ordained on May 24, he has been assigned to St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church in Bergenfield, New Jersey, about 90 miles northwest of his brother’s new parish..

He is a priest of the archdiocese, but by agreement between the archdiocese and the Neocatechumenal Way; after a few years, he can ask the archbishop to allow him to go on a mission elsewhere if he is needed.

He credits the Neocatechumenal Way with saving his vocation.

“I needed extra help, and the community was the help that I needed. I wouldn’t have made it without it,” Father Mike said.

Father Rob

Father Rob, 27, who also stands tall at 6-foot-3, ran track at Pennridge High School. He dated a girl in high school, and he envisioned himself as a husband and father.

But another calling won out. 

As he neared graduation, he decided he didn’t want to bother with college because he knew he wanted to enter the seminary right away.

He told the Register that he and his brother embraced their calling to the priesthood wholeheartedly as soon as they realized it was real.

“We were both pretty serious about not wasting our time and going through the motions of life,” said Father Rob.

Looking back, his vocation seemed the more obvious of the two, said John Bollinger, their father.

“My wife always said she thought Robert would be the one because he’d take his Bible to the beach,” John told the Register.

As part of his seminary training, Father Rob would go to Philadelphia’s Center City and hand out bags of food to the needy.

“I really kind of fell in love with service to the poor, living in the city,” Father Rob said.

Ordained on May 17, Father Rob has been assigned as a parochial vicar at Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary Catholic Church in northeast Philadelphia.

During an interview, he said he enjoys preaching while celebrating Mass.

“I love everything about preaching, from praying with the Scriptures to forming and re-forming a homily and seeing it affect people differently,” said Father Rob.

A Priests’ Mom

In an interview with the Register, Karen Bollinger described the first announcement, from her son Michael, as a spiritual experience.

“For myself, at that moment, because it’s your son saying he wants to become a priest, you’re either all in, to your heart and your core, or you’ve just led your son to something that’s fake,” she said.

“So for me, it was an accelerator for my faith. Because it was a choice that I had to make at the moment, in my heart,” she said, detailing such questions to consider: “Is Jesus God? Is the Catholic Church the church he founded? Is it a lie?”

“Or is it the truth, and therefore being a priest makes 100% sense. And you’re truly being called by God,” she emphasized.

Father Rob told the Register his mother showed her children by example how to follow God.

“She definitely lived out her faith every day of her life,” Father Rob said.

Both priests see their priesthood and the way they came to it as directed by God.

“God wanted this to happen. And whatever circumstances or designs or feelings or plans that any of us had, the truth is that God creates out of nothing,” Father Mike said.

“Because it wasn’t my plan to become a priest. In many ways, it wasn’t my brother’s plan to become a priest. It wasn’t my mother’s plan that we become priests. It wasn’t my dad’s plan,” Father Mike said. “It was what God wanted — because he knew it was the best way to save us.”