Please join us for this quarterly open-access meeting — Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/8535505703?omn=87141381513 — to learn more about the life of a missionary priest, preparation for that special ministry, and first-hand experiences with multiple orders of women religious and men religious as well as with lay people who serve in missions in Central America and Africa.
Although Father Michael Della Penna is a 2X Serra Club guest speaker (July 2022, December 2023), we have never asked him to speak specifically on a topic that our Serra Club has not presented before, or in recent memory — the vocation of a missionary priest.
We encourage you to share this invitation with family, friends, parishioners, colleagues, and pastors. We especially urge you to share this with high school and college guidance counselors and chaplains who could benefit from this information as they guide students considering a call to religious life as a missionary priest, sister, or brother.
Ordained a priest in the Archdiocese of Boston in 1999, Father Michael Della Penna spent 11 years as director of the Franciscan Valley of the Angels Orphanage in Guatemala before assignment to his Boston home parish in January 2020. Prior to Guatemala, he completed multiple assignments for his Immaculate Conception Province in the United States and Canada, including associate pastor, retreat director, and definitor. He again serves as one of five definitors for his province, having been elected during its Chapter this past summer. His specific responsibility in that provincial leadership role is continuous formation.
Missionary life in some of the world’s most impoverished locations can be more than challenging in many ways, but it has its hopeful, joyful, and positive outcomes, as well. A visitor to Valley of the Angels Orphanage today will meet children filled with gratitude for their safety, housing, meals, clothing, health care, education, and faith-filled daily lives. They enjoy an environment that promotes their academic aspirations, provides productive training in three vocational education programs that Father Michael introduced, and, most of all, surrounds them with authentic Franciscan love and human warmth where our Catholic faith and values are a dominant spiritual presence. Father Michael continues his association with Valley by his own mission trips and by leading St. Leonard Parish’s Guatemala Mission Group on its visits each year to work with the students and to minister among the very poor who are living in unimaginable conditions.
Father Michael is board chair and spiritual director of Silent Children’s Mission, founded and based in Toronto. He spends an annual missionary month in Malawi, Africa, and he has worked alongside close to 15 religious orders in their ministries. Most of the area’s missions, children’s homes, and medical facilities are directly administered by communities of women religious, who join communities of brothers, local priests, Secular Franciscans, and lay missionaries in their discipleship.
Philly Serrans and friends will recognize Father Michael from his first visit in July 2022 and, again, in December 2023 when he spoke from St. Leonard’s on the 800th Anniversary of the first live nativity established by St. Francis of Assisi in Greccio, Italy. His parishioners know him as a gifted homilist-teacher, and with a particular enthusiasm for preaching on Pope St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. He has established several strong parish ministries, with an emphasis on youths and young adults. He is also pastor and board member of the PreK-6 St. John School, located within walking distance of St. Leonard’s and along Boston’s Freedom Trail.
Father Michael has taught at St. Bonaventure University, and he has lectured and conducted retreats throughout Africa, Canada, Central America, Haiti, and Italy. He is a regular monthly celebrant of Holy Mass videotaped by the Boston-based Catholic TV (
https://www.catholictv.org).
He led pilgrimages to Assisi for 12 years, and he currently guides pilgrimages to Medjugorje, where he recently celebrated Mass (8/8/25) (
https://video.marytv.tv/watch/mgckiYsaNZv) during the 36
th Annual Youth Festival.
Father Della Penna earned baccalaureate degrees in psychology (Bridgewater State) and philosophy, completed a Master of Divinity degree from Weston Jesuit, studied at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto, and earned his licentiate and doctorate degrees in Franciscan Spirituality from the Pontifical University Antonianum in Rome. He is the author of The Crucified Knight: The Spiritual Odyssey of St. Francis of Assisi According to Henry of Avranches (Tau Publishing, 2014).
