MADAWASKA – Paul Henry Dumais will be ordained a Roman Catholic priest today in his home parish, the first such ordination at St. Thomas Aquinas Church since 1985.

Dumais, 32, grew up in Madawaska and spent three years working on a farm in Kansas and one year teaching school in New Hampshire before answering the call to the priesthood.

The 11 a.m. ordination Mass will be the first for Maine’s new bishop, the Most Rev. Richard Malone. Dumais will be a diocesan parish priest in Maine, but he did not know earlier this week where his first assignment will be.

Dumais said the calling to become a priest started many years ago when he was growing up in Madawaska. He was influenced by such priests as Monsignor Gilman Chaloult and the Rev. Robert Vaillancourt, both of whom served the St. Thomas Aquinas Parish.

“My turning point was attending a World Youth event in Denver, Colorado, that was hosted by Pope John Paul II,” Dumais said Wednesday. During that 1993 event, the pope “prayed that young people would have the courage to give a definitive ‘yes’ to the service to God. Those words seemed to apply to me,” he said. “I began to pray for the grace of a vocation.”

As a young man in Madawaska, Dumais had worked with local priests, the Christian Life Center at Frenchville and with youth organizations throughout the state. He said he discovered, through the years, the “dignity of the vocation of living as a priest.” He believes in the full weight of teaching the Eucharist and “to offering my life to the service of the church.”

He was ordained a deacon in June 2003. Since then, he has served at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Portland and St. Edward the Confessor Parish in Medfield, Mass., while continuing his formation at St. John’s Seminary in Brighton, Mass.

Dumais received his bachelor’s degree in theology from the Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, his master’s degree in philosophy from Boston College, and his master of divinity in theology from St. John’s. He graduated from Madawaska High School in 1990.