St. Monica Indy
Staff & Leaders

Todd Goodson

I was raised Catholic in Bloomington, IN and attended St. Charles Catholic grade school and Church. This was also where I made my First Communion and Confirmation. For the most part, I practiced my faith all my life; however the degree of attention which I gave it may have varied in intensity. I was always in a pretty religious family; things like attending Mass, personal prayer times, grace before meals—these were never presented as options to us, as much as we tried to make them optional. When I graduated from high school in Bloomington, I attended a Catholic school in Ohio and obtained a degree in Psychology. I worked for a few years in the mental health field, and dabbled a little in music, which had always been a hobby and something I enjoyed. Things began to move towards priesthood when I was twenty-five or so. Through a series of life experiences that had culminated at that point, I began to seriously reconsider my life’s direction. This led to some faith questioning and whether God had a big enough role in my life. I began to attend daily Mass, develop some sort of prayer routine, and to consider that if my life was to accomplish what I thought it should, then perhaps God should guide it, not me. I was provided with an opportunity to study theology for one year at the International Theological Institute in Gaming, Austria. In what for me was a pretty radical change of direction, I left my job and entered school again. It was during this time that I privately began to consider more seriously a vocation to the priesthood. After my year in Austria, I returned home and I spent the summer discerning a vocation to be a priest. In an interesting discernment turn of events (see link below) I made the decision to affiliate with the Archdiocese of Indianapolis as a seminarian and they accepted me. In 1997, I began my first year at St. Meinrad Seminary and after five years I was ordained to the priesthood in 2002. I have only been a priest for seven years, but since ordination I have ministered in quite a variety of parishes. I have been the pastor of some of the smallest parishes in the Archdiocese (Our Lady of Providence or St. Denis, Jennings County) to now one of the largest, St. Monica. In the five years I have had as a pastor, two themes have emerged that have always been important to me: 1) a shared and felt unity, and 2) a shared and felt ownership of parish and its ministries. While offering this brief overview of my life, I look forward to my story becoming part of our story as a Catholic Christian community seeking to proclaim the love of Christ in the world around us.