LEWISTON – For Gregory Dube, finding his way as a priest came slowly.

As a kid, he was an altar boy in his home parish, St. Patrick’s Church in Lewiston. He didn’t think of himself as priest material.

“In middle school, being a public school, you would never say you wanted to be a priest,” he said. “The kids would be like, ‘What, are you crazy?'”

But he was in eighth grade when an offhand remark from a monsignor – blessing throats during the feast of Saint Blais – befuddled him.

“One day, Greg, you will do this,” the priest told him.

“I was like, ‘Yeah, right,'” Dube said, laughing as he recalled the image. “That always stuck with me.”

After finishing high school, he attended the University of Maine at Augusta, picking up a four-year degree in business administration because it felt vaguely like the thing to do. He went to work for a short time at a Lewiston insurance agency. He left when the internship ended, even though he was offered a full-time job.

“They were great to work for, though I personally didn’t like the work,” he said.

He then took a job as the assistant general manager of Hudson Bus Lines.

“I often said to myself, there has to be more to life than this,” he said. “It was this constant routine. I wasn’t getting much meaning out of this.”

Meanwhile, he was serving on boards in his church. When he met a seminarian – “I hadn’t seen a young face in the priesthood in a long time” – he began to picture himself studying theology.

“I thought, ‘Wow. I could actually do that,'” he said.

He talked with his parish priest, who suggested that Dube apply to the diocese. The priest counseled him not to worry about all those vows, of poverty, obedience and celibacy. That would be years away.

The application process was exhaustive. He began in October 2001, just as the diocese in Maine and others across the country were facing sex scandals.

The application included the kind of information that typically shows up on a bid for college, but it went further.

It included a spiritual autobiography, “writing about yourself on your spiritual journey, from the time that you can remember to the present,” he said. There was a physical exam and a battery of tests with a psychologist.

“You’ve got your normal kind of personality inventories,” Dube recalled. There was probing into family history and psycho-sexual development “to make sure sure that there isn’t anything abnormal going on there.”

There was also a meeting with a six-person panel and, ultimately, a sit-down with the bishop, then the Most Rev. Joseph Gerry, who gave his approval.

The diocese sent Dube to the Catholic University of America’s Theological College in Washington, D.C.

In the urban school, Dube learned to live among 80 seminarians. And as he put on the collar for the first time, he learned that every priest is, inside, a regular guy.

He gazed at himself in the mirror and thought, “Me?”

Gregory Dube

Age: 28

Home town: Greene

Parents: Peter and Pat Dube

Education: Leavitt Area High School; University of Maine at Augusta; Catholic University of America’s Theological College, Washington, D.C.