2025 Saint Paul Seminary Distinguished Alumni Award honoree reflects on an unexpected call to priesthood and four decades of Church leadership.
Briefly
- A simple moment of prayer during seminary became a lifelong spiritual anchor for Bishop Peter Christensen of the Diocese of Boise.
- His journey from artist to bishop illustrates what he views as a radical surrender to God’s call and the surprising paths it has taken.
- Today, he encourages seminarians and priests to “pray often and be kind,” offering hope in a hurting world.
Bishop Peter Christensen’s favorite story from seminary starts out rather depressing.
It was January 1982, the kind of bone-cold, sunless winter only Minnesota can deliver. Then-seminarian Peter Christensen sat alone in his room in Cretin Hall at The Saint Paul Seminary, surrounded by 90 fellow students but feeling utterly isolated.
“I thought, ‘Gosh, I’m not doing well. I feel so alone,’” he recalls.
Looking for consolation, he left his room to pray. As he descended the stairs, something caught his eye: a forgotten whiskey-barrel planter filled with soil from the fall. And there, perhaps miraculously, bloomed white geraniums streaked with red.
“I found myself on my knees looking into the center of these little flowers,” said Christensen, a recipient of The Saint Paul Seminary’s 2025 Distinguished Alumni Award. “How beautiful in the stark, stark, dreary, dismal day.”
He walked to the small chapel in nearby Grace Hall and began to pray.
“I could kind of hear the Lord say, ‘Who’s done this to you?’ Meaning, who has put on this extra baggage in your life?” remembers Christensen, who this year celebrated the 40th anniversary of his priestly ordination. “‘Can you hand it over to me?’”
He did. One by one, inwardly, he laid emotional suitcases at the feet of Christ. Each one “became something smaller than a fly on a fingernail” and was flicked away.
And then, a few steps away, the moment deepened.
“I went to my mailbox … and in there was one note card,” Christensen said, referencing a mailing from an older woman who was taking theology classes at the seminary. “It was a glossy photograph of the exact same looking flowers I’d just seen earlier … and it simply said, ‘Trust in God’s love for you today.’”
[RELATED: View photos from throughout Bishop Christensen’s life, including The Saint Paul Seminary 2025 Distinguished Alumni Awards]
An artist’s unlikely calling
That moment of beauty and surrender marked a deepening in the life of a man whose road to priesthood was anything but straight.
Christensen had already lived a full professional résumé: graphic designer, dental lab tech, shoe salesman, art store manager, even self-employed potter. He believed that “my biggest dream was fulfilled in becoming a graphic artist.”
But it wasn’t.
“It was a tectonic shift in my life … from being a graphic artist to eventually becoming a priest and now a bishop.” — Bishop Peter Christensen, Diocese of Boise
He began to ask a deeper question: “What is my deepest desire?”
The answer startled him.
“For the first time since fourth grade, where I promised God, when I grew up, [I would] be a priest … I thought, ‘I can’t believe I’m saying this, Lord, but it is to be a priest.’”
Within months, Christensen was in seminary formation, first at St. John Vianney College Seminary, then later at The Saint Paul Seminary.
“It put me into a whole different world,” he says. “It was a tectonic shift in my life … from being a graphic artist to eventually becoming a priest and now a bishop.”
Formation meets transformation
Formation taught Christensen leadership rooted in presence, not prestige, he says. The seminary’s rhythm of prayer, study and fraternal life shaped not only his vocation but his future impact.
He would return years later as rector of SJV, overseeing its growth into the largest college seminary in the country at the time.
Bishop of the Diocese of Boise since 2014 (having also served as bishop of the Diocese of Superior, Wisconsin in the seven years prior), Christensen’s perspective stretches far and wide. But he continues to draw from that moment in the chapel, and the wisdom of late mentor priest Msgr. Ambrose Hayden, former rector of the Cathedral of St. Paul, who once told him: “Pray often and be kind to your people.”
That’s Christensen’s main advice for the priests and seminarians under his guidance today, he said. The Diocese of Boise currently has seven seminarians (Ethan Shultz, Ryan Olenick, John Dyson, Guillermo Gutiérrez, Ronald Onyekwelu, Nathan Ribb and Ian Willnerd) preparing for the priesthood at The Saint Paul Seminary.
A bishop’s blueprint for a fractured world
In a phone conversation on the 24th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, one day after the assassination of political activist Charlie Kirk on a Utah college campus, and 16 days following what’s believed to be the first United States Catholic school mass shooting at Annunciation in Minneapolis, Christensen decries what he says has shifted from “cancel culture” to “cancel-out culture.”
The Church’s task is both urgent and eternal: to evangelize and to heal, he says.
“There is so much need for healing. There are so many people living with fear and anxiety and doubt and confusion, questioning who they are, living the lie that they’re not loved. … Encouragement is an action of the Holy Spirit. And when we encourage people, we live in that spirit of God.” — Bishop Peter Christensen, recipient of 2025 Saint Paul Seminary Distinguished Alumni Award
“There is so much need for healing,” said Christensen, who was born and raised in California but moved to the Twin Cities shortly after high school with his mother and three sisters. “There are so many people living with fear and anxiety and doubt and confusion, questioning who they are, living the lie that they’re not loved.”
And encouragement, he says, is the antidote, referencing Hebrews 3:13 when St. Paul implores his audience to “encourage each other daily.”
“Encouragement is an action of the Holy Spirit. And when we encourage people, we live in that spirit of God,” Christensen said.
Now, more than 40 years after finding those flowers in the hallway, Bishop Christensen still lives that message.
And for all who walk the uncertain road of discernment or ministry, he hopes his story offers one quiet invitation:
“Trust in God’s love for you today.”