By Ana Rodriguez Soto - The Archdiocese of Miami

MIAMI | On the day Popes John XXIII and John Paul II were canonized, Father Rafael Capó posted a historical picture on his Facebook page: Himself, as a teenager, greeting John Paul II in Rome at the first World Youth Day in 1985.

Father Capó, then a junior in high school, was part of a delegation of young people from his native Puerto Rico to that World Youth Day.

“I had this small seed of a vocation since my early childhood,” recalled the director of the U.S. bishops' Southeast Regional Office for Hispanic Ministry. “But I was fighting with it. I was, in fact, thinking more of a girl that was part of our group than about a vocation.”

Then the pope began talking: Open your hearts wide to the Lord. Be not afraid to say “yes” to his call.

“Please shut up. I don’t want to hear this,” Father Capó recalls thinking. “I recognized it as the moment of a strong calling.”

Later, back in Puerto Rico, about to complete his senior year of high school, he decided to speak to a priest about that calling, “to get that out of my mind.”

After all, he had other plans, including accepting a scholarship to Yale University.

But when he went to speak to a priest he knew, “I said a couple of words and broke down in tears. I knew. This is ‘yes.’ Why am I fighting it?"

He remembers it was Feb. 2, 1986, the feast of the Presentation of the Lord, as he would discover later. Today, he calls it “the happiest day of my life.”

Ordained in 1996 for the Piarist Order, Father Capó had a number of opportunities to meet and speak with the future saint when he spent two years � 1994 to 1996 � studying in Rome, and helping out at the Office of Liturgical Celebrations.

“I had the opportunity of speaking with him many times. He left a big, big seal in my heart. All he did is a big part of my vocation,” Father Capó said.

What makes the story even more interesting is that he had no tickets to the papal audience that World Youth Day. Knowing he would be relegated to the far ends of St. Peter’s Square � if not farther away, in the Via della Conciliazione � he made a decision: “I’m going to get in.”

Along with another young man, also a member of the Puerto Rican delegation, he tried to sneak in with a group from an all-girls school. The Swiss Guard thwarted that plan. They tried again, this time asking for help from a group of Mexican religious. The Swiss Guard tried to thwart that plan, too, but the sisters prevailed.

“We got to be there right on first row, got an opportunity to speak with the pope,” Father Capó recalled.

Years later, he discovered that his friend also became a priest, for the Archdiocese of Boston.

“Just two of us got in. The two of us, we are priests,” Father Capó said.

No wonder, then, that for years before the official canonization, and to this day, “I pray to St. John Paul to intercede for my vocation, and many other Piarist and priestly vocations in the Church.”