The Next Good Step: Kurt Bragg's Journey to First Profession

Kurt Bragg, here photographed in his white Novice Habit.

Kurt Bragg likes to see the whole road ahead.

“I'm a 30,000 foot view person," he says. "I like to see the road and all the pathways to get there before I make decisions."

His vocation journey? It hasn't worked that way.

On August 1, 2026, Kurt will make his First Profession of Vows as an Augustinian, promising to live poverty, chastity and obedience in the Augustinian way of life. After spending a year in the novitiate, he will officially become an Augustinian friar.

It is a moment that Kurt has been moving toward for much of his life, although the path has been anything but direct.

Kurt was not raised Catholic. His first encounter with the Church came as a child in Texas, when his non-Catholic parents enrolled him in a Catholic grade school because they wanted him to receive a good education.

He remembers attending Mass and watching the priest elevate the Eucharist during the Consecration.

“I didn't know at the time - at 8 or 9 years old - what that meant, but I knew it was something special,” he says.

His family later moved to Kansas, and Catholicism largely disappeared from his life. Years passed before Kurt found his way back to Mass. And when he did, it happened almost by accident.

As a young adult working at a restaurant in Wichita, Kurt was surrounded by Catholic coworkers, though he did not think much of it. One day, the restaurant’s bookkeeper invited another employee to attend Mass with her family. Kurt waited for her to invite him next. She didn’t.

“I said, hey, I'll go to mass with you on Sunday," he recalled. She agreed and he went. Smething immediately clicked.

“That was it. That Sunday was it for me. I knew. I knew that this was the spot for me, and so that was the turning moment.”

After Mass, Kurt asked when people came back. The following Sunday, he was told. But, if he really wanted, there was Mass again the next morning.

“I said, 'All right, we're coming tomorrow.'”

Kurt began attending Mass regularly and soon entered the process of becoming Catholic. He threw himself into his new faith, discovering Eucharistic Adoration, wearing the brown scapular, praying with holy cards and a community of people who gave him what he described as countless “on ramps” into a deeper life with Christ.

His life began to change. He changed the way he spoke and the things he watched. He began inviting coworkers to church. His conversion caused tension within his non-Catholic family and cost him friendships, but he continued moving forward.

Then, about two years after becoming Catholic, Kurt woke suddenly from a deep sleep around 5:30am one morning.

“And the Lord just woke me up out of this dead sleep and said, 'Kurt, I want you to be a priest and a religious.'”

The call was clear. The road ahead was not.

Kurt was dating someone at the time and had never seriously imagined himself as a priest or religious. He went almost immediately to a nearby church, found a priest hearing confessions and told him what had happened.

That began years of discernment.

Eventually, Kurt entered formation with the Conventual Franciscans. He believed religious life was where God was leading him, but shortly after entering, his mother was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of dementia. His family needed him.

Kurt left formation and returned home to help care for his mother. Although he knew caring for her was a good and necessary thing, leaving religious life was painful.

“I tell you, that was a real struggle for me. I really felt like I was divorcing the Lord by coming back.”

His mother would live for another 12 years, longer than expected for someone with her form of dementia. Kurt came to see those years as a gift.

“It was a grace to have two full experiences with the same person, you know,” he said. “I had the same mother, but two completely different experiences.”

Kurt moved forward with life. He built a successful career, worked in research and consulting, and dated. He tried to accept that perhaps the chapter of his life involving religious vocation had closed.

But the call never fully disappeared and the Lord kept calling and kept calling.

After his mother’s death, two people in Kurt’s professional life independently approached him and suggested that God might be calling him to something more. This time, Kurt listened. He found a spiritual director and began exploring religious communities again.

Then a video appeared in his YouTube feed.

It was six minutes and 32 seconds long: a glimpse into a day in the life of an Augustinian in formation.

Kurt ignored it.

The next day, it appeared again.

He ignored it again.

On the third day, when the same video appeared once more, Kurt finally watched.

“There's something compelling about these guys, like they seem like approachable men, men looking for the Lord and really striving to live in community,” he remembered thinking.

It was enough to make a phone call.

That call eventually led Kurt to Fr. Tom McCarthy, O.S.A., and into discernment with the Augustinians. About eight months later, Kurt faced another decision. He had been exploring several religious communities and assumed he could apply to more than one, almost like applying to colleges though he soon learned otherwise.

Choosing the Augustinians meant closing other doors. For someone who wanted to see every possible road before making a decision, it was a moment of surrender.

But Kurt had begun to understand something about the way God had been leading him all along.

“He's not asking you to make all the steps. He's asking you to make the next good step.”

Now, after completing his novitiate year, Kurt is preparing for the next good step.

As First Profession approaches, he speaks with gratitude about the people who have accompanied him and the Augustinian friars whose lives have inspired his own vocation.

“I think of, you know, the giants that I've encountered in our Order,” Kurt said. “People like Bishop Dan [Turley], people like Father Sam [Joutras], people like Brother David Marshall, you know, people who I deeply respect, that I'm going to be calling brother.”

There are still questions ahead. After professing vows, Kurt will begin theological studies and continue discerning how God is calling him to serve. But for perhaps the first time, he does not need to see the entire road.

“I don't know all the answers, and I think I, in some ways, stopped trying to have that 30,000 foot view, but rather rely on God's grace to say again, 'What's the next good step into this relationship with him? And where is He leading?'”

On August 1, 2026 Kurt will follow where God is leading him as he makes his First Profession of Vows.