W&L Alumnus Ordained as Deacon
Scott Sina was in the news last month for a couple of rather different reasons.
First, we wrote about his stolen Washington and Lee class ring, which was found in a Huntington, W.Va., backyard and successfully returned to him.
That story appeared a few weeks before Scott was featured in the Arlington, Va., Catholic Herald, which wrote about his spiritual journey from “the edge of atheism” to his ordination as a transitional deacon in the Catholic Church.
Scott holds both his undergraduate degree (political philosophy, Class of 1995) and law degree (Class of 2000) from W&L. He also earned a master’s degree in legal and political theory from University College in London in 1996.
As the story is told in the Catholic Herald, Scott’s time in London, especially staying at the Newman Center there, “kept me from going over the edge to atheism.”
It wasn’t until he’d begun practicing law, however, first in West Virginia (where his class ring was swiped) and then in Virginia Beach (where his firm did business law for the Richmond Diocese) that he began to attend Mass again. “It was like being called home,” he said.
After moving to a firm in northern Virginia, where he practiced commercial litigation and construction law, Scott got more involved with the church. He entered Mount St. Mary’s Seminary because, as he said in a Q&A on the Arlington Diocese website, “I finally felt that my attraction to the priesthood could not be ignored.”
And so Scott was ordained as a transitional deacon on June 1, in a ceremony at the Cathedral of St. Thomas More in Arlington. In that capacity, he is in his last year of seminar study and will be ordained as a priest next June. He began serving the Church of Saint John the Beloved in McLean, Va., earlier this month.
If you know any W&L alumni who would be great profile subjects, tell us about them! Nominate them for a web profile.
