Blessed by God, joining his team

BY BILL DOYLE
CFP CORRESPONDENT

James J. Boulette suffered a concussion, a lacerated spleen and a broken right kneecap when he drove alone off the road and into a boulder in Fitchburg after having too much to drink following work one night in 2007.
He underwent knee surgery, spent four days in the hospital and was housebound for several months.
“God blessed me,” the 43-year-old Worcester native said, “because I didn’t hurt anybody but myself.”
As odd as it may seem, he believes the accident was the best thing to happen to him. It forced him to reevaluate his life and steered him on a path toward God.
At 10 a.m. on June 18, Deacon James J. Boulette will be among seven transitional deacons who will be ordained priests for the Worcester Diocese at St. Paul Cathedral.
“This was God kind of slapping me in the head, saying, ‘What are you doing with your life?’ It was kind of being confronted with the truth,” he said, “and just saying, ‘You need to do better. You’ve been created for better things.’”
For more than two years after his accident, he stopped drinking alcohol and he has only an occasional beer now. During those two years, he began to realize that God was calling him to become a priest to add fulfillment to his life so he could help bring meaning to the lives of others.
“My life did not have a purpose,” he said. “I didn’t have a direction and now I think God is calling me to come closer to him and serve the people he has created, in a meaningful way, to bring them to an eternal life, to help them see Christ, to help them get out of where I was before.”
Because of what he’s overcome, Deacon Boulette believes he can help parishioners cope with their struggles.
“I feel blessed,” he said. “I feel God is using my experiences, my bad experiences. He’s saying these experiences that I caused, these torments, can be used for the good. So you can relate to other people and show them that there is hope in life that people can change and God can be with them at all times and all they have to do is accept his love.”
As a boy, Deacon Boulette was an altar server at St. Andrew the Apostle Parish in the Columbus Park section of Worcester, but for nearly a decade prior to his car accident he attended Mass infrequently. Even when he did attend, he said it wasn’t for the right reasons.
“I was just trying to climb the corporate ladder,” he said, “trying to make myself known and seen.”
He worked as a computer technician for Deluxe Corporation in Groton for 18 years until he decided to become a priest.
After his accident, he went to confession and returned to church regularly. A friend convinced him to attend daily Mass and he did so at St. Benedict Abbey in the Still River section of Harvard.
“Once I allowed that to happen,” he recalled, “God put dominoes in front of me that I could knock down.”
He felt a stronger calling from God after he accepted an invitation to visit the Holy Land in Israel.
“I didn’t know what the calling was, but I knew I had to be more active in the church,” he said.
After his return from the Holy Land, he was invited to take part in the Cursillo spiritual retreat in Weston.
In 2013, he began meeting regularly with a spiritual director, Father John Sassani of the Archdiocese of Boston. Once he felt called more and more toward the priesthood, he started meeting with the Worcester Diocese vocations director, Father James S. Mazzone, now pastor at St. John, Guardian of Our Lady in Clinton. In 2015, Deacon Boulette applied to become a priest.
As someone who returned to the church after attending Mass infrequently for nearly a decade, Deacon Boulette hopes he can lure others back to Mass as well.
“Having a relationship with the people,” he said, “being able to talk with them, being able to take the Gospel of Jesus Christ and open it up for them and relate to their everyday lives and show them that this is possible to do. This isn’t an impossible task. What Jesus is asking us to do is absolutely possible and it’s what’s going to bring us the most joy.”
Deacon Boulette plans to conduct Bible studies and a youth program at whichever parish he’s assigned.
He graduated from South High School and earned a philosophy degree from Assumption University in 2018 before entering the seminary.
He’s been staying with Msgr. James P. Moroney at St. Cecilia Parish in Leominster since he graduated from Pope St. John XXIII National Seminary in Weston on May 9.
Serving as a deacon at St. John, Guardian of Our Lady Parish last summer, and his last two semesters in seminary school, provided him with some insight into the life of a priest.
“Just the love you get from the people,” he said. “You can see how much they love their priests and their deacons. When you give them your love, it comes back tenfold.”
His parents, Richard and Doris Boulette, his brothers Richard and Dominique, and his sister Monique Lucey plan to attend the ordination at St. Paul Cathedral.
If someone told him 20 years ago that he would become a priest, he wouldn’t have believed it.
“I would think that they were crazy,” he said. “This was not something that was on my radar. I wanted to have a married life, I wanted to have children and have a good job and make lots of money. That was my dream.”
Now, he’s on the verge of fulfilling a different dream. 
“My new dream is more than I could have hoped for,” he said. “It’s not something that I ever thought about, but it’s my calling from God. God is saying, ‘This is what I created you for,’ and I finally heard the call and I’m really happy about it. I’m really joyful and excited to get started in God’s work.”