When the COVID-19 pandemic forced Boston’s St. John’s Seminary to send students home in early March, James Muscatella had to say an early goodbye to the place he’d called home for almost two years.

“There was a bit of sadness, even before the coronavirus came to head, of the notion that I would be leaving my classmates, the men that I’d spent a year and a half with and had grown so close with,” he told the Catholic Courier Aug. 10.