PHOTO BY ALENA KUZUB
Father Ubiparipovic gives a blessing.
By ALENA KUZUB
LYNN — Sinisa Ubiparipovic, who grew up in Lynn, is not your average millennial. First of all, he tries to visit his mom every week. He’s outgoing, likes to joke and enjoys traveling, like many young men of his generation. Unlike most 29-year-olds, he’s pledged his life to Christ.
The Rev. Sinisa Ubiparipovic was ordained in 2015 and currently is a parochial vicar at St. Paul Parish in Hingham.
Ubiparipovic was born in Bosnia in 1987 to Orthodox Serb father Desimir and Catholic Croatian mother Mirjana Ubiparipovic. When Father Ubiparipovic was only 5, the Bosnian War erupted. His dad died fighting in the civil war in 1993. The young mother and her two sons were welcomed into Germany as refugees, and eventually applied for immigration to the United States through a Catholic charity. She was happily surprised when their request was accepted. None of them spoke English. They were brought to House of Peace in Ipswich in 1999. They met another Bosnian family who was living in Lynn, and they decided to move there.
“We had again to start from scratch,” said Mirjana Ubiparipovic.
Last Monday, Father Ubiparipovic traveled from Hingham to visit his mom and younger brother Danijel at her small, homey Lynn apartment. His mom had put out some figurines of the three kings/wise men for Christmas decor, and her son the priest teased her that it was way too early to display them and that she should know better being a devoted Catholic.
Mirjana admires her sons and enjoys cooking for them. They treat her with care and respect. When they were children they would clean up their mess before she came home from work, helping her around the house and making her coffee. During my visit, the brothers teased and joked with each other.
“When he (Father Ubiparipovic) is home I just see him as my son,” said Mirjana. “I don’t look at him as a priest. … When he is saying Mass in church, I see him as a priest. People come to me in church and say ‘You know, that’s so wonderful that you have a son as a priest.’ Sometimes it is hard to adjust my brain, because at Mass I look at him just as a priest.”
Mirjana believes that Father Ubiparipovic was called to the priesthood when he was very young. “It would be Sunday and I would be tired, exhausted from working, going to school … but every Sunday Father Ubiparipovic would get up, get dressed and he would try to wake up me and Danijel and call us to go to church.”
Father Ubiparipovic said during his high school years his priest suggested that he look into becoming a priest. “I was very afraid of that and I said, ‘No, I am not ready for that kind of commitment,’” said Father Ubiparipovic, who majored in accounting and liberal studies at Bentley University.
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“Being in college, I started to get into the party life and I traveled abroad. I went out a lot and (had) girlfriends and drinking and things like that. … It all just left me very empty.”
One day he felt the urge to pray to God, “…if you want me to be a priest, I’ll be a priest. But you’ve got to give me the desire to do what you want me to do.”
Several months later he saw Pope Benedict at a rally in New York and experienced “a sudden overwhelming sense of desire to serve God in a more total way.” That was the beginning of his becoming a priest.
His family was surprised. Danijel, who is almost 3 years younger and works as an apprentice electrician, was skeptical. “He just didn’t seem that type. …I just never expected that from him. I never noticed that he would have a passion for that. … When you see somebody pursue their goals like he did, you start to begin to believe that that’s what they actually want. After few years it was more solid.”
Now, Father Ubiparipovic has a busy schedule. “I can be gone some days from the time I wake up all the way till 9, 10 o’clock at night.” He administers Sacraments, meets and counsels people, works with Hingham teenagers, sometimes preaches on Catholic TV and volunteers on Tuesdays — his day off — at St. Mary’s Chapel in Lynn. He often stops by St. Mary’s High School afterward to talk with students. In July, he took 14 teens from a Hingham youth program to see Pope Francis during World Youth Day in Krakow, Poland.
“I like people, I like being with people,” he said. A favorite responsibility is to say Mass, and he tries to do that at least once each day.
Joseph Demichele, a retired surgeon from Lynn, enjoys going to St. Mary’s Chapel on Tuesdays because Father Ubiparipovic “exudes Holiness.” He also emanates humor.
“When I celebrate Mass I am very serious because I don’t want the attention to be drawn so much to my personality as to Christ,” he said. “There is a quote someone told me, ‘What a sad day it would be if people came to church looking for Jesus but instead they found me.’”
However, “There are moments during the Mass when I preach, and it comes from Christ in me and Christ in me also uses our personalities. … Before the final blessing I usually have a joke for people.”
One of his favorites: “Someone is going to a job interview and he is running late, trying to find a parking space. He starts praying to God to get a parking spot. He says ‘God, if you give me a parking spot I will promise to give up beer for the rest of my life.’ Nothing happens for 10 minutes. ‘Lord, I promise to give up even all the whiskey in the world if you give me a parking spot right now.’ Nothing happens for another 5 minutes. He says, ’Lord, I promise to go to church every single Sunday, if you just give me the parking spot right now.’ The moment he says that, a car moves and frees a spot and the man yells ‘Never mind, Lord, I found one!’”
Has he ever had second thoughts about priesthood? “No, never. … There is nothing to compare to the experience … My days are always different. Every single day, a different person with a different problem … or a different joy.
“You just get the whole spectrum of humanity. There is nothing in this world that I could have done to have the same amount of joy and satisfaction of life.”
