Staff Series, Joshua Butek of Special Services

“What I love first and foremost about my work is that everything here is centered on the Catholic faith,” says 25-year-old Joshua Butek, Special Services Assistant Counselor and one of the newer employees at Seton Home Study School.

Born in Wisconsin and the third of five children, Joshua, along with his siblings, was homeschooled from grades K-12.

“I had a positive view of homeschooling from the beginning,” he says, “and knew that if I worked for Seton I’d be in a field I truly appreciated.” He describes his upbringing as “very devout,” participated in a large homeschooling group, and was a member of an Irish step-dancing team for ten years. “My friends and I also enjoyed medieval warfare. We made our own swords and shields, and sometimes 40 of us would be running around doing battle with each other.”

Today Joshua still pulls out his wooden weaponry on occasion, but he enjoys wielding a pen even more, writing poetry, fiction, and songs whenever he has a few spare moments.

After graduating with a degree in philosophy from Christendom College in 2019, Joshua returned briefly to Wisconsin, where he worked in religious education at a parish in Eau Claire and enjoyed helping young people deepen their understanding and love of their faith.

A New Direction

But his heart was back in Virginia. At Christendom, he’d fallen in love with Therese, a theology major. Though both of them were discerning a religious vocation when they first became acquainted, God led them in a different direction, and Therese and Joshua were married just before her senior year.

This was the summer of 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic was at its height, and Joshua applied for work at Seton, which urgently needed men and women to help with the overwhelming numbers of families looking to register for the fall.

Seton hired Joshua, and he has worked since then in Special Services, where he answers the phone and helps arrange appointments with counselors. Lately, he has spent a good deal of time reformatting and editing lesson plans for Special Services. “I like bringing order to things, so that is a lot of fun for me,” he remarks.

He also gets a great deal of satisfaction from speaking occasionally with parents.

“Listening to parents and the trials they are dealing with, that to me is to be a light of Christ to them,” Joshua says. “I end up being a willing ear for them. I know where they’re coming from, and that helps me speak to them with confidence.”

He pauses, and then says, “Those are some of my favorite moments on the job.”