Our Story

The Saint Sebastian Institute began with a single question.

In 2019, I was in the Special Forces Qualification Course, enduring round after round of tough, realistic, and deeply formative training exercises designed to prepare me to lead as a Captain in the Green Berets.

At one point, I stepped back in gratitude and awe. I realized how much time, effort, and money the Army was pouring into my development as a leader. It was a beautiful moment of gratitude. Then a question came to mind:

The Army has a gravely important mission and more than 250 years of leadership development experience. But the Church has a far more important mission and 2,000 years of history. What methods does the Church use to develop priests as leaders?

So I began asking the priests I knew, and their answers shocked me. Priest after priest said the same thing: seminary formation was rich and deep in so many ways. but lacked any sort of leadership training that could compare to what the Army did. These priests all strongly desired to grow as leaders as well, however they could.

Those conversations clarified the need, but I felt too small for the mission. I spoke with fellow West Point graduates and Green Berets, and together we dreamed up ways to adapt the military’s leadership principles and training methods for priests. But we never acted, thinking that we weren’t ready.

Still, the idea never went away.

The Lord was calling me, steadily and insistently, to step out in faith. For years, I thought about it, but told myself I would try it “someday.”

In 2023, nine years after graduating, I returned to West Point to teach, and I happened to meet Fr. Jonah Teller. We became fast friends, and through a series of conversations and spiritual direction sessions, I told him about the idea burning in my heart—and my anxiety about actually trying to execute it.

He gave me a dose of priestly wisdom and faith:

“If the Holy Spirit put this on your heart, then your job is just to try. If He blesses your efforts, you’ll know. And if He doesn’t, then you’ll know, and you can move on with your life.”

That settled it.

My wife was on board. Now I needed to build a team. I reached out to a mentor, former West Point leadership instructor, and exceptional leader, Mike Erwin. Mike had founded several successful nonprofits, including Team RWB and Father Vincent Capodanno High School. Providentially, my request came just as he was looking to dedicate his life more directly to the service of the Church.

We built our first course around one key conviction: leadership cannot simply be learned in a classroom. It must be practiced, trained, and tested.

An old military saying captures the idea well:

“In battle, you don’t rise to the level of your hopes. You sink to the level of your training.”

So we built the Pastor Stress Test: a realistic training scenario built around a parish in crisis. It is intentionally harder than “real life,” so that when real moments of stress, ambiguity, and competing demands come, priests are not surprised by them.

With the help of many generous volunteers, we ran our first course in August 2025 with seven Dominican Friars, friends of Fr. Jonah, attending Cohort 1. Within hours of the course beginning, the friars were urging us to scale the idea as quickly as we could.

We were stunned by their enthusiasm, but the path forward was becoming clear. I would need to leave the active-duty Army to pursue this mission. Now we needed a name, an episcopal sponsor, and an experienced priest to labor with us.

Within weeks, I ran into Fr. Paul-Anthony Halladay for the first time in a decade. He had been a priest at West Point when I was a cadet and had celebrated my marriage in 2014, but we had not seen each other since.

The Lord works in mysterious ways.

Fr. Paul had just retired from the military and piloted a leadership development course for seminarians at St. Patrick’s Seminary in California. But the Lord had other plans, and he unexpectedly had to leave that project to become Vocations Director for the Archdiocese for the Military Services. When I told him about my ideas, he immediately jumped on board and has been a key catalyst for our progress ever since.

We take our name from Saint Sebastian, a Roman soldier who chose to remain with the persecuted Christian community in Rome rather than flee. His courageous leadership saved souls and lives. When confronted by Diocletian, he stood firm and proclaimed the Gospel, for which he was executed.

With Fr. Paul’s help, we received the incredible blessing of Archbishop Broglio’s endorsement, completing the essential structure we needed to begin.

Now it is time to labor in the vineyard and forge the courageous Catholic leaders our world so desperately needs.

With Christ, all things are possible.

Pray for us!

- Louis Tobergte, Founder and Executive Director