As a boy, David Zallocco found the keys to success: With his parents, be a good kid; with friends, be a clown; with girls, be good at sports.

“Or so I thought,” Zallocco, 33, confessed.

In his hometown of Sant’Elpidio a Mare, eastern Italy, pretty much everyone was on the “conveyer belt,” as he called it: baptism, first Communion, Confirmation, youth group. He joined a Neocatechumenal community at 17.

But he acknowledged that it didn’t touch his core. “I always heard ‘God loves you,’ but I never believed it.”

Part of his problem was being an only child, Zallocco said. “I was used to being the center of attention, and I tried to replicate that with my friends, in my school, in my parish.”

One day at the age of 16, he drank so heavily that he passed out during a Mardi Gras parade. Next day in school, he beamed to see classmates lining the halls, applauding.

He worked awhile at a local newspaper, but couldn’t stand the hectic pace. At 21, he took a dark appraisal.

“I wondered, who loves me?” he said “My parents, if I was a good kid. My friends, if I was a clown. Girls, but only as a friend. And I never went far in sports.

“So there was no meaning to life. No love. I was wasting my time. I felt like committing suicide.”

He still managed to go to World Youth Day that year in Madrid and felt the call to the priesthood. “But I didn’t trust the Lord. I felt he would screw me over.”

That changed in 2012, when he walked part of a Compostela pilgrimage in Spain. While trekking the last 100 miles, he fell into conversation with a girl in the group. And he found himself pouring out his feelings of loneliness and lovelessness.

Her simple comment: “Don’t you know there is a God who loves you as you are?”

Yes, he’d heard it before, but this time was different. “This time I was naked, totally sincere,” Zallocco said. “I felt heaven open. God loved me as I am. I felt rest, happiness, a peace that nothing can take away.”

Back home, he began attending a pre-vocational center, meeting three times a month with a priest. Eventually he realized that for him, following God meant ordination.

In October 2014, the Neocatechumenal Movement sent him to Miami, where he studied at its Redemptoris Mater Seminary in Hialeah. He has done adult catechesis for five churches in the archdiocese: St. Boniface in Pembroke Pines, St. Vincent in Margate, St. Cecilia in Hialeah, Mother of Christ and Good Shepherd in Miami.

Zallocco talked fondly about his time, 2019 to 2022, as an itinerant catechist in northern and central California. He drove up and down the state’s central valley, speaking at summer camps and winter campuses, to listeners 12 to 25 years old.

“It was lots of work and sleepless nights, but the best three years of my life,” he said. “I saw how teens suffer as I did. They don’t feel good enough. I could announce to them that God loves them.”

The experience has decided Zallocco to serve as a “missionary priest,” even if he ends up at a parish. His message: There is a hell and a heaven.

“Hell is when I wanted to kill myself,” he said. “And heaven is when I learned that God loves me. I no longer strive to fit in, to prove that I am worth something. There is a God who loves me as I am.”