A former Bay Street businessman, originally from Malta, who found his calling while watching the city’s homeless sleep on steam grates from his office window was ordained priest yesterday.

Ivan Camilleri, the former associate director of finance for Bell Canada Enterprises, was ordained with five others by Toronto Archbishop Thomas Collins at St Michael’s Cathedral, a ceremony that drew more than 1,000 people.

Camilleri, 37, said the “scary” decision to quit a lucrative corporate career was more an evolution than an epiphany, one he said many of his fellow seminarians experience because they too are former professionals.

“I’d reached the point where I had the position I’d always wanted. Sitting back and reflecting on it, I asked, ‘So now what?’ A lot of people seem to be often dissatisfied with what they’re doing and they don’t quite know why. I’m not saying that people are all called to some form of religious life, but they’re all called to something. It’s the importance of listening to our hearts as much as our minds.”

Beyond the window of his downtown office where he regularly oversaw multi-million-dollar deals, there it was, a rotating tableau of homeless folk. It was then that Camilleri felt most compelled to start serving people “who the world had forgotten”.

Born in Malta to a long lineage of active Catholics, Camilleri felt inclined to the priesthood early. One uncle and three cousins are priests; another cousin is a bishop in Brazil. Camilleri experienced the call again during the final year of his finance degree at Sudbury’s Laurentian University, but chose to ignore it, instead motoring through his MBA by the age of 24.