A Chicago Tribune story on Rob Spaulding, the Mundelein seminarian who, driving drunk last year, crashed in an incident that resulted in the deaths of two of his passengers, also seminarians:

Spaulding told Magette of the last time he saw her son, who was still alive but badly hurt. He died hours later.

"That was the most difficult day of my life, and also the most transformative," Spaulding said of meeting the families. "To be able to look them in the eye and say face-to-face how sorry I was, and to hear them say, `We forgive you …’"

The next day he went through it again with Pam Molnar, who said she never blamed Spaulding for the accident.

"Hate makes you a very bitter, angry person. You just can’t dwell on things, as much as I’ll miss [Matty] forever and I’ll probably cry forever," said Molnar, who lives in Prairie Village, Kan. "I think [Spaulding] is a good guy, I really do."

Spaulding believes the ordeal could make him a better priest.

"It opened me up to the woundedness in the world," Spaulding says. "Just sitting in a restaurant, thinking about the trial coming up, the possibility of going to prison, I remember thinking, `How many other people are suffering like this?’"

But whether he becomes a priest is not entirely up to him. To be reinstated to the university, he will have to obtain permission from his home diocese in Cheyenne, Wyo., and undergo a review with seminary officials. Since the crash, he has been living at a parish rectory in Buffalo Grove.

There is no timetable for when that will happen, in part because Spaulding is still completing his community-service requirement, said Rev. Thomas Baima, seminary provost.

"The people who have been in touch with him have expressed feelings about the quality of his repentance and how they really feel that he has been changed by this," Baima said.

The Cheyenne diocese, which sponsors Spaulding at the seminary, supports his return but will re-evaluate his case at some point, possibly after his 30 months of probation, spokeswoman Katy Ferrari said.