It doesn’t say much for your professional league when a player decides to retire from your sport to enter the priesthood.

The ASSOCIATED PRESS passes along news that Chase Hilgenbrinck is stepping off the Major League Soccer pitch, and stepping into a seminary.

After spending four years playing in Chile, Hilgenbrinck had signed with the New England Revolution in March. But after a few games at Gillette Stadium, Chase heeded the call to someone even more powerful than Revs & Pats owner Robert Kraft:

“I felt called to something greater,” Hilgenbrinck said. “At one time I thought that call might be professional soccer. In the past few years, I found my soul is hungry for something else. I discerned, through prayer, that it was calling me to the Catholic Church. I do not want this call to pass me by.”

So on Monday, Chase traded in his jersey for a white collar, as he’ll spend the next six years studying theology & philosophy before becoming ordained as a Roman Catholic priest.

Despite hanging up his cleats, Hilgenbrinck doesn’t want to disavow soccer for good:

“It’s not that I’m ready to leave soccer. I still have a great passion for the game,” he said in a telephone interview. “I wouldn’t leave the game for just any other job. I’m moving on for the Lord. I want to do the will of the Lord, I want to do what he wants for me, not what I want to do for myself.”

Let’s hope he isn’t sent on a missionary tour of Brazil, where the female football fans can cause one to reconsider his vow of celibacy.

Not to mention the players, too - like Brazilian babe Laisa Andrioli:

Good Lord, indeed.