Lancaster Vocations

Priest and Saint: Thomas Aquinas

2012-01-28T08:06:00.000Z

One of the joys of the Communion of Saints is that every saint shines with a particular quality or virtue, as an example to us and as patron and intercessor for us in our need. St Thomas Aquians, whose feast the Church celebrates today, is particularly remarkable as a theologian and philosopher, a priest endowed with a wonderful mind for discovering the mysteries of God and teaching others about him. One of the great tasks of priests - perhaps especially in our own time - is to teach others about the Lord. This requires that they first know the Lord themselves, both through prayer and through careful study of the Scriptures and the Church's teaching. Thomas excelled at both: he was a man of deep prayer and of extraordinary study. He did much to teach us all about God and His work in our world, yet in the end, it was his prayerfulness that led St Thomas to a profound mystical vision of God. Let us ask his prayers today, that we too may grown in our knowledge and love of God. The relics of St Thomas are kept under the altar in the church of "Les Jacobins" in Toulouse, south-west France: there they invite us to pray, and to remember the close link between this great saint and the gift of Christ's presence in the Eucharist.

Come, follow me

2012-01-21T12:31:00.003Z

This weekend, as last, we hear at Mass readings which speak about the call God issues to follow Him. For some, this is a general call, given to all who will listen: "Repent, and believe the Good News". For others, though, the call is more specific. Jesus calls some people to serve Him in very particular ways, such as Peter and Andrew, James and John, who we hear about in today's Gospel. They are called to serve Him as "fishers of men", in other words, as ones who will continue the Lord's ministry after He has returned to the Father. At the very start of His earthly ministry, Jesus called together a community of disciples, and within that community, those who would be its leaders. The Lord's call is no less urgent today, so let us pray that those who hear the Lord's call may be as courageous as those first apostles, who left everything to take up their vocation.

The Joy of the Priesthood: Fr David Elder

2011-12-15T07:22:00.008Z

Fr David Elder

Ordained: 29 June 1968

Currently: Parish Priest of St Mary’s and St Michael’s, Garstang

I would have loved to have been married and had a family. I would probably have been a grandfather by now! But God knew better! God knew what would make me really happy and would bring joy to my life – to be a priest – a joy that I know I have not earned or deserve.

I wanted to be a priest from the age of 7 or 8 years and this desire grew into a fierce determination. I was only 18 months off ordination when I realised that I had never asked God: “Do you, Lord, want me to be a priest?” This realisation, that I had never asked God, devastated me. How could I be a priest if it was not what God was planning for me? How could I be a priest if it was only my desire and not God’s? I sobbed bitterly at my arrogance. I asked God in a quiet, humbled voice: “Lord, do you really want me, such a proud, weak person, to be your priest?”

The answer wasn’t direct – but a peace overwhelmed me – and that peace has stayed with me to this day. Yes, he did want me, in all my inadequacy and weak humanity, to be his priest. It is my human-ness as David, that God has clothed me in priesthood. My flawed humanity, called to be a priest, is God’s greatest gift to me – and I never cease to praise and thank him!

The Joy of the Priesthood: Fr Paul Swarbrick

2011-11-21T07:05:00.002Z

Fr Paul Swarbrick

Ordained: 10 July 1982

Currently: Parish Priest in Workington

Because I am a priest I found myself in sub-Saharan Africa. There I was, one balmy evening, in a classroom bulging with young Zambian schoolgirls aged 13-20 years, all eyes glued to the TV set at the front of the class. Africa Cup. Zambia behind with little time left. They equalise. Injury-time. They score. Full-time. I’m still not sure what happened next, but it must be akin to being hit by lightning… and enjoying it. Here was a joy that cannot be described, nor can in be sustained. An out-standing moment in time, great while it lasted. Where do I find joy? Here and there, now and then.

29 years on, I look back on a priesthood peppered with moments of what might be mistaken for joy, broken by gaps where I thought joy was absent.

But it wasn’t. They joy I know now isn’t dependant on mood or the right circumstance or an imprisoned experience or chance. It is a faithful joy, proving its loyalty over time, and only over time. It reveals its pedigree simply by staying with you, refusing to fade in spite of my changing circumstances and the roller-coaster life I lead. In revealing its character it goes on to reveal its source, the God I serve and preach and love. There I persevere, the better I know the source of that constant joy.

My way to discover this has been through the priesthood. It will be the same for others.

A blog from Oscott

2011-11-13T09:55:00.000Z

The staff and students of Oscott College, a seminary just outside Birmingham, started a new blog at the beginning of term. It gives some reflections on our faith and insights into life at seminary, and is well worth a look. You can find the blog here. Lancaster Diocese has one student, John-Paul Evans, at Oscott. Please keep all our seminarians in your prayers.

Priest and Saint: Charles Borromeo

2011-11-04T07:28:00.018Z

Today the Church celebrates the feast of St Charles Borromeo, a sixteenth-century cardinal and Archbishop of Milan. A gifted man, he soon rose to prominence and was a leading figure at the Council of Trent, convened in response to the challenges of the Reformation. The images here are from the St Charles Borromeo chapel in our Cathedral. Above, the saint is seen with a copy of the decrees of the Council of Trent.

As well as being a leader in the Church, he was also a priest of great humility, who never locked himself away but engaged with his people in their need. Here he is seen administering the sacraments to the sick and dying on the streets of Milan during a plague, thereby risking his own life to serve the people of his diocese.

St Charles was also a man of great holiness, who told his priests: "Is your task the care of souls? Then do not neglect your own!" The image depicts him praying and doing penance before a crucifix. Among his many concerns, Charles promoted the holiness and education of the clergy, and was a leading figure in the establishment of seminaries for the training of priests. He is, therefore, patron saint of seminarians, and we ask his prayers for all our seminarians today.

The Communion of Saints

2011-11-01T07:53:00.011Z

Today and tomorrow we are reminded of the unity of the whole Church: on earth, in heaven and on the way to heaven. Today's feast of All Saints celebrates all those who have entered the eternal life of heaven, and tomorrow, All Soul's Day, we commemorate and pray for all those who have died but are still on the way to their eternal reward. So we are reminded that all of us belong to the one 'communion of the saints', a communion which is bound together on earth by the Church's sacraments. In baptism we enter the communion of saints; in the Eucharist we receive the pledge of eternal life. Once again, then, we are reminded of the importance of the sacraments, and therefore of the ministry of priests. Please continue to pray for vocations.

Vocations Newsletter

2011-10-28T07:41:00.016+01:00

We've recently published the first edition of Vox Domini, a newsletter for those considering priesthood in the Diocese of Lancaster. The name means "The Lord's Voice", and is a reminder that each vocation is a call from Him, and it is to His voice that we respond. Sometimes people refer to 'vox populi', the 'voice of the people', but when listening for the Lord's call we often need to listen beyond the voice of majority opinion and tune our ears to Him. The newsletter will be emailed out four times per year to all enquirers, and comes with no strings attached. If you'd like to join the mailing list, please email us [lancastervocations(at)hotmail.co.uk] and ask to receive the newsletter. We will then send the newsletter to you each time a new edition is published, but will not use your email address to contact you for any other reason.

Our new priest: Fr Darren Carden

2011-10-23T06:58:00.022+01:00

Yesterday the Diocese of Lancaster celebrated a joyful occasion: the ordination of a new priest. Fr Darren Carden was ordained in the Cathedral, where a large congregation had gathered to witness his ordination and offer their prayerful support. There is no happier occasion in the life of any diocese than the ordination of a new priest, and the sense of joy was almost tangible among those who had come together from around the Diocese and beyond.

After the Mass, Fr Darren had to perform cake-cutting duties, followed by a rousing rendition of 'for he's a jolly good fellow', sung by the appreciative crowd gathered in Lancaster's Ashton Hall. Today he has some more obviously priestly duties to perform, as he celebrates a Mass of thanksgiving at St Joseph's church in the city, where he has been relevant for much of his years in seminary training. Fr Darren is appointed to St Clare's Church, Preston, where he will serve as assistant priest and chaplain to the Royal Preston Hospital. A number of people have left messages of support on our Facebook page - if you'd like to do so, you can find the page here.

Joy of the Priesthood: Fr Andrew Allman

2011-10-21T12:05:00.001+01:00

Today we begin a new series, 'the Joy of the Priesthood', in partnership with the Catholic Voice of Lancaster, our diocesan newspaper (website here). Each month a different priest of our Diocese will say where they find joy and happiness in the priesthood. As Vocations Director, I'm getting the ball rolling, so here are my thoughts...

We are sometimes reminded that the word ‘Gospel’ means ‘good news’. For me, when I hear some good news I can’t wait to tell people – and that’s true of the Gospel too! One of my greatest joys as a priest is sharing the message of salvation. I love preaching at Mass, speaking about Christ and teaching others about our faith. This sharing the Gospel is about more than words. I remember once, soon after my ordination, being called to see a woman who had just found out she was terminally ill. I heard her confession, anointed her and gave her Holy Communion. “You have made me very happy”, she told me. I only met her that one time and don’t even remember her name, but it strikes me that no one other than a priest could have brought her happiness on that day. Through the sacraments I was able to share the Gospel with her. It wasn’t really me who had made her “very happy” – rather, it was the Lord who had worked through me to console her and give her hope that day. What a gift it was – for both of us!

Ordination Video

2011-10-10T22:27:00.003+01:00

Take a look at this extraordinary video showing young men being ordained at a seminary in America. It shows so clearly their joy at reaching the day of ordination, and their enthusiasm to serve God and His Church as a priest. The variety of their stories and hopes is striking - God loves diversity in His priests!

Bishop Campbell: 40 years a priest

2011-09-19T21:50:00.000+01:00

Last Friday our Bishop celebrated 40 years as a priest, and thejubilee was marked with a Mass of thanksgiving at the Cathedral. On his blogthis week, the Bishop writes: "Put simply: to have walked in the footstepsof Christ as a minister of his word and sacrament among his people in so manydifferent situations has been a wonderful, if at times, demanding venture. Onelives each day with the mystery of vocation, conscious in faith of the presenceof Christ in one’s ministry, yet continually surprised at the impact thatministry can have on others. To any young man reading this blog, I canwholeheartedly recommend the path of priesthood as a most worthwhile way tospend one’s life. You will indeed make a difference!" You can find theBishop's blog here.Please pray for the Bishop, and that his call for vocations may be answered. Admultos annos!

Pope Benedict - and the world's seminarians

2011-08-20T19:48:00.000+01:00

Pope Benedict greets the crowds outside the Cathedral Church of Madrid, after celebrating Mass with seminarians from around the world. In the Mass, which took place earlier today, the Holy Father described the Cathedral as being like "a great Upper Room, where the Lord greatly desires to celebrate the Passover with you who wish one day to preside in his name at the mysteries of salvation." Here we see a great sign of hope for the future of our world: great numbers of young men who are willing to offer their lives in service of God. Among them were four seminarians from our own Diocese of Lancaster. The Pope spoke of both the joys and challenges of priestly life, he offered advice for seminarians, and he announced that he will soon declare St John of Avila a Doctor of the Church. St John, whom the Holy Father described as an "outstanding pastor", is the patron saint of the diocesan clergy of Spain. You can read the full text of Pope Benedict's address here.

Find us on Facebook

2011-08-13T10:18:00.001+01:00

Lancaster Vocations now has a Facebook page, which is regularly updated with short items of news and information. This blog will continue to be updated with longer features and articles about vocations in the Diocese of Lancaster, including a new feature - brought to you with the Catholic Voice of Lancaster - on where our priests find happiness and joy in their priestly lives. Watch out for the new feature, beginning in October. Meanwhile, if you use Facebook please visit our page and click the 'Like' button at the top of the page to show your support for those considering priesthood in the Diocese. You can find the page at www.facebook.com/lancastervocations.

Saint John Vianney

2011-08-04T23:10:00.000+01:00

Today the Church has been celebrating the feast of St John Vianney, the Curé of Ars and patron saint of parish priests throughout the world. For anyone considering the priesthood today, it's worth remembering that his own journey to the priesthood was far from easy. He had to fight to be accepted into seminary, and he struggled greatly with the studies. But God's will was done in the end, and despite what appeared at first to be very limited potential, John Vianney went on to be a great priest.

He was sent to Ars in 1818, and the Bishop told him upon his appointment, "There isn't much love of God there; it will be up to you to bring some". In an extrordinary way, he introduced a wonderful love of God to his village, and by the end of his life he drew tens of thousands of people every year, mostly to make their confession to the holy priest.

Today St John Vianney is known throughout the world and venerated for his holiness of life, his love of the sacraments, his ascetic lifestyle and his fine example as a priest. He once said, "The priesthood is the love of the heart of Jesus" - thus reminding all priests what we are to aim for: to be the human face of God's love in the world. Against all the odds, Fr Vianney did just that. Could you?

Cathedral Vestments Festival

2011-07-14T21:59:00.001+01:00

Our Cathedral is currently hosting a stunning exhibition of liturgical vestments, many of which have been borrowed from parishes across the Diocese. The use of vestments reminds us of an important truth: the priest in the liturgy does not stand for himself, but represents another. By wearing vestments, he is reminded that his role is to represent Christ the Head.

The different colours of the vestments used in the liturgy reminds us that the priest shares in every aspect of the lives of God's people: from great feast days to solemn funerals, the priest walks alongside the community that God calls together.

Among the different colours, the vestments on display are also of different ages and different styles: a sign of both the unity and the diversity of the Catholic Church.

Some of the vestments displayed have played a special role in the life of the Diocese. These vestments, for example, were first used at the episcopal ordination of our Bishop.

Another sign of the unity and diversity of the Church: these vestments are worn in the Ukrainian Catholic Church.

And on this cope, a reminder that the one who is privileged to represent Christ in the liturgy is always called to make sacrifices. In this image we see the martyrdom of St Robert Southwell, a Jesuit priest who was martyred at Tyburn, London, in 1595. The Vestments Festival, which is free to enter, remains open at the Cathedral until Sunday.

Pope Benedict: sixty years a priest

2011-06-30T20:07:00.001+01:00

One of many young men ordained to the priesthood on 29 June 1951 at Freising Cathedral - but this man would be called, over 50 years later, to the chair of St Peter. Fr Joseph Ratzinger - Pope Benedict XVI - yesterday celebrated 60 years as a priest. Recalling the day of his ordination, he said: "Sixty years on from the day of my priestly ordination, I hear once again deep within me these words of Jesus that were addressed to us new priests at the end of the ordination ceremony by the Archbishop, Cardinal Faulhaber, in his slightly frail yet firm voice. According to the liturgical practice of that time, these words conferred on the newly-ordained priests the authority to forgive sins. “No longer servants, but friends”: at that moment I knew deep down that these words were no mere formality, nor were they simply a quotation from Scripture. I knew that, at that moment, the Lord himself was speaking to me in a very personal way. In baptism and confirmation he had already drawn us close to him, he had already received us into God’s family. But what was taking place now was something greater still. He calls me his friend." The Vatican page marking this wonderful anniversary can be found here, or click here to see a ten-minute video which includes footage of the ordination.

Corpus Christi

2011-06-26T18:37:00.000+01:00

Today we celebrate the gift of the Eucharist: the Body and Blood of Christ made present in the Mass. This gift can only be given through the ministry of priests: pray for vocations to the priesthood today!

Invocation 2011

2011-06-19T14:30:00.005+01:00

At Oscott this weekend, young people are meeting for the second annual "Invocation" festival. The event is an opportunity for those considering their vocation to come together for prayer, discernment and mutual support.

During the weekend there are talks from keynote speakers, workshops and lots of opportunity for prayer. As you can see in the images, the event is very well attended and will no doubt bear much fruit in the life of the Church.

Part of the benefit of the weekend is, quite simply, the chance to meet others who are discerning their vocation and taking seriously the possibility that the Lord is calling them to a deeper commitment in the life of the Church. People are coming from all over the country, so no doubt many long-distance friendships are also formed.

The weekend is structured around the core elements of the Church's life: Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours. There is also strong emphasis on Eucharistic devotion, as it is in the presence of Christ that God most clearly reveals His will.

As well as meeting one another, the participants at the weekend get a chance to meet many who have already committed themselves to a particular call within the Church. Many priests and religious of different orders are present, so that the many charisms of the Church's life can be represented and those still discerning can discover more about particular ways of life. Here a young man chats with Rt Rev. Mark Davies, the Bishop of Shrewsbury.

Some of those present at the weekend are staying in accommodation near the college, but most seem to have opted to camp within the college grounds. In the midst of the tents, a papal flag flies. The Holy Father visited Oscott during his trip to the UK last September, and there met with seminarians from all around the country.

One of the highlights of the weekend was the candlelit Blessed Sacrament Procession. There is a poignant symbolism here: young people discerning their vocation, walking with the Lord and seeking His light.

The photographs in this blog post are copyright Mazur/catholicchurch.org.uk, and are taken from the excellent Flickr site of the Bishops' Conference. You can see more pictures of the weekend here.

A vocation story: Fr Peter Walters

2011-06-16T11:44:00.000+01:00

Last weekend at St Bernadette's, Blackpool - the parish where I am based - we had an appeal for a charity called "Let the Children Live". The appeal was presented by the charity's founder, Fr Peter Walters, and during his address he shared something of his own remarkable vocation story. On a visit to Columbia in the 1980s, he became stranded and ran out of money. Street children - who were amused to find a foreigner who had no money - 'adopted' him and helped him to find food until he was able to return home. He became more aware of their plight and went to see the local bishop - the Archbishop of Medellin, and asked him what the Catholic Church was doing to help the street children. The Archbishop told him of some of the work the Church was doing, but also challenged him: "What will you do to help them?" Fr Peter remarked that he had gone on vacation, but found a vocation. At the time he was a lay Anglican, but went on to be an Anglican priest, and worked for a time at the Anglican Shrine at Walsingham. There, he founded the charity and in due time mobved to Medillin to oversee its work there.

In Medellin Fr Peter was receievd into full communion with the Catholic Church, and was ordained priest of the Diocese of Medellin. Now, as a priest he works with a large group of street children, trying to help them out of poverty, protect them from the many dangers they face, and help them to find happiness as followers of Christ. The charity's base in Medellin is called "Casa Walsingham", thus maintaining the strong link with our national shrine.

In 2001 Fr Peter met Blessed John Paul II. His vocation story is remarkable, as through the problem of being stranded in a foreign country, God led him towards the work he has done for so many years, and to life as a priest of the Catholic Church. Often the Lord works through seemingly random circumstances to make his voice heard! Fr Peter's charity continues to do great work to support the street children of Medellin - you can read more on their website - click here.

Pentecost Sunday

2011-06-12T07:50:00.013+01:00

Today we celebrate Pentecost, the feast of the Holy Spirit. Fifty days after Jesus had risen from the dead, the Holy Spirit was sent down upon His disciples and the holy women who were gathered in prayer. Today the Holy Spirit is still present in the Church, and it is He who gives every vocation and reveals every calling. On this feast of Pentecost, let us ask the Holy Spirit's guidance upon all those who are discerning their vocation, and pray that He may inspire more young men to consider the priesthood. At the first Pentecost, the Spirit inspired the disciples to go out and preach courageously. May He also grant courage to all those being called to preach the Gospel today.

Invocation Video

2011-05-17T06:59:00.002+01:00

Last month we mentioned the Invocation festival, a chance to spend a weekend with other young people (16-35) who are considering their vocation. With the event now just one month away, here is a video giving a flavour of last year's festival. If you're interested in attending, take a look at the official website, which can be found here.

Diocesan Chrism Mass

2011-04-22T18:02:00.002+01:00

Yesterday the clergy and people of the Diocese gathered at the Cathedral for the annual Chrism Mass. This celebration is particularly important for the priests, as at this Mass they are invited to renew their commitment to priestly service. The oil of the sick and the oil of catechumens are blessed, and the oil of Chrism is consecrated during the liturgy, and these oils are then distributed for the priests to use in the celebration of the sacraments around the Diocese. In his homily, the Bishop reminded the priests that the Spirit of the Lord had been poured out upon them, and asked them to be guided by the same programme which guided the Lord in His earthly life. You can read the full text of the Bishop's homily here. In Rome, Pope Benedict concluded his homily with an address to the priests, saying, "With great gratitude for the vocation and with humility for all our shortcomings, we renew at this hour our 'yes' to the Lord’s call: yes, I want to be intimately united to the Lord Jesus, in self-denial, driven on by the love of Christ. Amen." You can read the full homily here.

Into Holy Week

2011-04-16T18:59:00.003+01:00

The Church is entering Holy Week, the annual celebration of the Lord's suffering, death and resurrection. The liturgy of this week above any other is truly the source and summit of the life of God's people. As such, it reminds us of the importance of priests, who are needed to celebrate these mysteries; it also reminds us of the challenges faced by those who are called to follow Him. As the shadow of the cross hangs over us, we recall the Lord's words that those who are to be His disciples must take up their cross every day and follow Him. This call is true in a particular way of those who follow Him in the priesthood, and yet walking with the Lord and following the path that He chooses for us is the only way to true peace in this life, as well as the next. As we accompany the Lord this week, let us continue to pray for those who are discerning the path that the Lord has set before them.

Invocation 2011: an invitation

2011-04-02T10:16:00.004+01:00

Young Catholics aged 16-35 are invited to "Invocation 2011", a festival for young people considering their vocation. The event takes place at St Mary's College, Oscott, just outside Birmingham, 17-19 June. Last year saw the first of these events, which was a great success and gave many young people the chance to meet others on a similar journey. If you're interested in finding out more about the event, take a look at the website: click here, or have a look at some photos of last year's event: click here.

Pontiff Lauds Internet's Benefits for Seminarians

2011-02-09T13:55:00.002Z

The Internet is a valuable tool for seminarians, not only in their studies, but also in their pastoral ministries, says Benedict XVI.

 The Pope affirmed this today when he received in audience members of the Congregation for Catholic Education, gathered in their plenary assembly.

The Holy Father spoke with the council members and its president, Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski, about a variety of issues related to education, both for seminaries and for Catholic schools and universities.

"The topics you are addressing in these days have education and formation as the common denominator," he noted, "which today constitute one of the most urgent challenges that the Church and her institutions are called to address."

Though urgent, the task of educating is getting ever more difficult, the Pontiff warned, because of the culture that "makes relativism its creed."

Thus, "it is considered dangerous to speak of truth," he lamented. But, "to educate is an act of love."

The Pontiff noted the congregation's discussion on a draft document regarding the Internet and the formation of seminarians. While emphasizing the need for well-prepared educators in this field, he spoke of the benefits of the Internet for future priests.

"Because of its capacity to surmount distances and put people in mutual contact, the Internet presents great possibilities also for the Church and her mission," he said. "With the necessary discernment for its intelligent and prudent use, it is an instrument that can serve not only for studies, but also for the pastoral action of future presbyters in different ecclesial fields, such as evangelization, missionary action, catechesis, educational projects, the management of institutes."

Central

Benedict XVI went on to discuss the importance of theology in relation to the other disciplines of education.

"Blessed John Henry Newman spoke of the 'circle of knowledge,' to indicate that an interdependence exists between the different branches of knowledge; but God is he who has a relationship only with the totality of the real; consequently, to eliminate God means to break the circle of knowledge," he said.

In this regard, the Holy Father stressed the importance of Catholic universities, with "their openness to the 'totality' of the human being."

He said they "can carry out a valuable work of promoting the unity of knowledge, orienting students and teachers to the Light of the world, 'the true light that enlightens every man.'"

See the full text here (Zenit)em>

Ukraine sees rise in Vocations to the Priesthood

2011-02-09T13:48:00.002Z
There are now up to three candidates for every place at some seminaries in the Ukraine. Auxiliary Bishop Jaroslav Pryryz of the Greek-Catholic Eparchy of Sambir-Drohobych told Aid to the Church in Need that up to half of seminary candidates in parts of western Ukraine had to be turned away because of lack of space. In some areas two out of every three would-be seminarians are unsuccessful when they apply to begin training.

Speaking with Aid to the Church at the charity’s project headquarters in Konigstein, Germany, the bishop said candidates for seminary have to take up to four exams as part of the selection procedure.

Bishop Pryryz said young men are being drawn to the priesthood because they are seeking a challenge. “When they see good priests, and when they see the Church living out the social gospel, it inspires them," he said.

“Many young men see the positives and negatives – the positive of how the Church serves people – and the negative of how hard life is in the streets and the villages.”

He cited diocesan priest Blessed Omelian Korch, who helped the Jewish people during Nazi occupation, as “a great example for young men.”

Korch was killed in Majdanek concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin, in Poland in 1944.

Bishop Pryryz said: “His family tried to free him from prison but he wrote to his family telling them not to worry. He stayed with the Jewish people and died with them.”

He added: “The Catholic Church gives a great example of service and suffering – we need to show people a very great example.”

The challenges that the Ukraine has faced under fascist and soviet rule have greatly affected the country since the beginning of the Second World War.

Reflecting on the difficulties of reestablishing the Church after the fall of Communism, Bishop Pryryz thanked ACN for its support: “You have enabled our Church to regain a normal presence in the public life of our country.”

In a country where a third of the population live below the poverty line, Aid to the Church in Need is supporting the diocese’s 86 seminarians and continues to help after ordination by providing Mass stipends to support its 287 priests.

In message to the charity’s benefactors he said: “I send you sincerest greetings from Ukraine and express our heartfelt thanks to you for graciously responding to the calls of the charity Aid to the Church in Need to help our Church meet the many needs that have arisen after a period of prolonged persecution.”

“Together with you, we are building the temple of human souls, whose grandeur depends solely on the sincerity of efforts each one of us is making according to personal ability.”

Source: ACN

Interview with the Director of the National Office of Vocation

2011-02-09T13:44:00.000Z

Fr. Christopher Jamison Vocations Podcast from Vocations Podcast on Vimeo.

Another Vocation Story: Seminarian Darren Carden

2011-01-25T22:38:00.005Z

Seminarian Darren Carden with Cardinal Bernard Law, Archbishop Emeritus of Boston

Is God calling you to Priesthood, this is what Pope Benedict had to say in his letter to seminarians late last year.

“God is alive, and he needs people to serve him and bring him to others. It does make sense to become a priest: the world needs priests, pastors, today, tomorrow and always, until the end of time.” (Pope Benedict XVI letter to seminarians 18th October 2010)

Who is called?

Not I, surely?

Maybe you are asking yourself these questions, guess what... you are not the first and you certainly would not be the last. God calls people every day to serve him in some special way.

For many of us this call is not always clear, for me personally I first felt called to the Priesthood back in 1991 at World Youth Day in Poland, but for many reasons just felt it was not for me. Now here I am today in Rome at the Pontifical Beda College in my forth and final year of seminary formation at the age of 39. This is what Pope Benedict had to say about the seminary in his letter:

“The seminary is a community journeying towards priestly ministry. I have said something very important here: one does not become a priest on one’s own. The “community of disciples” is essential, the fellowship of those who desire to serve the greater Church” (Pope Benedict XVI Letter to Seminarians 18th October 2010)

So why am I at the Beda College and why is it only a four year course?
The Beda College was first founded in 1852 to form older men, often convert clergymen, for Catholic priesthood. They came only for four years, because they were seen to have significant knowledge and experience already. Today the character of the community has changed. Although the Beda remains the responsibility of the Bishops of England and Wales, it has opened its doors to receive men from English-speaking countries worldwide. However, the essential mission remains the same: to help older men harness and develop their experience and knowledge in the service of the Gospel as Catholic priests.
As I said earlier I fist felt called to priesthood back in 1991 at the World Youth Day in Poland. I started to discern vocation again in June 2004, for some of us it takes longer and often we run away from the call and make excuses. There are many different reasons why we do not feel called; maybe too old, too young, not worthy or you just feel that you could not cope.

Courage you only have to look at the Prophets and Apostles to realise they felt the same. Read the call of Moses in Exodus 3: 1- 4:17, who said he could not express himself very well or the call of Jonah (Jonah 1: 1-16) who just wanted to run away or even the call of Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1: 1-19) who said he was too young. Another great example is with the Apostle Paul who persecuted the Christians until he had a personal encounter with Jesus. It is about turning and facing God, it is about experiencing a personal relationship with Christ. I invite you to take up these scripture passages and contemplate them in your own life.

Remember the passage in Acts (Acts 8: 26-39) about the Ethiopian on his way home when Philip ran up and heard him reading Isaiah. Philip asked him if he understood what he was reading. The man replied “how could I, unless I have someone to guide me”

Rest assured Lancaster has a great team of people who are able to guide you. If it was not for this team and indeed the other seminarians, I wonder if I would still be wondering; if I would still be running away making excuses. There is no pressure; the team helps you to discover what the Lord is calling you to. This could be a number of things like the Priesthood, Religious life, Married life or the single life. This God of ours has a plan for every one of us - we just need to be open to God to enter into a relationship with Christ through prayer and discernment.

I leave you with the closing lines of Pope Benedict’s Letter to Seminarians:

"Dear seminarians, with these few lines I have wanted to let you know how often I think of you, especially in these difficult times, and how close I am to you in prayer. Please pray for me, that I may exercise my ministry well, as long as the Lord may wish. I entrust your journey of preparation for priesthood to the maternal protection of Mary Most Holy, whose home was a school of goodness and of grace. May Almighty God bless you all, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit."

My Vocations Story: Seminarian James Neary of the Diocese of Lancaster

2011-01-14T08:14:00.006Z

Seminarian James Neary, The Catholic Parish of Milnthorpe & Arnside

I grew up within a loving Catholic family and so knew and felt God’s love for me from a very early age. I recognised my faith as a precious and joyful gift, but never really allowed this to pose the question of my purpose in this life. My relationship with God was apparent and real but only to a level where essentially I was in control, in the driver’s seat, like so many living in this increasingly technological age with seemingly endless possibilities and opportunities. This sense of control was enhanced by the fact I achieved high grades in my subjects through what I felt were my own and my teachers’ efforts, reinforcing the notion that I could determine my own future. Blinded by choice of university courses and careers, like the seed thrown into the thorns (Mk 4:7), I was choking and suffocating my true self and ignoring an inner voice calling to something else. I felt my choice to study Medicine a wise decision and started on my career to become a Doctor in 2000 at Manchester University.

Then in January, 2002, at the age of twenty, I was diagnosed with having a life-threatening brain tumour and suddenly had to step off this treadmill. For the first time in my life, I began to understand my utter dependence on God. I was made aware of my fragile, corruptible nature as a human being and realised my need to recognise my life from within the comfort of God’s hands. This gradually began to open up a deeper relationship with God and eventually a complete trust in and a total surrender to His will for me – I was baptised again in His Spirit. Over the coming years I began not only a journey of recovery, but also of discernment of God’s plan for me. This was aided by a short time in 2005-2006 in the Lancaster Diocesan House of Formation in Cleator, West Cumbria under the fatherly guidance of Fr. Manny Gribben. Finally, in July 2006, after two operations, months of radiotherapy and chemotherapy, several special experiences and the prayers of so many wonderful people, my scan revealed that the inoperable remains of my tumour had disappeared.

I’m now in my fifth year at Allen Hall Seminary in London studying to become a priest for the Lancaster diocese. People often ask me how long it takes to become a priest and when I tell them that it’s usually six years they’re quite surprised at how long this seems to be. To be frank though I’m quite glad that it is, now I’m reaching the later stages! Just like a university, we do have the academic side to it with a combination of philosophical and theological courses that are required, but the fundamental objective of our time here in Seminary (literally ‘the seed-bed’) is to discern and understand, to a degree, what God has in mind for us and our priestly ministry. The prerogative is for us to be formed and fashioned as people ‘configured to Christ, so that they can act in the person of Christ the Head’ (Presbyterorum Ordinis 2). Therefore, we need to allow God to work in us and through us so that we can become a true disciple of the Lord. This seems quite daunting, but it is indeed rewarding.

Finally, can I please ask for your prayers for our Church, for more men and women to hear and respond to God’s call and for support of those in training.

A Vocation Boom in Lancaster Diocese - Think about it?

2011-01-13T09:22:00.000Z

How do you experience the Presence of Jesus Christ in the Mass?

2011-01-12T09:19:00.001Z
A little something from 'down south':

Another Vocation Story....John-Paul Evans, Seminarian of the Diocese of Lancaster)

2011-01-06T08:00:00.005Z

“Samuel, Samuel… Speak LORD your servant is listening.” (1 Sam. 3:10)

by Seminarian John-Paul Evans, Great Eccleston

No, this is defiantly not how my call to priesthood began. There was no great flash, the angel of the Lord did not appear in a dream, but there was - as with all vocations - a personal call, to me from God. I didn’t grow up with the idea of becoming a priest. I assumed like “most people” I would get a job, get married, have children and live my life. I wished to go into a career as an electronic engineer, however there were a few problems and I left university and took a job dealing with and resolving IT problems. However, I am currently in my second year at St.Cuthbert’s Seminary, Ushaw, where in November I was instituted as a Lector, (the first ministry on the way to becoming a priest). Here is a short (ish) account of how I got there.

I grew up in the small village of Great Eccleston and became an altar boy at around the age of 8. I have fond memories of Church – May processions and the Crowning of Our Lady’s statue, Stations of the Cross during Lent, Rosary devotions in October and regular Benediction. Unfortunately these traditional practices seam to have all but disappeared from parish life in recent times. Despite this early beginning centred on the Eucharist, prayer and devotion to Our Blessed Mother, it was not until I was about 21 that I really started to think more about priesthood.

One Sunday during Mass I remember for the first time actually “hearing” the Gospel! It was addressed to me. The Priest’s Homily was addressed to me! Over the next few weeks and months I was really aware that Christ Speaks to us all personally in the Gospel and I began to realise that He was calling me to serve Him, not just as an altar server at Mass – but as a Priest. Around that same time, with the encouragement and support of my parish priest I signed up to represent the parish at the next World Youth Day in Cologne, Germany in 2005. I remember the call to priesthood constantly filling my life and during a WYD retreat at Castlerigg I just had to tell someone about it. I spoke to one of the priests on the retreat who reassured me that it was a great thing to be called to priesthood and that I should talk it through with my parish priest. When I returned I went to speak to the parish priest who was greatly supportive and encouraged me to begin praying more. I began at that point to pray Morning, Evening and Night prayer from the Divine Office.

It was while I was at World Youth Day in Germany that I was prompted to say Yes to Christ’s call and told this to the Vocations director Fr. Manny Gribben. What prompted me? (Other than the Holy Spirit) – At a catechesis session, Cardinal McCarrick spoke about our whole life being a pilgrimage, not just the prayers we say or the pilgrimages we make, but everything. And this pilgrimage is towards God. At the end of the session, the Cardinal asked us two questions: What does God want from me today? And How do I live my Faith? My response was that I must say Yes to the call to priesthood. That was over five years ago and is still an important thing to ask.

When I came home I continued to work and to pray. After I left my job I spent a year in Cleator at the Diocesan house of formation before starting major seminary at Ushaw in 2009.

P.S. Ushaw like Allen Hall in London has its origins in the English College at Douai founded by Cardinal William Allen – the same man after whom my old high school in Fleetwood was named. So maybe the call to priesthood was always there in my life, but like Samuel I just needed a little prompting to respond. We don’t always realise at the time, but Christ works through many different channels to reach us, through our friends and family, priests, but nowhere more so than in the Gospel.

A Vocation Journey....by John MIllar, Seminarian of the Diocese of Lancaster

2011-01-03T18:45:00.007Z

by Seminarian John Millar, Kendal

I was told in the playground at primary school that I would be a good priest and that planted a seed of a thought in my mind. Like all young people I thought about many different jobs I might do when I grew up. The Priesthood was always a possibility in my mind for my future. After my confirmation, at the age of 14, thoughts of following Christ in the Priesthood came to the fore. The Sacrament of Confirmation is one in which the Christian is strengthened to follow Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. He receives power to witness to Christ publicly and quasi officially (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1305). The way in which I felt God calling me to fulfil this commission was in the Priesthood.

So I began a process of deepening my prayer life and my involvement in the parish of Kendal where I grew up by reading at Mass and serving on the altar. Soon afterwards, when I was 15, I spoke to my parish priest about the possibility of a vocation to the Priesthood. He put me in touch with the vocations director who was the same priest who spoke to me in the school playground all those years before! With the help and encouragement of good priests and my family I began to grow in an understanding of what God was asking me to do.

During Sixth Form I made a formal application to the Diocese of Lancaster to study for the Priesthood. Bishop O’Donoghue sent me to the House of Formation in Cleator for a propaedeutic year. This was a time of growth in the spiritual life following the timetable of prayer set in the house, weekly manual labour, an in-depth study of the Catechism and pastoral work throughout that large parish. Following this year Bishop O’Donoghue sent me to Allen Hall seminary in London. Here I spent two years studying philosophy and am now in my third year of theology at Heythrop College (a Jesuit institution part of the University of London). During this time I have been instituted as both a lector and an acolyte and most recently admitted to candidacy for holy orders by our own Bishop Campbell. I am presently completing my final year of studies at Allen Hall.

Go to the Website of the Diocese of Lancaster

2010-12-20T12:11:00.001Z

Go to the Diocese of Lancaster's official Website and learn of the latest news and information on the local and univeral Church as well as resources for catehcesis and evangelisation.

Prayers Requested for Seminarian with Inoperable Brain Cancer

2010-12-03T11:49:00.005Z

The Most Reverend Michael F. Burbidge of the Diocese of Raleigh is requesting prayers for one of our seminarians, Philip Johnson. Philip just completed his first year of Pre-Theology at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philadelphia. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Philip served two years in the Navy, having been granted a discharge in 2009 when he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour.

Prior to this diagnosis, Philip believed God was calling him to the Priesthood. “I discussed the possibility of entering the Diocese of Raleigh’s formation program with Bishop Burbidge in 2006 before I went on active duty to fulfill my five year commitment,” he said. But the Navy informed him that was not possible. “So, my plan was to complete my tour of duty and then apply to the Diocesan formation program.”

In October 2008, while serving on a ship near Bahrain, Philip began developing problems. His roommate, who was a Catholic chaplain, noticed a seizure Philip experienced during his sleep. As a result, he underwent an MRI, which revealed a mass developing in his brain.

“I know many people would get mad at God receiving this kind of news,” Philip said. “I didn’t get mad. I got sad. I went to a small Catholic chapel on the naval base in Bahrain and cried, unsure of what the future held.”

The Navy assigned him to Norfolk to undergo further medical tests. In January 2009, a biopsy was performed, the results of which indicated cancer. That meant an automatic medical discharge from the Navy, which occurred several months later.

Philip met again with Bishop Burbidge, sharing with him the status of his illness. He noted that doctors, while acknowledging the seriousness of his illness, could not give a definitive prognosis and that his age was in his favor. “Bishop Burbidge told me he would not get in God’s way if I wanted to answer the call to Priesthood,” Philip said.

In April 2009, he began undergoing radiation for the tumour and chemotherapy.

Having been given the assurance by Philip’s physicians that he could participate fully in the seminary formation program without any detrimental effects to his health, Bishop Burbidge accepted him into formation for the Priesthood, and he entered St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in August 2009.

Regrettably, Philip was informed last month by his physicians that the tumour had begun to grow, and there is no standard treatment to address it at this time. On June 16, he began what will be regular visits to the National Institutes of Health in Washington, DC, undergoing a new experimental chemotherapy treatment.

During this period of treatment, Bishop Burbidge has assigned Philip to an apostolate of prayer for the Church and Diocese at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Dunn. In addition, he is being granted permission by the Bishop to return to the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes in France in July to participate in a seminarian program at the Shrine, which helps pilgrims who are ill. He will also serve as a tour guide at the Shrine. It will be his second year in this program. “It is something I am looking forward to,” he said, “because of my devotion to Our Lady of Lourdes and Saint Bernadette.”

As for a return to the seminary this coming fall, Philip said, “The Bishop told me that I may return if I feel I can handle it, and that is my plan. The Bishop also stressed the need for consultation and the consent of my physicians.”

Philip is sharing his story with others on a blog that he created. “My parents and I began receiving emails inquiring how I was doing. As word began to spread, I began getting even more emails of people sharing their illnesses with me and telling me how I was giving them strength and helping them with their faith,” Philip said. “Knowing that so many are praying for me, they in turn are giving me strength to go on. They are helping me to keep moving to the vocation God is calling me to.”

Bishop Burbidge stated that Philip is a powerful example of the faith and the trust we need to share in the sufferings of Christ. Bishop Burbidge said, “I join Philip in thanking the priests, deacons, religious and lay faithful of this Diocese for their continued prayerful support for Philip during this time of need.”

Seminarian may owe his life to Cardinal Van Thuan's intercession

2010-11-19T11:07:00.001Z

Doctors said Joseph Nguyen was dead. His heart rate was dropping beyond recovery, and all brain activity was gone. But while they wrote his death certificate, Joseph's parents were asking an old family friend for help: a Vietnamese cardinal who is being considered for beatification.

Joseph Nguyen has since re-enrolled in seminary. He's seen his own death certificate, now stamped “VOID.” He has only two memories of the 32-day coma, which he says felt otherwise like a “great night's sleep.”

During the weeks that he hovered between life and death in 2009, Joseph says he had two encounters with Cardinal Francois-Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan.

The revered Vietnamese Cardinal died in 2002. In 2007 he received a prominent mention in Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical “Spe Salvi,” where the Holy Father cited his exemplary Christian witness during his 13 years as a political prisoner. His cause for beatification began in 2007 as well. In October 2010, the Vatican began its own inquiry into his possible sainthood.

Long before anyone thought to declare him a saint, the future cardinal was simply a priest– often celebrating private Masses in the homes of some Vietnamese faithful. Although Joseph Nguyen never met Cardinal Van Thuan during his earthly life, his father's family knew “Father Van Thuan” quite well. They thought of the priest “almost like a family member.”

That family bond deepened when Cardinal Van Thuan became Archbishop of Saigon, and subsequently a prisoner of the Communist regime.

In 1975, Joseph Nguyen's parents immigrated from Southeast Asia to the United States, where their son was later born. Joseph knew about Cardinal Van Thuan's heroic life, and appreciated his message of peace and hope. But the young seminarian never imagined he would be describing details of his own life, and near-death, to investigators for the cardinal's canonization.

It began in August 2009, during Joseph's third year in the seminary. He was assigned to hospital work, visiting and counseling the sick, as well as bringing the Eucharist to Catholic patients. Early in the fall, he caught what he thought was only a common seasonal flu. When the illness worsened, he asked for leave from the seminary to recover at home.

“I remember October 1st,” he recounted to CNA. “I had no idea why I was gasping for air.” His father drove him to the hospital, where he checked himself in. But Joseph has no memory of that event, or the emergency tracheotomy he received after losing the ability to breathe.

Later, he would hear about the day he was pronounced dead, while his parents kept hope alive and prayed fervently for Cardinal Van Thuan's intercession. He would also hear about how, on the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, while still comatose, he began violently pulling the tubes from his body, stopping only when his father placed a rosary in his hand.

He'd also learn about the second time his body seemed to be shutting down. That time, no one declared his death. They'd already seen one seemingly impossible recovery.

When Joseph awoke, after 32 days, he knew nothing about any of this. A doctor explained he had fallen ill not only with a seasonal flu, but also the H1N1 “Swine Flu,” and severe pneumonia. Friends and family later told him the details of his month in the coma.

But when he could speak again, Joseph had his own story to tell.

“During my coma, there are only two things I remember,” he said. “The only two things I remember are two visions of Cardinal Van Thuan … He appeared to me twice.”

Joseph said he not only saw, but actually met and spoke with Cardinal Van Thuan, during two vivid incidents he described as a “separation of soul and body.” Although he said he couldn't reveal the details of the ecounters, he did say that he suspected that they occurred while his doctors were observing his loss of brain activity and decline in vital signs.

“Soon after the second visit” with the cardinal, he said, “I woke up from the coma.” He had “no idea what had happened,” or why he had “all these tubes and wires” coming out of his body, particularly the tube in his neck that kept him from speaking.

Doctors thought it would be months or years before he could speak, walk, or study. But within days he was talking and breathing normally, racing his nurses around the rehabilitation room.
He also received an entirely unexpected phone call from Cardinal Van Thuan's sister in Canada, who ended up giving him one of her brother's rosaries.

Joseph returned to the seminary at the beginning of the following semester– a far cry from the two years his doctors had advised him to wait.

As others learned about Cardinal Van Thuan's possible involvement in Joseph's healing, he ended up providing information to officials working on the cardinal's cause for beatification in Rome. Apart from that contribution, though, the young seminarian just wants to move forward toward the goal of ordination. When he returned to the seminary, Joseph was assigned once again to hospital duties.

While he was reticent about some potentially miraculous aspects of his healing, Joseph spoke enthusiastically about his current hospital work. He said his coma and recovery experience have allowed him to give hope and comfort to patients.

Those patients don't need to know about his mysterious meetings with a possible saint, or his breathtaking return from death. What matters more is to see the scar on his throat, and know he understands. “It's very fulfilling to be able to walk into a room and say ... 'You don't have to feel this alone, because I've been there' – physically, there, in that hospital bed.”

Joseph recalled that his experiences in the coma instilled “the virtue of hope” in his heart, giving him a message he hopes to share with those in desperate circumstances. “That's Cardinal Van Thuan in my life,” the future priest reflected.

Priestly vocations on the rise in England and Wales

2010-11-17T13:29:00.005Z

Priestly vocations on the rise in England and WalesThis September saw the numbers entering English seminaries to become Catholic priests at their highest level in a decade. 56 men began the journey towards priesthood this year. “The number of people responding to the call of Christ to be priests and religious has been rising slowly but surely, said Fr Stephen Langridge, Chairman of the Vocations Directors of England and Wales, and may rise further as people respond to the visit of Pope Benedict.”

At their annual conference held last week at Oscott seminary in Birmingham, the Vocations Directors discussed the approaches to vocations work that have contributed to this increase. Many dioceses and religious orders now run discernment groups for young men and women where all vocations are discussed. Such groups encourage lay, religious and priestly vocations. Fr Christopher Jamison, Director of the National Office of Vocation, commented: “When everybody in the Church takes seriously Newman’s insight that ‘God has created me to do him some definite service,’ then a greater number discover their call to the priesthood and religious life.”

Vocations directors also discussed new ways to promote this culture of vocation. ‘Invocation’ was a festival held in Birmingham in July 2010 for Catholics aged 16-35 who are discerning their vocation and some 300 young people attended. This was so popular that it is being held again on the weekend 17th to 19th June 2011.
Schools are now being provided with high quality on-line materials and youth ministers are developing new approaches to bringing the gospel to life for the young. Attending events such as World Youth Day is an important experience that opens the eyes of many people to the richness of life in the Church and plans for English and Welsh participation are well developed.

More information is available at the following web sites:

http://lancastervocations.blogspot.com/
ukvocation.org
ukpriest.org
invocation.org.uk

IF YOU WANT TO BE PART OF THIS STORY!.....

Contact:
Lancaster Diocesan Vocations Director
Fr Emmanuel Gribben
St Mary
The Priory
Cumbria,
CA23 3AB

Tel: 01946 810324

email: emmanuel.gribben@googlemail.com

Reflections on Pastoral Leadership and Ministry in the Church of 2010 and Beyond

2010-11-14T18:19:00.002Z

Father Rosica's Address to Vocation Director Convention

Here is the keynote address Basilian Father Thomas Rosica, the C.E.O. of the Salt and Light Catholic Media Foundation, delivered Sept. 14 to the 47th Convention of the National Conference of Diocesan Vocation Directors, the Midwest Association of Theological Schools, and the Seminary Division of the National Catholic Education Association. The address is titled "Reflections on Pastoral Leadership and Ministry in the Church of 2010 and Beyond."
* * *

Dear Friends,
Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Thank you for the privilege of addressing this important and impressive international assembly of the National Conference of Diocesan Vocation Directors [NCDVD]; the Midwest Association of Theological Schools [MATS] and the Seminary Division of the National Catholic Education Association [NCEA]. Your invitation to me arrived over two years ago and I have given much thought to the theme you have chosen and the presentation I am about to give. I come to you as a member of a Religious Congregation -- the Basilian Fathers -- whose roots are in the diocesan priesthood of early 19th century France. Our raison d'être in the beginning was the formation of the local clergy in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

My reflections are based on many years of experience with those preparing for priestly ministry in the Church -- in both diocesan seminaries and religious life -- as well as with young priests, and those who work in seminaries, theological faculties and formation settings. In addition to working with those preparing for ministry, the experiences of teaching Sacred Scripture to candidates for ministry, of working in university chaplaincy, preaching priests' retreats, leading a World Youth Day, serving in congregational administration and heading a National Catholic Television Network in these turbulent times have offered me invaluable insights into the lives and hopes of young adults today. I have learnt much about the challenges facing those in ministry, and those whom we strive to serve.

Doing the will of the Lord

My starting point for this address is found in the homily of Pope Benedict XVI at the Mass for the Inauguration of his Petrine Ministry on April 24, 2005. In that very moving, programmatic address, Benedict XVI said: "Dear friends! At this moment there is no need for me to present a programme of governance. …My real programme of governance is not to do my own will, not to pursue my own ideas, but to listen, together with the whole Church, to the word and the will of the Lord, to be guided by Him, so that He himself will lead the Church at this hour of our history."

Imagine Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, one of the greatest theologians and minds of the Church, announcing to the Church and the world that he has come not to do his own will, but to listen, together with the whole Church, to the word and the will of the Lord, to be guided by the Lord, so that the Lord himself will lead the Church at this hour of our history! What powerful words to be taken to heart for each of us entrusted with priestly and pastoral ministry!

These words are very fitting for the theme of this conference in Milwaukee: "Thy will be done." The will of God is first of all the comprehensive plan of God for the universe and history. It is the marvelous plan through which the Father, "destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will" (Ephesians 1:5). The same expression "thy will be done" can refer also to any singular expression of the will of God. This "will" must be done first of all by God; it is God who fulfills his plan of salvation for the world.

Far from meaning some kind of passive, helpless abandonment to fate or circumstance, the "will of God" surpasses our wildest imagination and dreams, and reveals God's immense, providential, merciful care for each and everyone of us. To allow God's will to be done in us requires a conscious, decided "yes" or "fiat" on our part, and a sweet and sometimes bittersweet surrender so that something great may happen in us, through us, because of us and even in spite of us.

A vocation is not self-centered but comes to maturity in the context of a living, breathing, faith community. Allow me to share with you some reflections on our life together in the Church. What are the implications of doing God's will in vocation and formation ministry in the Church today? What are the challenges and opportunities before us as we try to understand and do the will of God, and as we help the young people entrusted to us to discern God's will for them? How is our priesthood related to the priesthood of Jesus, the eternal high priest? How is the will of God manifested to us? How is the will of God done in and through us?

I would also like to address several important questions that are surfacing among those preparing for ministry, and those recently ordained. Why are candidates for ministry and newly ordained priests raising questions about the validity and enduring significance of the teachings of the Second Vatican Council? Why does there seem to be a fascination with old liturgical practice and things that appear to be external and superficial? Why is the divide growing between younger priests and older priests? How can we foster dialogue and build bridges between the generations of the presbyterate?

The Prophetic Priesthood of Jesus Christ

Before we speak of formation for ministry and the exercise of our priestly ministry, we must look carefully at the priesthood of Jesus Christ. Jesus was not a priest after the Jewish tradition. He did not belong to the line of Aaron but to that of Judah, and thus the path of priesthood was legally closed to Him. The person and activity of Jesus of Nazareth did not follow in the line of the ancient priests, but in that of the tradition of the prophets of ancient Israel. As Pope Benedict pointed out in his homily for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi in Rome on June 3, 2010: "Jesus distanced Himself from a ritualistic conception of religion, criticizing the approach that attributed value to human precepts associated with ritual purity rather than to the observance of God's commandments; that is, to love for God and for neighbor, which 'is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices'. ... Even His death, which we Christians rightly call 'sacrifice', was completely unlike the ancient sacrifices, it was quite the opposite: the execution of a death sentence of the most humiliating kind: crucifixion outside the walls of Jerusalem"

Unlike the Levitical priests, the death of Jesus was essential for his priesthood. He is a priest of compassion. His authority attracts us- because of his compassion. Ultimately, Jesus exists for others, he exists to serve. He has been tested in all respects like us- he knows all of our difficulties; he is a tried man; he knows our condition from the inside and from the outside -- only by this did he acquire a profound capacity for compassion. For one must have suffered in order to truly feel for others. The priesthood of Christ involves suffering. Jesus truly suffered and He did so for us. He was the Son and had no need to learn obedience, but we do, we needed it and we will always need it. Thus the Son assumed our humanity and, for us, allowed Himself to be 'educated' in the crucible of suffering, he allowed himself to be transformed by suffering, like the seed which to bring forth fruit must die in the earth. Without this fundamental principle and vision, any of our efforts to form the Church of Jesus Christ are in vain.

The lasting significance of Vatican II

When Pope Benedict met with the Roman Curia to offer his first Christmas greetings as Pope back in December 2005, he offered a long analysis of the legacy left by the 1962-1965 gathering of the world's bishops (known as the Second Vatican Council). This papal address is absolutely essential to our understanding of what Benedict is trying to offer the Church through his Pontificate.

One of the most important duties and responsibilities of the Successor of Peter and Vicar of Christ is to preserve the unity of the Church. Benedict, in particular, feels deeply responsible for unity, and cares for hose who still today find themselves outside of ecclesial communion, but also of those who find themselves in a state of tension within it, and he invites all to a reciprocal openness within the unity of the same faith… that same unity and faith which inspired John XIII fifty-one years ago to convene the Council, and moved and animated Paul VI, John Paul I and John Paul II in their heroic efforts to give flesh and blood to the Second Vatican Council.

Nevertheless, there have been several significant events, statements, and misunderstandings these past years that have left us all perplexed. Are we turning the clock back on Vatican II? Are we trying to erase what the Council taught? In particular, in the area of liturgy, is there an effort to go backward rather than forward? I have been concerned that among younger clergy and even those in formation, there seems to be a greater interest in and familiarity with recent "Motu Proprios" rather than Conciliar documents. There appears to be a trivialization, a fastidious and affected attention to externals more than a deep desire to find meaning, and foster reverence and respect for the Sacred Liturgy.

The pillar of the renewal of priestly life is the liturgy. If the priest does not rediscover the true meaning of the liturgy in his life, he cannot find himself. The liturgy is the place of education to communion. The protagonist of the liturgy is Christ, not the Pope, the Cardinals in Rome, and not even the parish priest. By living the liturgy, we can enter into the life of God, and only thus can we priests journey effectively with the men and women of our time and of all time. Nevertheless the liturgical reform must concern itself not only with texts and ceremonies, rubrics and rituals, vestments and the number of candlesticks on altars, but also with the spiritual hungers of human communities that we serve. Without authentic evangelization, participation in the liturgy is ultimately hollow– an aesthetic pastime or a momentary palliative; without the works of justice and charity, participation in the liturgy is ultimately deceptive, playing church rather than being church.

Nor can we forget that permission for the "Extraordinary Rite" of the Mass was granted for the sake of unity in the Church and nothing else. "The Extraordinary Rite" is exactly that: extraordinary. What is ordinary is what the vast number of our faithful celebrate each week. To impose what was meant to be "extraordinary" on ordinary situations does a great disservice to the unity of the Church and goes against the intent of the Holy Father. To misuse the special permission of the Holy Father for the Extraordinary Rite for political motives causes division. We must be about the work of unity in a Church that is often so divided.

Another perplexing reality I have encountered, especially among those in formation and those newly ordained, has been in the area of Sacred Scripture and preaching. A number of students, usually in their final years of the Master of Divinity or Master of Pastoral Theology program have complained saying they would never take another Scripture course again; that their previous Scripture courses had nothing to do with the reality of the church and liturgy and that the courses were "without a soul". This topic was addressed numerous times at the recent 2008 Synod of Bishops on the Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church, a Synod which I experienced in a very significant way, having served as the English language media attaché to this historic, world-wide gathering at the Vatican.

One cause of the present disinterest and seeming impasse in Scriptural studies has been the atomization and dissection of the Scriptures, and a lack of integration of biblical studies with faith and lived spirituality. Are today's Catholic Scripture scholars and teachers adequately prepared to draw from their exegetical knowledge and their own life of faith and prayer to help fellow Catholics discover the meaning of the biblical Word today?

In his 2001 brilliant and synthetic Apostolic Letter Novo Millennio Ineunte at the close of the Great Jubilee, Pope John Paul II highlighted seven pastoral priorities that are key to effective pastoral ministry today: holiness, prayer, Sunday Eucharist, sacrament of reconciliation, the primacy of grace, and listening to the Word and proclaiming the Word. The Word of God must be at the centre of our priestly lives and ministries. It is fundamental to the preparation of those preparing for priestly ministry. Unless we build our lives upon its rock-solid foundation, we will not have any roots.

Moving Beyond Ideology

We must be honest and admit that today, some of us are still stuck in the ideological battles that followed the Second Vatican Council. Perhaps we are frozen in categories of left and right; traditional vs. avant-garde; male vs. female; hierarchical vs. lay-led, or prophetic vs. static. Excessive tensions arising from Church politics, gender issues, liturgical practices, language, confusion over the "spirit of Vatican II" and not the whole message of the Second Vatican Council -- all of these influence today's candidates for ministry in the Church. Our inter-ecclesial and inter-community fixations and polarizations on all sides of the ecclesial spectrum can distract us from addressing with requisite depth and discernment the issues facing us today.

Many of today's young adults, including young priests and those discerning or preparing for ordained ministry, are searchers and seekers who desire to be truly Catholic. They seek nourishment in piety and devotion in ways very different from our own. They engage freely and generously in the works of social justice. They refuse to allow themselves to be ensnared by political or politically correct polarization or fashionable ideologies which are ready to exploit their human potential.

Whatever is not purified and transformed within us is transmitted to others- especially to the next generation. When we sell ourselves to cynicism and despair, meanness of heart, smallness of spirit and harshness in ecclesial discourse, we betray our deepest identity as bearers of joy, hope and truth. The manifestations of the Spirit must be accompanied by positive energy- because they are liberating. They ultimately set people free, and do not lead them into depression, sadness, cynicism, indifference or anger.

We must honestly ask ourselves individually and collectively: What ideologies have dominated our lives? How do we minister beyond ideology? What have been the dominant ecclesial ideologies at work among us? Is joy present in our priestly witness? What prevents me as an individual and us as a community from giving a robust, joyful witness to Jesus Christ, the Catholic Faith and the Church?

Many of us are afraid of the new generation, of their robust sense of Catholicism, their manifestations of piety, their desire to "reclaim" many things that have been lost or forgotten. Deep down inside of many of our hearts, we would like clones of ourselves, and not new, free, thinking beings of a new age. There is a great wisdom to the Church's ban on human cloning!

The younger generation easily uses the word "solid" to describe those who are rooted in tradition and unafraid to manifest authentic piety and devotion. The younger generation is wary of those who equivocate and speak around issues rather than addressing them. What can we learn from their questioning? We must learn that we have to avoid the temptation to fudge -- to adapt the Catholic faith so as to make it palatable to modern tastes and expectations. This so-called "accommodationist" approach generally fails. There is a risk in this approach that the Christian message becomes indistinguishable from everything else on offer in the market stalls of secularized religious faith. We have to be convinced that the fullness of the truth and beauty of the message of Jesus Christ is powerfully attractive when it is communicated without apologies or compromise.

The Second Vatican Council recommends that older priests show understanding and sympathy toward younger priests' initiatives; and it advises young ones to respect the experience of older priests and to trust them; it suggests that both treat each other with sincere affection, following the example of so many priests of yesterday and today; the parish priest and other priests, including the religious, are called upon to testify to communion in everyday life.

The resurgence of triumphalism, juridicism and clericalism

Among a particular segment of the Church today, and among some of our young people preparing for ministry or recently ordained, there is a resurgence of triumphalism. The triumphalist approach would like Church leaders and pastors to exercise authority through aggressive condemnation and excommunication and believes that the Church not only has the truth but also all the answers to every modern dilemma! How many of this group would like to use a Catholic Television Network to be the voice piece for such an ecclesial view! Woe to me if I do that with Salt + Light Television!

Jesus Christ is indeed the Truth, and the fullness of that truth is found in the Roman Catholic Church, but we must seek out with humility and in light of the Gospel how to respond to the many and varied demands of living in today's world. The Church must always proclaim the truth in love and charity. We do not impose the gospel on the world, but propose its alternative vision of compelling beauty, a beauty rooted in faith and reason. We seek to persuade by grace, truth and beauty through our liturgies, our pastoral programs and teaching moments.

Recently we have received a number of requests from our younger viewers and some younger clergy to "feature" the "old vestments" on our liturgical broadcasts. A fascination with such displays is symbolic of an ongoing "restorationism" in various pockets of the Church and represents an attempt to return to a triumphal past that the young never knew. In the midst of a world-wide pandemic of sex abuse, insistence on these elements is even more disconcerting. What does this message communicate to the world around us?

Again among a particular segment of the Church today, and among some of our young people, there is a resurgence of juridicism that searches out laws new or old to justify personal positions or ideologies in the Church. Juridicists take great delight in focusing on liturgical practices. They often create unnecessary hoops for people to jump through. While the Church needs law to insure good order, the purpose of all laws in the Church is the same as for all the works of the Church: for us, for our good and for our salvation.

There is also an emerging clericalist perspective that exaggerates the authority of the priest or bishop creating a new authoritarianism. The clericalist operates as if ordained ministers are entitled to special status and privilege in the Church and in society. It becomes even more pronounced when vocations are few, and those who are preparing for ministry and those recently ordained manifest a certain sense of entitlement because they have responded to the call while many others have not! Therefore they think that they deserve even more respect in this day and age. Clericalists gives little merit to collaboration with the laity and the involvement of laity. I encounter this on a daily basis in a pocket of our television viewers who would be content with a whole series of "talking head" priests, sisters and Church leaders who simply "talk at people" rather than engage them in mature, adult conversation.

Whenever we are manipulated by or become instruments of political pressure groups or tactics that would like to give the Church such new forms of triumphalism, juridicism, and clericalism, we fail in our mission of helping people to grow into a living, breathing, hopeful Church.

One of the great insights that came to me during the recent "Year of St. Paul" was Paul's tremendous spirit of collaboration with his co-workers. It was not simply a personal style or political ploy imposed by necessity but flowed from the deepest experience of his faith and his theological convictions. Paul of Tarsus knew that every gift, no matter how brilliant, was subordinate to the gift of charity and the bonding of the community. This must be our approach if the church is to be renewed and our mission to the world sustained.

Our current ecclesial reality

How could I stand here before the Seminary Rectors, heads of theologates and Vocation Directors of the United States and Canada without speaking about the ways that we are being pruned as a Church community, as the presbyterate and the episcopate during these very challenging days for the world Church? Over the past year in particular, the tsunami of headlines about abuse of minors by priests and religious in Ireland, Germany, Austria and numerous other countries, and re-runs of old stories from various places have brought the Church to her knees once again. To watch television networks or read the newspapers, one would think that the sexual abuse of children is a uniquely Catholic problem, one indeed facilitated by a wicked lot of priests and bishops.

Is it not true that many of us in the Church today feel like we are caught in a flash flood that is unexpected, powerful, destructive and filled with despair? The refrain sounds all too familiar: "Vocations are down, scandals are up. Problems are more and more complex, and demands are increasing. Complaints are more frequent and more strident. We are dealing with an aging population. We seem to have moved from "mission to maintenance." We feel battered and bruised. The flame seems to have gone out and our influence is terribly diminished. And the list goes on and on… Many of us have been hoodwinked into discouragement.

The media exerts a powerful influence on the thinking, the attitudes and the faith of people. The flash flood bears down with immense force on all of us. Some view our present situation with great pessimism and grow disheartened, depressed, and even cynical. Others don't want to admit what is happening and go whistling in the dark, clinging to the illusion that things definitively past can be recovered and the claims and facts of the present ignored. The media, magnifying various cases of pedophilia throughout the world, have forgotten the great majority of priests and religious who have lived out and continue to live out their fidelity happily and with total and freely given dedication, and whose only goal is to seek God and do good for others.

Just as the Risen Lord entrusted himself into the hands of pathetic, broken people in the beginning, he does the same to us. The full significance of the Ascension of the Lord reminds us that Christ accepts our lack of self-confidence in ourselves. He accepts the shadowy and dark areas of our humanity. He accepts our capacity for deceit, betrayal, abuse, greed and power. And having accepted us, he calls us, gives us the eternal commission to be his people, and sends us to serve him and love him. No one has described this better than John Henry Cardinal Newman who will be proclaimed "blessed" next Sunday. Cardinal Newman wrote:

"He calls us again and again,
in order to justify us again and again-
and again and again, and more and more,
to sanctify and glorify us.
It were well if we understood this;
but we are slow to master the great truth,
that Christ is, as it were,
walking among us, and by his hand, or eye, or voice,
bidding us follow him."

Five holy role models for our time

Throughout last year, we were invited to reflect on the life, message and example of St. John Vianney during the Year of the Priest. The Curé of the little village of Ars in France offered to each of us a sterling example of holiness and virtue, especially through his ministry of reconciliation. Let me offer you five exemplary models of ecclesial ministers who embody a way and message for our own times.

Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman

The beatification of Cardinal Newman on Sunday September 19, 2010 in Birmingham is a very important event for the universal Church. This 19th-century theologian is considered by many to have anticipated the Second Vatican Council. In all his anticipation he was always very careful to keep a moderate balance. He never went over the top. Rather than highlight his brilliance of theological synthesis and grasp of history, I would like to stress one of his outstanding human qualities: his understanding of friendship.

Friendship is a positive experience in a person's emotional life. In the Church there is still much fear of friendship. Pathologies are not channeled if one is not helped to develop a healthy life. Unhealthy and negative friendships, which because of this are not proper friendships, must not close us off from the essential value of these bonds of preference that open us to the love of others and help us to understand who God is. Newman truly speaks heart-to-heart -- "cor ad cor loquitur" -- a phrase that he took from St. Francis de Sales, as his personal motto.

Cardinal Newman often wrote to his friends as carissimi -- "dearest ones" -- but his was a more innocent age, far less suspicious of strong expressions of love between persons of the same sex. Newman was not afraid to be very close to a few people. He once wrote in a letter: "The best preparation for loving the world at large, and loving it duly and wisely is to cultivate an intimate friendship and affection for those who are immediately about."

Are we able to foster such friendships today among priests and among the people we serve? Can such intimate friendships exist for us? Men and women often have intense friendships with members of their own sex, friendships that have no sexual component; yet we are at a loss to speak about them or even afraid to do so. Today "friend" is one you add to a social networking profile on the web. You can "friend" someone or "unfriend" them with the stroke of your keyboard. "Friend" is also a euphemism for a sexual partner outside marriage. Can a man nowadays even own up with pride to having a dear and close friend, another man to whom he is devoted?

The French writer François Mauriac once wrote about friendship: "If you are friends with Christ many others will warm themselves at your fire... On the day when you no longer burn with love, many will die of the cold." I am certain that the "kindly light" and flame in Cardinal Newman's heart gave and continues to give life and warmth to millions of people. And the source of the unquenchable fire was Newman's deep friendship with Jesus Christ. We need Newman's kindly light and brilliant example today more than ever.

Blessed John XXIII

In 1958, at nearly 77 years old, Cardinal Angelo Roncalli was elected Pope upon the death of Pius XII. He was expected by many to be a caretaker and transitional Pope, but he astonished the Church and the world with his energy and reforming spirit. He expanded and internationalized the college of cardinals, called the first diocesan synod of Rome in history, revised the Code of Canon Law, and called the Second Vatican Council with the specific purpose of renewing the life of the Church and its teachings and reuniting Christians throughout the world.

In his opening address on October 11, 1962 [the date established as his feast and not the customary date of one's death], at the beginning of the Vatican Council, Pope John said, "In the every day exercise of our pastoral ministry, greatly to our sorrow we sometimes have to listen to those who, although consumed with zeal, do not have very much judgment or balance. To them the modern world is nothing but betrayal and ruination. They claim that this age is far worse than previous ages and they go on as though they had learned nothing from history -- and yet history is the great teacher of life."

On that same night of October 11, 1962, the day of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, Papa Giovanni appeared at his window in answer to the chanting and singing below from a crowd estimated at half a million people assembled in St. Peter's square. Many were young people who came in procession with candles and singing. His impromptu window speech that night is now part of Rome's legends. He cried out to the crowd:

"Carissimi giovani, carissimi giovani, Dear children, I hear your voice." In the simplest language, he told them about his hopes for the Council. He pointed out that the moon, up there, was observing the spectacle. "My voice is an isolated one," he said, "but it echoes the voice of the whole world. Here, in effect, the whole world is represented." He concluded: "Tornando a casa ... As you return to your homes, give your little children a kiss -- tell them it is from Pope John."

The emotion was palpable. The "patriarch" who was bearing the burden of age and sickness, gave and generated love with all his being. For all of the lofty words, words, words and texts that went into the Council, the historic nocturnal gathering on October 11, 1962 -- the opening night of Vatican II ¬-- was infused with the deep and stirring humanity of its author. Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was a human being, more concerned with his faithfulness than his image, more concerned with those around him than with his own desires. He truly embodied the words, "not my will but Your will be done." With an infectious warmth and vision, he stressed the relevance of the Church in a rapidly changing society and made the Church's deepest truths stand out in the modern world.

Blessed Jerzy Popieluszko, Martyr for the Truth

The recent beatification of the Polish Priest and Martyr, Jerzy Popieluszko offers us a magnificent model of courage, boldness, conviction and faith. He was born on this very day, September 14, 1947, the Feast of the Triumph of the Cross, in the village of Okopy in eastern Poland.

August 1980, saw the beginning of the Solidarity trade union. Fr. Jerzy regularly attended the trials of Solidarity activists, sitting prominently in court with their families so that the prisoners could see they were not forgotten. Jerzy was neither a social nor a political activist, but a Catholic priest. He wasn't a forceful speaker, but someone of deep conviction and integrity. His sanctity lay in fundamental righteousness that gave people hope even in horrendous situations. He knew that all totalitarian systems are based on terror and intimidation. The Communists saw him as an enemy because he freed people from fear of the system.

On October 19, 1984, he was kidnapped by security agents on his way back to Warsaw after a visit to a neighboring town. He was savagely beaten until he lost consciousness and his body was tied up in such a way that he would strangle himself by moving. His weighted body was then thrown into a deep reservoir. The massive turnout of people for his funeral sent shock waves deep into the Communist establishment.

The blood of his martyrdom has become the seed of faith for his homeland and for the church. At this moment in history, when the priesthood and the church have suffered much because of the past "sins of the fathers," the life and death of Fr. Popieluszko remind us what the priesthood and the Roman Catholic Church are all about.

The Servant of God, Fr. Michael McGivney

Fr. Michael McGivney, a parish priest in Hartford, Connecticut lived in 19th century America. He ministered to his flock with Christ-like compassion and recognized the material and spiritual poverty of so many members of the Catholic community of his day. He understood that it was part of the lay vocation to become actively involved in offering assistance to brothers and sisters in need. He knew that it is not only priests and religious who have a vocation, but that every Christian is called by Christ to carry out a particular mission in the Church. He died at the young age of 38 years old, leaving a lasting legacy in founding and establishing the Knights of Columbus, a lay Catholic fraternal organization that now has close to 1.8 million members worldwide.

Like the Good Samaritan, Christ's care for the sick and the suffering was an inspiration to Fr. McGivney who, as a priest, sought to be a living sign of Christ for the people he served. Fr. McGivney and his brother Knights throughout history have been binding the wounds of those they discovered lying by the wayside of history and helping restore them to health and strength. In so doing, they imitate Christ, who came that we might have life in abundance.

St. André of Montreal -- Brother André Bessette, CSC

The last example I hold up for you is not a priest but a Brother of Holy Cross, André Bessette, C.S.C. Born Alfred Bessette on August 9, 1845, in Saint-Grégoire d'Iberville, Quebec, he was one of 12 children and suffered from a chronic stomach ailment that kept him out of school and often without work. A few years after his father's death, his mother died, but their piety and trust in God had deeply influenced young Alfred. When he reached the age of 18, he set out for New England in search of employment. He spent four years working in cotton mills and farms in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. In 1867 he returned to Canada and sought the help of his childhood parish priest, Father André Provençal. The priest encouraged the young man to pursue his desire to enter into religious life.

When Alfred entered the novitiate, Father Provençal sent a letter to the novice master saying, "I am sending a saint to your congregation." The Holy Cross brothers had initially turned the less than five-foot-tall André away from seeking a religious vocation because of his delicate health. In reference to his assignment as doorman, he once quipped, "When I joined this community, the superiors showed me the door."

For more than 40 years, André contented himself with his humble tasks of welcoming visitors, cleaning the premises and running errands. He put himself at the service of everyone, especially the students, whom he would look after when they were ill. Many visitors would come to the college and ask André to pray for their loved ones who were ill, and many claimed they had been healed. News of his power to heal spread as people began to recover. In response to the many healings and conversions, Brother André would always insist it was the work of St. Joseph, not himself.

Brother André's special affection for St. Joseph inspired him to build a church in his honor. Using the small sums he received cutting students' hair, as well as donations, the brother was able to build a modest structure in 1904, which he continued to expand as more funding became available. Brother André was named the oratory's custodian in 1909 as hundreds and then thousands of pilgrims made their way to Mount Royal to meet Brother André and pray to St. Joseph. Brother André died on January 6, 1937, at the age of 91. Between his death and burial, more than 1 million people came to pay tribute to him. Beatified in 1982 by Pope John Paul II, Brother André, the humble porter of Mount Royal will be proclaimed a saint on October 17, 2010 in Rome.

Brother André Besette is a gentle yet powerful witness who reminds us that in the midst of all of our pastoral endeavors, we must strive for humility, practice hospitality, and love the poor. Who can say why was André chosen? In a truly beautiful circular letter to the Holy Cross family earlier this year, former Holy Cross Superior General Fr. Hugh Cleary, CSC wrote: "But perhaps André was chosen, like Mary and Joseph, because in the eyes of this world he was no one; he possessed nothing, nothing possessed him."

What struck me forcefully in the story of Brother André was the intuition and wisdom of his parish priest, Fr. André Provençal, who encouraged the young Alfred to pursue his desire to enter into religious life. Fr. Provençal sent a letter to the novice master saying, "I am sending a saint to your congregation."

I hope and pray that we who have been entrusted with vocational promotion and seminary formation may never forget one of the most important duties we have: to discern, recognize and acknowledge holiness in the young men entrusted to us. We must be discerners of holiness, fishers of men and not keepers of aquariums. Our task is not only to teach and form future ministers, but to call forth saints for the new millennium.

Holiness is the calling card of the Church. It is the face of the Church as we have seen in the remarkable lives of Jean Marie Vianney of Ars, John Henry Newman of Birmingham, Angelo Roncalli of Sotto il Monte and the Vatican, Jerzy Popieluszko of Warsaw, Michael McGivney of Hartford, and André Bessette of Montreal. Each of these men did not get caught up in the quarrels, squabbles and passing things of their age. They based their lives on God's Word, immersed themselves in the liturgy of the Church, drew strength from the Eucharist and the Sacraments, and put their devotion into practice through clear teaching, compassionate loving, gentle yet firm shepherding, patient suffering, and generously serving the poor. They allowed God's will to be done in their lives on a daily basis. The Lord worked through their doubts, strengths and human weaknesses to unite the Church. Their action on Jesus' behalf was all very positive, hopeful, courageous, and straightforward. Their active faith in him and their decisive following of him are the unchanging quintessence of the Church's vocation. They are the real heroes and role models for those who wish to serve the Lord in ordained ministry and religious life today.

The Lord entrusted himself into our hands

Priesthood is not, first and foremost, something we do, but someone we are. It is not an earned trophy. It is about an intimate relationship to the vine who is Christ. The Character of Christ the High Priest is branded on our hearts. We must never imagine that it is ourselves alone, in new-found power and privilege, who accomplish saving actions. It is Jesus, the Christ, who baptizes and preaches and spreads the feast of His body and blood and provides for the helpless and heals the hurt and grants us peace. He does it though weak, human beings like you and me. Who of us can ever be worthy of such a great calling? To victims, we must be an advocate; for the aimless, we must be shepherds; for the disheartened, heralds of good news; for sinners, disturbers of conscience; and for the guilty, forgivers. Let us take heart and be encouraged by the witness of the apostles and martyrs of the Early Church and the contemporary Church and never be afraid of giving our lives whole-heartedly to the Lord of the harvest. We come not to do our will but the will of the One who has called us and sent us.

Let me leave you with the deeply moving words of Pope John Paul II in his final homily at Canada's 2002 World Youth Day in Toronto. This great ecclesial event was prepared and took place under the terrible shadow of the sex-abuse crisis that erupted in the USA in early 2002. The Holy Father's words were so important and consoling then as they are today:

"Even a tiny flame lifts the heavy lid of night. How much more light will you make, all together, if you bond as one in the communion of the Church! If you love Jesus, love the Church! Do not be discouraged by the sins and failings of some of her members. The harm done by some priests and religious to the young and vulnerable fills us all with a deep sense of sadness and shame."

"But think of the vast majority of dedicated and generous priests and religious whose only wish is to serve and do good! There are many priests, seminarians and consecrated persons here today; be close to them and support them! And if, in the depths of your hearts, you feel the same call to the priesthood or consecrated life, do not be afraid to follow Christ on the royal road of the Cross! At difficult moments in the Church's life, the pursuit of holiness becomes even more urgent. And holiness is not a question of age; it is a matter of living in the Holy Spirit…"

May our will always be the will of the one who sent us: Jesus the Good Shepherd. Our real program of governance and pastoral ministry is not to pursue our own ideas, but to listen, together with the whole Church, to the word and the will of the Lord, to be guided by Him, so that He himself will lead the Church at this hour of our history. May God's will be done in us, through us, in spite of us, and yes, even because of us.

Thank you.

Would-be pro golfer on path to Priesthood

2010-11-10T11:55:00.002Z

It’s easy to imagine a six-foot, tanned, 32-year-old Peter Hannah on the golf greens of Monterey, California, in textbook form, languidly driving balls 300 yards.

But instead of an Izod shirt and khaki pants, he’s wearing the long, white habit of a medieval Dominican friar — and he’s heading into winter in Alaska. He arrived in August from St. Albert’s Priory in Oakland for a year’s work at Holy Family Cathedral in Anchorage, Alaska, as part of seminary training.

“My first reaction to being assigned to Anchorage was, ‘Wow, that’s a long ways away from California,” Brother Peter Junipero Hannah told the Catholic Anchor.

But the would-be professional golfer, former college fraternity brother and convert to Catholicism already has traveled a long distance — through even the spiritual “desert” of the so-called “good life” — on the surprising path to freedom.

The American Dream
By most accounts, Brother Hannah was living the American Dream.

Born in Temple, Texas at 10 pounds, 13 ounces, he looked like a nascent Texas Cowboys linebacker. But a family move to the West Coast and a “generally slender frame,” he said, turned hopes of football stardom into a chance at PGA fame. Like his up-and-coming school-mate Tiger Woods, as a teen, Brother Hannah was perfecting his strokes on California’s sunny golf courses.

Still, life was well-rounded.

Brother Hannah’s parents weren’t “PhDs or anything,” he said, but they instilled in him and his sister a “love for learning.”

And they owned a set of World Book of Encyclopedias, whose volumes six-year-old Brother Hannah would pick up on his own and “just start reading.” That intellectual curiosity continues to this day. “I’m interested in everything!” exclaimed the religious brother.

Growing up, his Presbyterian family attended church every Sunday. But by high school – and though he never “explicitly” disbelieved or rebelled against God – Brother Hannah was “so interested in golf, I didn’t really want to do anything else.”

In 1995, the “naturally ambitious” and determined Brother Hannah entered the University of California at San Diego, where he majored in American history and played on the golf team – aiming for a lucrative, professional sports career.

“I wanted to have a good life, I wanted to be successful,” Brother Hannah said.

A gnawing angst

At college, he joined a fraternity – which meant camaraderie, leadership and philanthropy projects.

But frat life had a dark side. There were drugs, alcohol and denigrating attitudes toward women.

By junior year, the “pagan pastimes” were gnawing on his conscience — as was the impermanence of his academic, social and athletic accomplishments.

His goals were “not bad things in themselves,” Brother Hannah said. “But when perfect performance did not emerge, and was made less and less perfect by the increasing mental haze attending fraternity life, a deep sense of anxiety developed within me.”

“I knew deep within my soul that things were not quite right,” he observed.

In quiet moments, he acknowledged, “‘There’s something really wrong about the messages I’m getting. There’s an emptiness in my soul that needs to be answered, filled somehow.’”

Then, the summer before senior year, his father encouraged him to become an official member of their hometown Presbyterian church — a step he had not yet taken.

“Like a lot of young people today,” he told his father that he wanted to “study other religions first.” For Christianity, his dad recommended the book, “Mere Christianity.”

So after a round of golf, Brother Hannah went to Barnes & Noble and walked out with a copy of C. S. Lewis’s classic and the autobiography of Jack Nicklaus.

'Water in the desert'

Lewis’s book turned out “like water in the desert for me,” Brother Hannah recalled.

“It was like, ‘Wow, Christianity does have some things to say!’” and those things, he observed, “protect order in society, protect human dignity” in “wonderful ways.”

Although he had “never tried to live intentionally in a non-Christian way,” Brother Hannah said he hadn’t thought much about what living in a Christian way looked like.

He began to realize that, however unwittingly, he had been acquiring “a lot of the habits that many people in the world acquire.”

He listed a few: the portrayal of women as sexual objects, the pursuit of wealth “to the neglect of the poorest of the poor or as kind of an end unto itself” and the pursuit of power and ambition apart from other concerns.

Finally, Brother Hannah acknowledged that he shouldn’t be embarrassed or ashamed by a conscience that was bothered by such attitudes and behaviors.

Soon, he began to question all his sacrifice just for a lower score on the links. By graduation, he had left his “religion” of golf.

Freedom in Christ

In graduate school in Maryland, Brother Hannah discovered Jesus in the Eucharist at a nearby Catholic parish. “I was overcome,” he recalled when considering that Christ himself would manifest himself in “his very flesh and blood.”

In a short time, he formally joined the Catholic Church and soon discerned a religious vocation.

He then entered the Order of Preachers or Dominicans as a brother and began the road to the priesthood.

In 2007, Brother Hannah made his first religious vow – obedience. As one who was accustomed to making his own way, he considers it the hardest.

“The vow of obedience goes straight to our free will and our desire to have certain situations the way we want them,” he said.

Obedience is the answer to the “mistake of pride of taking my own desires, will, wants, needs and not being willing to see them in a wider context of other peoples’ needs and of the needs of the world and the needs of my neighbor,” he explained.

Paradoxically, “the thing I’ve gained is freedom of heart,” he observed. “There is an almost indescribable freedom in giving yourself to Christ alone, in a single-minded way.”

As a religious, “all of my energy is going into helping people discover the life of Christ, helping people discover the grace and the freedom that is in Christ.”

For instance, in Anchorage, Brother Hannah is running the catechetical programs at Holy Family Cathedral, assisting with the youth and young adult groups there and teaching a church history class at Holy Rosary Academy.

Having been through the “desert,” Brother Hannah wants to show young people, in particular, “that there are other ways to live and to give them hope,” he explained.

Referencing Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, the now casual golfer and motivated religious brother observed: “We Christians are called to run the race to obtain a crown that doesn’t perish which is eternal life.”

Printed with permission from CatholicAnchor.org

Pope to Spain: See You Next Year in Madrid

2010-11-07T12:05:00.002Z

Benedict XVI left Spain today, but not before looking forward to his next visit to the country next summer.

"I return to Rome after visiting only two places in this beautiful country," the Pope said at the departing ceremony held at the Barcelona International Airport, but noted that, God willing, "we will meet again next year in Madrid, to celebrate World Youth Day."

The next youth day is set to take place Aug. 16-21, 2011.

In his address, the Holy Father also reflected on his brief two-day trip to Santiago de Compostela and Barcelona.

In Santiago de Compostela, he visited the tomb of Apostle James the Greater (in Spanish, Santiago), which is located in the crypt of the city's cathedral. Since the 10th and 11th centuries, the tomb has been the destination of the historic and popular pilgrimage route El Camino de Santiago de Compostela (The Way of St. James).

Benedict XVI said that he traveled to Compostela "as a pilgrim," and that as Pope he came "to strengthen my brothers and sisters in the faith that at the very dawn of Christianity came to these lands and took such deep root that it has constantly shaped the spirit, customs, art and character of its peoples."

"The preservation of this rich spiritual patrimony demonstrates the love of your country for its history and culture," he said, "yet it is also a privileged way of transmitting to younger generations those fundamental values so necessary for building up a common future of harmony and solidarity."

The Pontiff noted that while "the paths that cross Europe on the way to Santiago differed greatly, each marked by its own language and its particular characteristics, [...] the faith was the same. There was a common language, the Gospel of Christ.

"In any place pilgrims could feel at home. Beyond national differences, they knew that they were members of one great family to which the other pilgrims and people along the way also belonged."

"May this faith find new vigor on this continent and become a source of inspiration," he added. "May it give rise to an attitude of solidarity toward all, especially towards those communities and nations in greater need."

Monument of praise

In Barcelona, the Pope consecrated the altar of the Church of the Sagrada Familia (Holy Family), and designated it a basilica. The Pope said it was an "immense joy" for him to dedicate the church, which he said "Gaudí conceived as a monument of praise in stone to God."

He also visited the "Obra Benefico-Social Nen Deu" (social charity God-Child), a charity of the Franciscan Sisters of the Sacred Hearts that dates back to 1892.

The Holy Father said that the Holy Family Basilica and Nen Deu "stand in today’s Barcelona as two symbols of the fruitfulness of that faith which has marked this people deeply and which, through charity and the mystery of God’s beauty, contributes to the creation of a society more worthy of man."

"Truly, beauty, holiness and the love of God enable people to live with hope in this world," the Pontiff added.

Pope welcomes new seminary in Cuba

2010-11-05T12:21:00.002Z
Entrusting the new Cuban seminary to Our Lady of Charity, Pope Benedict in a message invited Cuban seminarians to identify themselves with Christ the Good Shepherd through prayer and study.

The new headquarters of the archdiocesan seminary of St. Charles and St. Ambrose was inaugurated on Wednesday. It is a complex of salmon-colored buildings organized around a chapel with stained glass windows located about five miles south of Havana.

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Holy See’s Secretary of State, delivered Pope Benedict XVI’s message at the opening of the seminary.

The Holy Father said in his message that he hopes the inaugural may be simultaneously “a sign and a stimulus for a renewed commitment to strive for the careful human, spiritual and academic preparation” of those preparing for the priestly ministry.

He invited the seminarians to identify themselves with “the sentiments of Christ the Good Shepherd” by means of “assiduous prayer,” serious dedication to study, “humbly” listening to the divine Word, and dignified celebration of the sacraments. He advised them to be “courageous witnesses” to God’s love as “authentic disciples and missionaries of the Gospel of salvation.”

Pope Benedict extended a blessing to all those who have contribute to the building’s construction.

He also entrusted the seminary to the protection of the Blessed Virgin Mary, noting Cuba’s devotion to her under the title Our Lady of Charity.

The seminary’s predecessor had been seized by Cuban authorities in 1966 and turned into a military barracks and then a police academy.

About 75 percent of the island nation’s priests left after the communist revolution. However, relations between Church and State have improved in recent years.

President Raul Castro attended the Wednesday ceremony and toured the facility.

“In the name of the Church, I thank the former president as well as current President Raul Castro, who honors us with his presence, for the state’s support of this work, to its completion,” Cardinal Archbishop of Havana Jaime Ortega said at the ceremony, according to Reuters.

Also in attendance were bishops from the Vatican and Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami.

The Holy Father writes to Seminarians

2010-10-20T13:37:00.003+01:00

Dear Seminarians,

When in December 1944 I was drafted for military service, the company commander asked each of us what we planned to do in the future. I answered that I wanted to become a Catholic priest. The lieutenant replied: “Then you ought to look for something else. In the new Germany priests are no longer needed”. I knew that this “new Germany” was already coming to an end, and that, after the enormous devastation which that madness had brought upon the country, priests would be needed more than ever.

Today the situation is completely changed. In different ways, though, many people nowadays also think that the Catholic priesthood is not a “job” for the future, but one that belongs more to the past. You, dear friends, have decided to enter the seminary and to prepare for priestly ministry in the Catholic Church in spite of such opinions and objections. You have done a good thing. Because people will always have need of God, even in an age marked by technical mastery of the world and globalization: they will always need the God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ, the God who gathers us together in the universal Church in order to learn with him and through him life’s true meaning and in order to uphold and apply the standards of true humanity. Where people no longer perceive God, life grows empty; nothing is ever enough. People then seek escape in euphoria and violence; these are the very things that increasingly threaten young people. God is alive. He has created every one of us and he knows us all. He is so great that he has time for the little things in our lives: “Every hair of your head is numbered”. God is alive, and he needs people to serve him and bring him to others. It does makes sense to become a priest: the world needs priests, pastors, today, tomorrow and always, until the end of time.

The seminary is a community journeying towards priestly ministry. I have said something very important here: one does not become a priest on one’s own. The “community of disciples” is essential, the fellowship of those who desire to serve the greater Church. In this letter I would like to point out – thinking back to my own time in the seminary – several elements which I consider important for these years of your journeying.

1. Anyone who wishes to become a priest must be first and foremost a “man of God”, to use the expression of Saint Paul (1 Tim 6:11). For us God is not some abstract hypothesis; he is not some stranger who left the scene after the “big bang”. God has revealed himself in Jesus Christ. In the face of Jesus Christ we see the face of God. In his words we hear God himself speaking to us. It follows that the most important thing in our path towards priesthood and during the whole of our priestly lives is our personal relationship with God in Jesus Christ. The priest is not the leader of a sort of association whose membership he tries to maintain and expand. He is God’s messenger to his people. He wants to lead them to God and in this way to foster authentic communion between all men and women. That is why it is so important, dear friends, that you learn to live in constant intimacy with God. When the Lord tells us to “pray constantly”, he is obviously not asking us to recite endless prayers, but urging us never to lose our inner closeness to God. Praying means growing in this intimacy. So it is important that our day should begin and end with prayer; that we listen to God as the Scriptures are read; that we share with him our desires and our hopes, our joys and our troubles, our failures and our thanks for all his blessings, and thus keep him ever before us as the point of reference for our lives. In this way we grow aware of our failings and learn to improve, but we also come to appreciate all the beauty and goodness which we daily take for granted and so we grow in gratitude. With gratitude comes joy for the fact that God is close to us and that we can serve him.

2. For us God is not simply Word. In the sacraments he gives himself to us in person, through physical realities. At the heart of our relationship with God and our way of life is the Eucharist. Celebrating it devoutly, and thus encountering Christ personally, should be the centre of all our days. In Saint Cyprian’s interpretation of the Gospel prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread”, he says among other things that “our” bread – the bread which we receive as Christians in the Church – is the Eucharistic Lord himself. In this petition of the Our Father, then, we pray that he may daily give us “our” bread; and that it may always nourish our lives; that the Risen Christ, who gives himself to us in the Eucharist, may truly shape the whole of our lives by the radiance of his divine love. The proper celebration of the Eucharist involves knowing, understanding and loving the Church’s liturgy in its concrete form. In the liturgy we pray with the faithful of every age – the past, the present and the future are joined in one great chorus of prayer. As I can state from personal experience, it is inspiring to learn how it all developed, what a great experience of faith is reflected in the structure of the Mass, and how it has been shaped by the prayer of many generations.

3. The sacrament of Penance is also important. It teaches me to see myself as God sees me, and it forces me to be honest with myself. It leads me to humility. The Curé of Ars once said: “You think it makes no sense to be absolved today, because you know that tomorrow you will commit the same sins over again. Yet,” he continues, “God instantly forgets tomorrow’s sins in order to give you his grace today.” Even when we have to struggle continually with the same failings, it is important to resist the coarsening of our souls and the indifference which would simply accept that this is the way we are. It is important to keep pressing forward, without scrupulosity, in the grateful awareness that God forgives us ever anew – yet also without the indifference that might lead us to abandon altogether the struggle for holiness and self-improvement. Moreover, by letting myself be forgiven, I learn to forgive others. In recognizing my own weakness, I grow more tolerant and understanding of the failings of my neighbour.

4. I urge you to retain an appreciation for popular piety, which is different in every culture yet always remains very similar, for the human heart is ultimately one and the same. Certainly, popular piety tends towards the irrational, and can at times be somewhat superficial. Yet it would be quite wrong to dismiss it. Through that piety, the faith has entered human hearts and become part of the common patrimony of sentiments and customs, shaping the life and emotions of the community. Popular piety is thus one of the Church’s great treasures. The faith has taken on flesh and blood. Certainly popular piety always needs to be purified and refocused, yet it is worthy of our love and it truly makes us into the “People of God”.

5. Above all, your time in the seminary is also a time of study. The Christian faith has an essentially rational and intellectual dimension. Were it to lack that dimension, it would not be itself. Paul speaks of a “standard of teaching” to which we were entrusted in Baptism (Rom 6:17). All of you know the words of Saint Peter which the medieval theologians saw as the justification for a rational and scientific theology: “Always be ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an ‘accounting’ (logos) for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet 3:15). Learning how to make such a defence is one of the primary responsibilities of your years in the seminary. I can only plead with you: Be committed to your studies! Take advantage of your years of study! You will not regret it. Certainly, the subjects which you are studying can often seem far removed from the practice of the Christian life and the pastoral ministry. Yet it is completely mistaken to start questioning their practical value by asking: Will this be helpful to me in the future? Will it be practically or pastorally useful? The point is not simply to learn evidently useful things, but to understand and appreciate the internal structure of the faith as a whole, so that it can become a response to people’s questions, which on the surface change from one generation to another yet ultimately remain the same. For this reason it is important to move beyond the changing questions of the moment in order to grasp the real questions, and so to understand how the answers are real answers. It is important to have a thorough knowledge of sacred Scripture as a whole, in its unity as the Old and the New Testaments: the shaping of texts, their literary characteristics, the process by which they came to form the canon of sacred books, their dynamic inner unity, a unity which may not be immediately apparent but which in fact gives the individual texts their full meaning. It is important to be familiar with the Fathers and the great Councils in which the Church appropriated, through faith-filled reflection, the essential statements of Scripture. I could easily go on. What we call dogmatic theology is the understanding of the individual contents of the faith in their unity, indeed, in their ultimate simplicity: each single element is, in the end, only an unfolding of our faith in the one God who has revealed himself to us and continues to do so. I do not need to point out the importance of knowing the essential issues of moral theology and Catholic social teaching. The importance nowadays of ecumenical theology, and of a knowledge of the different Christian communities, is obvious; as is the need for a basic introduction to the great religions, to say nothing of philosophy: the understanding of that human process of questioning and searching to which faith seeks to respond. But you should also learn to understand and – dare I say it – to love canon law, appreciating how necessary it is and valuing its practical applications: a society without law would be a society without rights. Law is the condition of love. I will not go on with this list, but I simply say once more: love the study of theology and carry it out in the clear realization that theology is anchored in the living community of the Church, which, with her authority, is not the antithesis of theological science but its presupposition. Cut off from the believing Church, theology would cease to be itself and instead it would become a medley of different disciplines lacking inner unity.

6. Your years in the seminary should also be a time of growth towards human maturity. It is important for the priest, who is called to accompany others through the journey of life up to the threshold of death, to have the right balance of heart and mind, reason and feeling, body and soul, and to be humanly integrated. To the theological virtues the Christian tradition has always joined the cardinal virtues derived from human experience and philosophy, and, more generally, from the sound ethical tradition of humanity. Paul makes this point this very clearly to the Philippians: “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (4:8). This also involves the integration of sexuality into the whole personality. Sexuality is a gift of the Creator yet it is also a task which relates to a person’s growth towards human maturity. When it is not integrated within the person, sexuality becomes banal and destructive. Today we can see many examples of this in our society. Recently we have seen with great dismay that some priests disfigured their ministry by sexually abusing children and young people. Instead of guiding people to greater human maturity and setting them an example, their abusive behaviour caused great damage for which we feel profound shame and regret. As a result of all this, many people, perhaps even some of you, might ask whether it is good to become a priest; whether the choice of celibacy makes any sense as a truly human way of life. Yet even the most reprehensible abuse cannot discredit the priestly mission, which remains great and pure. Thank God, all of us know exemplary priests, men shaped by their faith, who bear witness that one can attain to an authentic, pure and mature humanity in this state and specifically in the life of celibacy. Admittedly, what has happened should make us all the more watchful and attentive, precisely in order to examine ourselves earnestly, before God, as we make our way towards priesthood, so as to understand whether this is his will for me. It is the responsibility of your confessor and your superiors to accompany you and help you along this path of discernment. It is an essential part of your journey to practise the fundamental human virtues, with your gaze fixed on the God who has revealed himself in Christ, and to let yourselves be purified by him ever anew.

7. The origins of a priestly vocation are nowadays more varied and disparate than in the past. Today the decision to become a priest often takes shape after one has already entered upon a secular profession. Often it grows within the Communities, particularly within the Movements, which favour a communal encounter with Christ and his Church, spiritual experiences and joy in the service of the faith. It also matures in very personal encounters with the nobility and the wretchedness of human existence. As a result, candidates for the priesthood often live on very different spiritual continents. It can be difficult to recognize the common elements of one’s future mandate and its spiritual path. For this very reason, the seminary is important as a community which advances above and beyond differences of spirituality. The Movements are a magnificent thing. You know how much I esteem them and love them as a gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church. Yet they must be evaluated by their openness to what is truly Catholic, to the life of the whole Church of Christ, which for all her variety still remains one. The seminary is a time when you learn with one another and from one another. In community life, which can at times be difficult, you should learn generosity and tolerance, not only bearing with, but also enriching one another, so that each of you will be able to contribute his own gifts to the whole, even as all serve the same Church, the same Lord. This school of tolerance, indeed, of mutual acceptance and mutual understanding in the unity of Christ’s Body, is an important part of your years in the seminary.

Dear seminarians, with these few lines I have wanted to let you know how often I think of you, especially in these difficult times, and how close I am to you in prayer. Please pray for me, that I may exercise my ministry well, as long as the Lord may wish. I entrust your journey of preparation for priesthood to the maternal protection of Mary Most Holy, whose home was a school of goodness and of grace. May Almighty God bless you all, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

From the Vatican, 18 October 2010, the Feast of Saint Luke the Evangelist.

Yours devotedly in the Lord,
BENEDICTUS PP. XVI

Going for the Priesthood Today

2010-10-12T15:50:00.003+01:00
After the frenetic last few weeks and months leading up to the Holy Father's Visit to this country its now time to get back to routine works. Nonetheless the Papal Visit was a resounding success and hopefully much good will come of it. Meanwhile here’s a postive, thoughtful and uplifting piece from Channel 4 News the day before the Holy Father arrived:

Please pray for our priests, seminarians and those who will be the priests and seminarians of tomorrow.

Where do Priests Come From?

2010-10-12T15:42:00.003+01:00

“No one will touch it with a 10-foot pole,” best-selling Catholic author, speaker and convert Elizabeth Ficocelli said to me when presenting the manuscript for the children’s book - Where Do Priests Come From? “At one point a New York publisher was interested but then the abuse scandals began to break and they dropped it like a hot potato.”

“Yeah, I can imagine,” was my uneasy response. The secular headlines calling for Pope Benedict’s arrest, and/or demanding that he “step down” from the Chair of Peter, were all over the media. As the mother of 3 sons, my own heart was restless in regards to the on-going, ever-unfolding priest scandals that rocked the Catholic Church. Although no such scandal had touched my own life, I often thought of, and prayed for, the families who had experienced abuse.

How would I manage to publish a book about the priesthood as a noble and dignified calling? How could I, with limited reach and resources, consider a book that other Catholic publishers wouldn’t "touch with a 10-foot pole"?

I suppose that if the priesthood were simply a “made up” practice of the Catholic Church I, too, would have walked away from Elizabeth’s book. After all, my own company is just a “David” in an industry of “Goliaths” and it would seem that instead of boldly going where others wouldn’t, it would be more fitting—it would certainly seem wiser and show more business acumen—that I take my cue from the big guys and walk away. But my heart wouldn’t allow me.

Somehow I knew that if I walked away from this little gem of a book, the good Lord was going to ask me some tough questions when I stood before Him. Maybe it was because of all the research I have done over the years from my "Jewish roots" book. Or because my small company could much more quickly and easily round up an illustrator and bring this necessary book to print, amidst the scandal and contention surrounding the Church.

Whatever the reason, my heart knew the answer before my head could process it. I hoped the book might bring even one boy to the priesthood in the future, or that it might allow others --whatever their vocation-- to understand and revere the sacred priesthood, in spite of the current climate. And now-- I am filled with joy when I look through the beautifully illustrated pages and read the words that shed light on the question, "Where do priests come from?"

Part of the joy I take from this book --despite the pain that some cases of abuse have brought to so many-- comes from the knowledge that the holy priesthood was instituted directly by Jesus Christ. It is not an institution that the Catholic Church “made up.” It is, rather, an institution established by God.

The Protestant teaching is one of a “universal” priesthood in which the special, “set-aside” priesthood is no longer relevant or necessary. However, in denying that the priesthood still exists as a position essential to the Church, we would be required to deny the fullness of our faith which includes the Sacrifice of the Mass and the power to forgive sins—the binding and loosing in Matthew 16:19; 18:8 and John 20:23.

We have no right to deny the fullness of our faith. To walk away from the sacred priesthood, as instituted by Christ, is to walk away from Him in the Eucharist. We can continue to empathize with wounded families, in overwhelming situations, and still embrace the truth and sacred traditions of the priesthood.

Without a doubt, we must remain passionate about upholding the holy priesthood as a linchpin of our faith—without it, we will be completely lost. Make no mistake about it.

I’ve been reading Father Benedict Groeschel’s book “Arise from Darkness,” in which he writes:

“When we are … betrayed by those we thought we could rely on…we can pick up the Cross and wave it … To boast in the Cross, it seems to me, is an almost fierce gesture when we confront all that would defeat us and say: 'Look at the Cross, all of you, and know that I shall not be overcome, because the Lord of Life is with me and in me, and he will go with me even through the valley of the shadow of death'.”

We will rely on those whose responsibility it is to right these horrible wrongs and to punish wrongdoers. But we must also retain complete confidence that the agonizing Cross of the sex-abuse scandals cannot possibly destroy Christ's Church.

Instead of shying away from the truth about the sacred priesthood as a Divine institution, Elizabeth’s book celebrates the priestly calling. “Where Do Priests Come From?” relies on research, surveys and a passion to uplift those called to the Sacrament of Holy Orders. It is a beautifully illustrated book that is able to teach young and old alike about this God-given institution and why we are called to build it up, honor it, and cherish it.

This wonderful book inspires us to pick up the Cross, and announce to all powers and principalities: We shall not be overcome!

Note: Where Do Priests Come From? is the first in a series of vocation-awareness books by Elizabeth Ficocelli. The second book Where Do Sisters Come From? is due out in December, 2010 with Where Do Deacons Come From? due out in spring 2011. Catholic schools or religious education programs interested in bulk purchases should contact Cheryl@BezalelBooks.com for information.

From The Catholic News Agency

'A Come and See' Weekend: Priesthood in the Diocese of Lancaster

2010-09-27T17:55:00.005+01:00

If you are thinking about what is involved in becoming a Catholic Priest in the Diocese of Lancaster then - “Come and See”

You are invited to an overnight meeting in Cleator: Saturday 23 October (10.30am) till Sunday 24 October (after lunch).

Contact:

Fr Emmanuel Gribben
Diocesan Vocations Director
St Mary
Cleator
Cumbria
CA23 3AB

Tel:(01946) 810324

Email: emmanuel.gribben@googlemail.com

World Youth Day to inspire seminarians

2010-09-26T17:20:00.000+01:00

Sioux City, Iowa, Sep 26, 2010 / 01:14 pm (CNA).- When a group of young adults from the Diocese of Sioux City heads off to Spain for the 2011 World Youth Day, among the diocesan pilgrims will be nine seminarians. According to seminarian Pat Behm, the experience will allow them to grow spiritually.

“Fundamentally, World Youth Day is not a vacation; it is a pilgrimage,” he stressed. “It is a pilgrimage to another part of the world to meet the person of Jesus Christ and the pope, his vicar here on earth. The opportunities for adoration, Mass, confession and catechesis are great and their value is beyond measure.”

He cited other benefits of the pilgrimage such as an opportunity to be connected to the universal church.

“This obviously means being connected and united with our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, but it also means being united with the Body of Christ throughout the world,” Behm said. “World Youth Day is a tremendous way to be united with and experience in a radically new way, our brothers and sisters throughout the world.”

Another valuable experience, he added, will be in seeing the poor. Even in the midst of an economic crisis the seminarian said the United States remains a wealthy nation by the rest of the world’s standards.

Andrea Jenson, assistant director of youth and young adult ministry who is coordinating the trip, said she is very excited to have the seminarians along on the trip “because they are the future priests. I hope that this pilgrimage will encourage the seminarians in their discernment and strengthen them in their call to the priesthood.”

The Diocese of Sioux City is presently seeking donations to offset the cost of the pilgrimage for the seminarians. At $3,800 per person, the diocese hopes to raise $34,200. If they raise over that amount, it will be set aside for the World Youth Day 2014.

“The seminarians are dedicating their time and service to the Diocese of Sioux City through answering God’s call,” Jenson said. “They have such busy schedules with school, ministry and prayer that they are not able to work during the school year. We are hoping that the diocese will respond generously in support of the seminarians as well as pray for God’s blessing on this pilgrimage.”

Behm, who was born in Fort Dodge and raised in Storm Lake, said that parishioners’ support will help the seminarians grow closer to one another and closer to the Holy Father.

“God-willing, when we become priests, this experience will make us better priests and better able to serve the people of the Diocese of Sioux City,” he said. “If you generously choose to contribute to this effort, it is very possible that you will be helping to support your own future pastor. I would also like to say that the Lord is never outdone in generosity. We see this evidenced over and over again in Scriptures, but it is really true.”

He pointed out that he attended World Youth Day 2002 in Toronto and found that to be one of the most formative experiences in his life and it even contributed to his entering the seminary in 2003.

Father Brad Pelzel, director of vocations, pointed out that he has attended World Youth Days in 2002 and 2008 and found them to be moments of joy and re-commitment to his faith and vocation.

“To be gathered with millions of other Catholics celebrating their faith joyfully and publically is a moment I wish every Catholic could experience, especially priests and seminarians,” he said.

With WYD intended for people aged 18-40, Father Pelzel said the gathering is not meant for the church of tomorrow but rather the church of today.

“To witness the energy, goodness, vitality, commitment and joy of millions of Catholics, young and not so young, actively engaging the world through their faith is to experience the working of the Holy Spirit in truly its most universal, that is “Catholic” manner outside of the sacred Mass itself,” said Father Pelzel, who will be unable to accompany the seminarians due to prior commitments.

Jenson said that having the seminarians in the group will be great for the others on the pilgrimage as they will be able to witness how the young men are living out their call from God. The seminarians will also be able to share their knowledge of the faith.

By the time of the trip, Behm should be ordained a transitional deacon. The seminarian is hopeful that he will be able to not only assist at Mass with the Holy Father but also to preach at a small, private Mass for the diocesan pilgrimage group.

If someone is on the fence about making a donation to this cause, Behm would encourage them to pray about this and discern if this is what Jesus is calling them to do.

Printed with permission from the Catholic Globe, newspaper for the Diocese of Sioux City, Iowa.

Pope Benedict in Hyde Park: Some Definite Service

2010-09-23T17:14:00.006+01:00

Dear young friends: only Jesus knows what “definite service” he has in mind for you. Be open to his voice resounding in the depths of your heart: even now his heart is speaking to your heart.

Christ has need of families to remind the world of the dignity of human love and the beauty of family life. He needs men and women who devote their lives to the noble task of education, tending the young and forming them in the ways of the Gospel. He needs those who will consecrate their lives to the pursuit of perfect charity, following him in chastity, poverty and obedience, and serving him in the least of our brothers and sisters. He needs the powerful love of contemplative religious, who sustain the Church’s witness and activity through their constant prayer. And he needs priests, good and holy priests, men who are willing to lay down their lives for their sheep.

Ask our Lord what he has in mind for you! Ask him for the generosity to say “yes!” Do not be afraid to give yourself totally to Jesus. He will give you the grace you need to fulfil your vocation. Let me finish these few words by warmly inviting you to join me next year in Madrid for World Youth Day. It is always a wonderful occasion to grow in love for Christ and to be encouraged in a joyful life of faith along with thousands of other young people. I hope to see many of you there!

The Call: Fr. Thomas Euteneuer

2010-08-30T22:01:00.001+01:00

The Call: Bishop Robert Baker

2010-08-30T21:59:00.001+01:00

The Call: Fr. Benedict Groeschel

2010-08-30T21:56:00.000+01:00

The Call: Fr. John Corapi

2010-08-30T21:52:00.000+01:00

Ireland's New Seminarians

2010-08-27T22:43:00.002+01:00

This week, sixteen men from various dioceses around Ireland embark on a period of study and formation on the potential road to priesthood. This year, the Dublin archdiocese leads the way with 4 seminarians, followed by Down and Connor with 3 and one seminarian for each of the following dioceses: Armagh, Clogher, Cork and Ross, Derry, Galway, Kildare and Leighlin, Meath, Raphoe and Tuam.

The number of new entrants this year is a sharp drop in comparison to the previous four years. In 2006 there were 30 new entrants, 31 in 2007, 30 in 2008 and 36 in 2009. The news of these new entrants should be welcomed. There is no doubt that it takes immense courage to opt for priesthood in these difficult days for the Irish Church. It is appropriate too to acknowledge the work of the various diocesan vocation directors throughout Ireland - who often have a difficult and lonely task in promoting vocations.

On the other hand, the news of this significant decrease in numbers entering the various seminaries used by the Irish church this year will and should be thoroughly examined and reflected upon by those in positions of authority. More than anything it should raise the following questions: (1) are vocations given priority in every diocese? (2) are the vocations personnel given reasonable resources to carry out their work effectively? (3) when will Irish dioceses consider appointing vocation directors where that ministry is their primary work? (4) where is prayer for priestly and religious vocations taken seriously?

Gerard Dunne OP

Help to Protect the Pope

2010-08-26T21:20:00.005+01:00

As we prepare to welcome the Holy Father to Britain in September check out:
http://protectthepope.com/ - a site launched and ran by Lancaster Permanent Deacon
Nick Donnely.

Might the Lord be calling you to be a priest?

2010-08-26T20:43:00.003+01:00

Might the Lord be calling you to be a priest? Don't be afraid to explore the possibility a little further. Give Fr Manny Gribben a phone call on 01946 810324 or send him an email him at: emmanuel.gribben@googlemail.com

23 Reasons Why A Priest Should Wear His Collar

2010-08-26T20:16:00.013+01:00

1. The Roman collar is a sign of priestly consecration to the Lord. As a wedding ring distinguishes husband and wife and symbolizes the union they enjoy, so the Roman collar identifies bishops and priests (and often deacons and seminarians) and manifests their proximity to the Divine Master by virtue of their free consent to the ordained ministry to which they have been (or may be) called.

2. By wearing clerical clothing and not possessing excess clothes, the priest demonstrates adherence to the Lord’s example of material poverty. The priest does not choose his clothes – the Church has, thanks to her accumulated wisdom over the past two millennia. Humble acceptance of the Church’s desire that the priest wear the Roman collar illustrates a healthy submission to authority and conformity to the will of Christ as expressed through his Church.

3. Church Law requires clerics to wear clerical clothing. We have cited above number 66 of the Directory for priests, which itself quotes canon 284.

4. The wearing of the Roman collar is the repeated, ardent desire of Pope John Paul II. The Holy Father’s wish in this regard cannot be summarily dismissed; he speaks with a special charism. He frequently reminds priests of the value of wearing the Roman collar.In a September 8, 1982 letter to Ugo Cardinal Poletti, his Vicar for the Diocese of Rome, instructing him to promulgate norms concerning the use of the Roman collar and religious habit, the Pontiff observed that clerical dress is valuable “not only because it contributes to the propriety of the priest in his external behavior or in the exercise of his ministry, but above all because it gives evidence within the ecclesiastical community of the public witness that each priest is held to give of his own identity and special belonging to God.”In a homily on November 8, 1982 the Pope addressed a group of transitional deacons whom he was about to ordain to the priesthood. He said that if they tried to be just like everyone else in their “style of life” and “manner of dress,” then their mission as priests of Jesus Christ would not be fully realized.

5. The Roman collar prevents “mixed messages”; other people will recognize the priest’s intentions when he finds himself in what might appear to be compromising circumstances. Let’s suppose that a priest is required to make pastoral visits to different apartment houses in an area where drug dealing or prostitution is prevalent. The Roman collar sends a clear message to everyone that the priest has come to minister to the sick and needy in Christ’s name. Idle speculation might be triggered by a priest known to neighborhood residents visiting various apartment houses dressed as a layman.

6. The Roman collar inspires others to avoid immodesty in dress, words and actions and reminds them of the need for public decorum. A cheerful but diligent and serious priest can compel others to take stock of the manner in which they conduct themselves. The Roman collar serves as a necessary challenge to an age drowning in impurity, exhibited by suggestive dress, blasphemous speech and scandalous actions.

7. The Roman collar is a protection for one’s vocation when dealing with young, attractive women. A priest out of his collar (and, naturally, not wearing a wedding ring) can appear to be an attractive target for the affections of an unmarried woman looking for a husband, or for a married woman tempted to infidelity.

8. The Roman collar offers a kind of “safeguard “for oneself. The Roman collar provides a reminder to the priest himself of his mission and identity: to witness to Jesus Christ, the Great High Priest, as one of his brother-priests.

9. A priest in a Roman collar is an inspiration to others who think: “Here is a modern disciple of Jesus.” The Roman collar speaks of the possibility of making a sincere, lasting commitment to God. Believers of diverse ages, nationalities and temperaments will note the virtuous, other-centered life of the man who gladly and proudly wears the garb of a Catholic priest, and perhaps will realize that they too can consecrate themselves anew, or for the first time, to the loving Good Shepherd.

10. The Roman collar is a source of beneficial intrigue to non-Catholics. Most non- Catholics do not have experience with ministers who wear clerical garb. Therefore, Catholic priests by virtue of their dress can cause them to reflect – even if only a cursory fashion – on the Church and what she entails.

11. A priest dressed as the Church wants is a reminder of God and of the sacred. The prevailing secular morass is not kind to images which connote the Almighty, the Church, etc. When one wears the Roman collar, the hearts and minds of others are refreshingly raised to the “Higher Being” who is usually relegated to a tiny footnote in the agenda of contemporary culture.

12. The Roman collar is also a reminder to the priest that he is “never not a priest.” With so much confusion prevalent today, the Roman collar can help the priest avoid internal doubt as to who he is. Two wardrobes can easily lead – and often does – to two lifestyles, or even two personalities.

13. A priest in a Roman collar is a walking vocation message. The sight of a cheerful, happy priest confidently walking down the street can be a magnet drawing young men to consider the possibility that God is calling them to the priesthood. God does the calling; the priest is simply a visible sign God will use to draw men unto himself.

14. The Roman collar makes the priest available for the Sacraments, especially Confession and the Anointing of the Sick, and for crisis situations. Because the Roman collar gives instant recognition, priests who wear it make themselves more apt to be approached, particularly when seriously needed. The authors can testify to being asked for the Sacraments and summoned for assistance in airports, crowded cities and isolated villages because they were immediately recognized as Catholic priests.

15. The Roman collar is a sign that the priest is striving to become holy by living out his vocation always. It is a sacrifice to make oneself constantly available to souls by being publicly identifiable as a priest, but a sacrifice pleasing to Our Divine Lord. We are reminded of how the people came to him, and how he never turned them away. There are so many people who will benefit by our sacrifice of striving to be holy priests without interruption.

16. The Roman collar serves as a reminder to “alienated” Catholics not to forget their irregular situation and their responsibilities to the Lord. The priest is a witness – for good or ill – to Christ and his Holy Church. When a “fallen-away” sees a priest, he is encouraged to recall that the Church continues to exist. A cheerful priest provides a salutary reminder of the Church.

17. The wearing of clerical clothing is a sacrifice at times, especially in hot weather. The best mortifications are the ones we do not look for. Putting up with the discomforts of heat and humidity can be a wonderful reparation for our own sins, and a means of obtaining graces for our parishioners.

18. The Roman collar serves as a “sign of contradiction” to a world lost in sin and rebellion against the Creator. The Roman collar makes a powerful statement: the priest as an alter Christus has accepted the Redeemer’s mandate to take the Gospel into the public square, regardless of personal cost.

19. The Roman collar helps priests to avoid the on duty/off duty mentality of priestly service. The numbers 24 and 7 should be our special numbers: we are priests 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We are priests, not men who engage in the “priest profession.” On or off duty, we should be available to whomever God may send our way. The “lost sheep” do not make appointments.

20. The “officers” in Christ’s army should be identifiable as such. Traditionally, we have remarked that those who receive the Sacrament of Confirmation become “soldiers” of Christ, adult Catholics ready and willing to defend his name and his Church. Those who are ordained as deacons, priests and bishops must also be prepared – whatever the stakes – to shepherd the flock of the Lord. Those priests who wear the Roman collar show forth their role unmistakably as leaders in the Church.

21. The saints have never approved of a lackadaisical approach concerning priestly vesture. For example, Saint Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787), Patron Saint of Moral Theologians and Confessors, in his esteemed treatise The Dignity and Duties of the Priest, urges the wearing of the appropriate clerical dress, asserting that the Roman collar helps both priest and faithful to recall the sublime splendor of the sacerdotal state instituted by the God-Man.

22. Most Catholics expect their priests to dress accordingly. Priests have long provided a great measure of comfort and security to their people. As youths, Catholics are taught that the priest is God’s representative – someone they can trust. Hence, the People of God want to know who these representatives are and what they stand for. The cherished custom of wearing distinguishable dress has been for centuries sanctioned by the Church; it is not an arbitrary imposition. Catholics expect their priests to dress as priests and to behave in harmony with Church teaching and practice. As we have painfully observed over the last few years, the faithful are especially bothered and harmed when priests defy the legitimate authority of the Church, and teach and act in inappropriate and even sinful ways.

23. Your life is not your own; you belong to God in a special way, you are sent out to serve him with your life. When we wake each morning, we should turn our thoughts to our loving God, and ask for the grace to serve him well that day. We remind ourselves of our status as His chosen servants by putting on the attire that proclaims for all to see that God is still working in this world through the ministry of poor and sinful men.
Msgr. Charles M. Mangan & Father Gerald E. Murray. “Why a priest should wear his Roman collar.” Homiletic & Pastoral Review (June, 1995).

Founded over one hundred years ago, Homiletic & Pastoral Review is one of the most well-respected pastoral magazines in the world. HPR features solid articles on every aspect of pastoral life and eloquent weekly sermons that illuminate through exposition of Scripture. Subscribe to HPR here.

THE AUTHORS

Msgr. Charles M. Mangan has been appointed by His Holiness, Pope John Paul II, to a position serving the Vatican’s Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. Ordained in 1989, Msgr. Mangan formerly served the Diocese of Sioux Falls in several parishes.

Father Gerald E. Murray is a priest of the Archdiocese of New York. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College and was ordained in 1984 after completing studies at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Dunwoodie, N. Y. Currently he is studying canon law at the Gregorian University in Rome.

Come to World Youth Day 2011, Madrid with the Diocese of Lancaster

2010-08-25T17:32:00.002+01:00

Why come along to World Youth Day 2011, Madrid with the Diocesan Group (Lancaster).
For details click here

A Seminarians Reflection in Lourdes

2010-07-26T08:38:00.004+01:00
Mary - Eschatalogical Icon of the Church

O God of truth, prepare our minds,
to hear and heed you holy Word;
fill every heart that longs for you
with your mysterious presence Lord.

“And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; she was with child and cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery” Rev 12:1
A woman appeared to Bernadette here in Lourdes as a woman appeared to John in the Apocalypse. This woman appeared as a sign to a broken world. I think it is worth taking time to look a little more carefully at this woman as she is revealed to us by St. John.

Who is this mysterious woman who was shown to John by God? The Fathers have variously seen her as both Mary and the Church. Mary is the greatest sign of the glory that awaits us. St Bonaventure tells us that God could have created a better world but not a woman greater than Mary. She is the perfection of God’s creation. Likewise the Church cannot be surpassed in glory. She is the perfect Bride of the Lamb. She is the beginning now of the heavenly Kingdom. She ushers into our fallen world the perfection of creation that will reach its fulfilment in the eschaton.
A woman clothed in the radiance of Divine glory, the Shekinah that covered Mt Sinai at the giving of the Law. The sun that surrounds the woman is the light and beauty of the Divine presence shining upon Mary the Immaculate one and upon the Church. God dwelt in the womb of the Virgin from whom radiates His beauty, as evidenced by the leaping in the womb of John the Baptist. Likewise God dwells in the midst of the Church which should shine as a sign to the world if the light is not obscured by the sins of her members.

The twelve stars are signs of the twelve tribes of Israel, a symbol themselves of the full reign of God’s Kingdom. It is in Mary and in the Church that this Kingdom is brought about. In Jewish thought at the restoration of God’s Kingdom the twelve tribes will be brought together once again. The twelve stars around the woman’s head point her out as the sign and locus of the kingdom, whether she be the Church or Mary.

Who is it that she gives birth to? The child is always Jesus, the Lamb who takes away the sins of the world, the eternal priest and king. Mary gave birth to the New Creation in Jesus Christ in a physical manner; the Church continues to make Him present in the world in the Sacraments and in the life of her members. Christ’s Incarnation sanctifies the whole world by His assumption of created nature. The Church, by bringing Him forth again and again into our broken reality, makes it holy and heals it with His presence. But the questions then arises, who is it in the Church that brings Christ into the world? Who is it that brings His peace, His reconciliation, His very presence? Pre-eminently it is the priest. Jesus the Priest sanctifies the world through His Incarnation; it is those who act as His priests now that continue this work in His Church ushering in His Kingdom. Like Mary it is the priests who are means by which Jesus makes Himself present in the world. It is they who are above all the instruments of the coming of His Kingdom.

If we take time now to look around us at what is happening around us here in the Domain through this prism we can discern many signs of these wonders being worked around us. Many signs that show us that God’s coming Kingdom is being brought about here in our very midst in Lourdes. Priests bring God’s forgiveness and peace in Confession, Christ is made present in the Eucharist, the humble are lifted up, the sick are healed, human nature is restored, all nations are drawn together by the sign of this woman. Mary’s apparition in Lourdes has been an effective sign that has enabled her Son to begin to establish His Kingdom in this small corner of France. The Church, present in Lourdes, is the instrument and locus of God’s Kingdom in this town. Let us take a few moments to consider what wonders the Lord has worked for us in this week and in this place.

“The Church today is the Kingdom of Christ and the Kingdom of Heaven”. These words of St Augustine point us to the great closeness between God’s Kingdom and the Church. This is something I feel that can be particularly experienced in Lourdes. As bishops, priests and seminarians we are called to serve the Church, to serve the Kingdom. There is none better than Mary to look to in our position as a sign of the Kingdom in the world and a sign of the glory of the Kingdom to come. She brought Christ into the world; may we by her intercession continue to do likewise.
Let us end of time of reflection with the Canticle of Mary, her great song of praise. Let us thank the Father with Mary for making His Kingdom present in our midst and for sending us His Son as we say; My soul glorifies the Lord...

By Seminarian John Millar

The Priestly Ordination of John Moriarty – Alston Lane, 11th July 2010

2010-07-19T23:03:00.005+01:00

Homily by Rt Rev Michael Campbell OSA, Bishop of Lancaster

The ordination of a priest is a moment of both joy and hope for the Church, and is so in a special way today for the Diocese of Lancaster. A priestly ordination is an occasion of joy for it marks the successful end of a long road of study and spiritual preparation; it is also a time of hope, because God is giving us a new priest to ensure that the saving work of his Son Jesus Christ will continue in the Church. I congratulate John Moriarty on this his ordination day, and thank him for his generosity in offering himself for priestly service in Lancaster diocese. I extend my thanks to John’s family, to all involved in any way in his preparation and who have made this day possible.

What better and more appropriate gospel for a priestly ordination than the story of the Good Samaritan just proclaimed to us! The Fathers of the Church liked to see Christ himself as the Good Samaritan who came to the rescue of the human race lying prostrate on the road, bowed and wounded through sin and the power of the evil one. A newly-ordained priest is sent forth in Christ’s name to continue his work as the Good Samaritan. In a unique way through his priests Christ continues to walk the paths of this world binding up wounds and bringing the balm of his healing to his people, especially the oppressed and troubled, and to all who need to hear a healing word of comfort. Through your ministry as a priest, John, you will make the power of Christ’s cross present and play your part in building up his Body, which is the Church.

What Moses said in the book of Deuteronomy about the closeness of God’s word is particularly applicable to you today. Through the sacrament of ordination you are being configured to Christ who is the Word of God. As a priest you will bring Jesus the Incarnate Word close to the people to whom you are sent. Allow them through your life and dedication to glimpse something of Christ in you. It is a wonderful if truly humbling thought that Christ the Lord will come to others through you as a priest.

You will unpack the Word of the life to God’s people. You will give them new horizons for hope and will tell them that Christ is the first-born from the dead; that through his Holy Spirit he stands alongside them on their pilgrimage through life, and that through his cross we are now reconciled and at peace with our God and Father. To be a priest in our time is not easy and much is demanded of us. Yet your ministry will be blessed, for the One who has called you to be his priest, Jesus Christ, has promised to be with us always, for as long as time last. Amen.

Why I am a Priest (Part 2) - Fr. John Cihak, S.T.D

2010-07-15T22:46:00.000+01:00

Even with this initial realization, I did not head straight to the Seminary. Instead I went off to begin pre-med studies at the University of Notre Dame, to sing in a band and live the life of a college student – football games, road trips and parties. I was not the greatest sinner, but neither was I really virtuous. I was engaged in an interior, sometimes turbulent struggle between my desire and this undeniable spark inside now tied with my awareness of His Heart. Though that spark continued to grow, I continued to drag my feet. Yet I would never miss Sunday Mass and would confess regularly. I continued to go to daily Mass, to pray my rosary, and began to read the spiritual classics. That first year I read The Imitation of Christ and Introduction to the Devout Life. The one or two minutes of silent prayer I gave the Lord grew to spending fifteen minutes before the Blessed Sacrament in our dorm chapel downstairs. Yet that night I could be crooning tunes at some party or club. There was something inconsistent between the messages of INXS and The Imitation of Christ, between singing Mick Jagger tunes and reading St. Francis de Sales even if they were both classic in their respective genre. I was trying to live two lives that the Lord slowly and patiently began to bring together and purify. Now as a priest, I realize the wisdom of our Lord in choosing fishermen to be his apostles. Fishermen know how to be patient. It took time to trust Him, to become vulnerable to His call and to let this call take hold of my heart.

A large part of forging a different life in the Lord was discovering the power of his mercy in confession. Through that Sacrament my walk with Him was deepened radically. I also resumed spiritual direction, but now with a more definite aim: Is Jesus calling me to be a priest? The call grew stronger. A feature of my prayer at the time was to ask Jesus for help – "If you want me to be a priest, please increase that desire and decrease the desire to pursue medicine." Over time, He did both. I remember vividly a moment during lab in the Stepan Chemistry building. I cannot remember the experiment, but I do remember the burner being on and wearing the gloves and goggles. Very strongly inside it dawned on me: "I don't want to be here anymore." In retrospect, I think I was hearing the Lord on a certain level with this deep attraction to being involved in His work of healing as a doctor, not of the body but of the soul.

The Holy Cross priests who lived in my dorm, Alumni Hall, were quite supportive of my interest in the priesthood. One of them told me that if I was thinking about becoming a priest, I should start studying philosophy. So without ever having taken a philosophy course, I switched out of the pre-med track and declared a philosophy major. I immediately fell in love with that study, and fortunately was introduced to the brilliance and enduring relevance of St. Thomas Aquinas by Ralph McInerny and Alasdair McIntyre among others. Looking back I realize how much intelligence was wasted on a dim undergraduate, but their thought did not fail to have an impact, especially in opening my eyes to the importance of showing the reasonability of the Christian faith.

By the middle of my junior year I declared a second major in theology after taking a seminar on St. Augustine, and was introduced to the world of the Church Fathers and quite by accident, over a dinner conversation, the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. I discovered that the Catholic Church contained untold riches to feed a hungry mind that would otherwise starve on the poor diet of contemporary American life or one of the many available versions of "Catholic-lite". This call to sacrificial love found in the Catholic faith radiated a mysterious and attractive beauty.

On the social scene, the playing in bars ceased and I devoted more time to studying, although I still took part in the social life of the campus with my friends. During Christmas break of senior year, I formally applied to begin studies for the diocesan priesthood back home. I graduated that May, and, after spending the summer working in a gang prevention program in south central Los Angeles in the wake of the Rodney King riots, entered the Seminary. I then began several years of seminary formation first in Oregon and then in Rome. Living in Rome instilled a sense of history, tradition, and especially apostolic succession. I saw how we stand on the shoulders of those believers who have gone before us. If not for the direct handing on of the Gospel by the apostles, whose unity is found in Peter, Christians could never be certain they have the story right. What struck me during those years in Rome was that Jesus' message of salvation is timeless and the Church is far wider and deeper than the categories of a single generation; therefore, she has the power to speak meaningfully to every generation and every generation must respond. After those years of study, prayer and formation, I finally came to that ontologically altering day in June of 1998.

The reasons for becoming a priest and the reasons for remaining a priest have not essentially changed over the past twelve years. It is love. But I have grown in a much deeper knowledge and appreciation of what true love entails with the passage of time. Even priests have a honeymoon period in ministry where the sheer newness, power and joy of priestly ministry is blinding – Mass, preaching, confessions, teaching, visiting the sick, offering counsel, etc. It's nothing less than absolutely incredible. I often tell young men considering the priesthood that one of the great things about being a parish priest, which was especially true as a pastor, is that I never had two days that were alike. When I looked at my daily calendar in the morning I knew it was only an inkling of what would actually transpire in the course of the day. Yet as time passes and the newness becomes routine, the priest inevitably comes to the actual work and true suffering in the adventure of love as he seeks to die to self.

This adventure of priestly love is founded upon the fundamental Christian reality of baptism and that original and universal vocation to holiness: allowing one's life to be penetrated by divine love so that one's human, earthly life begins to radiate the divine life. It is nothing less than to allow Jesus to live out His passion, death and resurrection in the heart of His priest. It is the only way a Christian becomes Christlike. There is no other way to become a part of this love without being shaped by the ultimate event of love of the Cross. The process often feels like death but what is actually happening is that the Lord is reconfiguring the Christian into His likeness thereby imparting His eternal life and power in us. And so, in the priesthood a man's entire self, weaknesses and faults included, are to be overtaken by divine love and transformed. A man does not become a priest because he is perfect; he becomes a priest so that Christ may perfect him. Often as a priest, it involves wrestling with the Lord like Jacob (Gen. 32:24) so that we will cease to cling to ourselves and surrender to His love.

The path of love for the priest consists of internalizing as his very own identity and living out the promises (celibacy, obedience and prayer) he makes and the consecration (to preach, to sanctify and to govern) he receives at ordination. The promises and the consecration are bonds of love that bind a priest's heart to the Heart of Jesus. In doing so, his vocation as a priest brings him to fulfillment as man by making him a husband and father on the supernatural level. By his ordination a priest is made into an image of the Bridegroom and thus brought into a spousal relationship with the Church, the Bride of Christ. Through this mystical relationship, a priest in a very real way becomes a husband and father, a spiritual father. His fatherhood perhaps becomes most evident when he baptizes and literally generates new spiritual life in a child and also in the Sacrament of Confession whereby he often brings people back from spiritual death.

The priest coming into his being a spiritual husband and father is concretely lived out in the promises he makes at ordination. Gen-Xers, who perhaps in their 20s were so willing to risk themselves in all sorts of dangerous things (Didn't Gen-Xers invent Xtreme sports?), are often afraid to risk themselves in the greatest adventure of making lifelong commitments in love. It is only in risking oneself in faithful commitment that one can find true love. Like all diocesan priests, I made lifelong promises of celibacy, obedience and prayer. These are the ties that bind a priest's heart to the one he loves, and allows that love to flow into his own heart to become a spiritual husband, father and physician of souls.

In these times, perhaps the greatest sign of contradiction is the priest's free promise of lifelong celibacy. This promise is counter cultural in any generation. Through this free promise we priests stake our entire lives on Jesus' resurrection. Either He is truly God and truly risen from the dead or no life is more absurd than ours. Because the stakes of this risk seem so high when compared to the prevailing value system, celibacy becomes a provocative sign in contemporary American culture, either admired or scorned, rarely ignored. Celibacy does not make for an easy life, but what life of true love in this world is easy? This promise, however, does have the power to create a deep, intimate life with God in the priest's heart. It cannot be lived at all without divine grace and it cannot be lived well without prayer and good human integration.

Because celibacy runs right through the heart of a man and his love, it also binds the priest in a special way to the Cross, the very place and event whereby Jesus Christ made the Church His Bride. Celibacy in a particular way makes absolutely real the holy sacrifice that is the life of a priest, that he himself becomes a living sacrifice. This promise to sacrifice the good and beauty of a wife and children of his own allows the priest to enter into the supernatural paternity and undivided availability to the Church in her needs. Both the joys and the desolation (which can feel overwhelming at times) flowing from this promise have convinced me even more of the soundness of this discipline in the Church and its intrinsic connection to the priesthood, since it characterized Jesus Christ's own priesthood. Thus we priests have moments of breathless exhilaration and of real pain, both of which are part of loving in this world. Those who know love see the celibate priest as one hopefully whose heart is on fire with love for God and for them, one who is risking his life for them.

Perhaps for some priests their promise of celibacy may bear the concrete face of the woman they loved and would have married. This love, when surrendered to God, perhaps becomes part of the great mystery of divine love that animates a priest's life and which understandably remains buried deep in his own heart known only to a few. The key, I believe, to live out the profound mystery of priestly love in celibacy is realizing that joy and meaning is not synonymous with being self-satisfied and getting what I want. Joy and meaning in this life, rather, come from desiring and receiving what the Lord wants for me and being poured out in love for the good and salvation of others out of love for Him.

Along with celibacy, the priest's promised of obedience is another bond of love between his heart and the Heart of Jesus. I would imagine that other priests would agree with me that when we put our hands into the hands of our bishop and promised obedience and respect to him and his successors, we had little idea what that would really mean. This particular promise takes a concrete form in a priest's assignments, that is, his collaboration with the bishop in his apostolic mission. But the place and the type of work are only the circumstances and situations of obedience, which can and do change at any time. In other words, being a priest is not about achievement or having a career in the eyes of the world. That is not to say some priests fall into this trap to the detriment of their own holiness and the good of the Church. The most important aspect of priestly obedience is the love with which he carries out his assignment.

My priest friends and I try to apply to ourselves the wise saying attributed to St. Francis de Sales, "Ask for no assignment; refuse no assignment." As a result, the assignments in my priestly life have been quite varied. Such is the adventure of love. The promise of obedience has taken me to places I otherwise would never have set foot, and into the lives of many incredible people I otherwise would have never have known. Although there have been plenty of times I wish I would have done better in a given assignment, I have yet to regret one. The Lord is so good that He even led me quietly back into the field of medicine. My doctoral thesis was on the problem of anxiety bringing me into the ambit of psychiatry, and a couple of years ago I gave a lecture on anxiety at the University of California, Irvine Medical Center.

The third bond of love of a priest's heart with the priestly Heart of Christ is the promise of prayer. Concretely we offer Holy Mass and pray the Liturgy of the Hours. But I have found that the internalizing and living out of the promises and consecration of ordination must be fueled by daily, vital contact in meditative prayer with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Blessed Virgin Mary, my guardian angel and the other angels and saints of Heaven. I know deep down in my heart that if I didn't pray everyday, I would not be able to persevere in this vocation. Prayer is the personal relationship that is cultivated with the Lord; prayer also deepens and intensifies it. We grow in His likeness by spending time, both quality and quantity, with Him – cheek to cheek as it were. The habit of prayer helps to keep me steady on the days when it doesn't feel so thrilling to be a priest and when the task of love is challenging my selfishness.

Having made those promises and received that priestly consecration in his heart, the priest then lives out his mission of preaching, sanctifying and governing in the Church. Even after the passing of years, and older priests who have served many more years will say the same, the adventure of love in these three aspects of our mission is breathtaking. The priest's life of divine love and the ensuing risks means his life will also be at the very center of the cosmic drama that is human life, the triumph and tragedy found in the confrontation between divine love and human freedom. The ordinary life of a priest is full of tragedy and triumph. It may involve giving counsel to the young unmarried woman who has just learned she is pregnant, bestowing mercy upon and helping to lead a penitent out of a long affair, or giving encouragement to the devout believer in her striving for greater holiness. There is tragedy as when a couple preparing for marriage runs away from the Church to a Justice-of-the-peace because they find the requirements of married love as taught by the Lord in the natural law and His Church too demanding for their tastes. There is also triumph, such as the one who, teetering on the edge of death, reconciles with God in the hospital ICU. After giving absolution and finishing the prayers for the dying with one such man who was unconscious, I bent down and whispered in his ear, "If Jesus comes for you, take His hand." And at that very moment the monitor above his head went to flat-line. Even amid the wailing beep of the monitor, the room was filled with peace, and victory. The ICU nurse came in with tears in her eyes and said, "He was just waiting for a priest." Most any priest could relate similar, and more incredible stories from his ministry.

After nearly twelve years, I can say that being a priest is great but it isn't easy. Married people tell me the same thing about their lives. My brothers who are married often tell me the easiest thing in the world is to get up in the morning and be a bad father. The same is true of spiritual fathers. The priest too is caught in the vissitudes of the drama of salvation going on in his own life. He is a man himself beset with weakness (1Cor. 2:3); the tragedy and triumph of the drama is going on within his life as well. Because of his weakness, the priest also has his painful encounters with the Risen Lord on the shore of Galilee. Like St. Peter, he winces at the healing blade of Jesus' words: "Do you love me? ... Feed my lambs ... Follow me" (Jn. 21:15-16,19).

All the aspects of a priest's life find their culmination in Holy Mass, Jesus' once for all saving action on Calvary brought into the here and now. In the drama of life the Eucharist is at the very core, Jesus' true presence, invisibly transforming the world. In the Mass, the priest finds strength and meaning when overwhelmed by life's tragedies and his apparent or real failure in that he can unite it all to the apparent failure of the Lord's crucifixion and death that brought salvation to the world. Along with prayer and the Mass I have derived great strength and encouragement from good priest friends – a band of brothers to share this same path and help each other along the way.

A call from Jesus coming through the events of an ordinary life is how I became a priest. Even after all this time, I'm still at a loss as to why He called me. I leave it to His own love, freedom and plan. But I am greatly encouraged that when he called his first priests, He didn't call those whom the world considered the best and brightest. They were exceptional in their ability to let the Lord's love and grace take hold of their hearts, and by the end of their lives could say like St. Paul, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Gal. 2:20). In preparing this article, I recently went online and watched a 2007 rendition of Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love at a reunion concert of Van Halen. The tune musically still rocks. Now that they are well past middle age and onstage – Eddie is still without a shirt and David Lee Roth still in the leather pants (I'm sure it was part of the act) – I wonder if they ever found real love. I hope so. Even if they weren't talkin' 'bout it in that tune, I'm sure on some level they were searching for it – the sex, drugs and rock and roll only go so far. Sin never makes anyone happy. Love always does in the end. Ain't talkin' 'bout love? It's all about love. That is why this Gen-Xer is a Catholic priest.

Why I am a Priest? - Fr. John Cihak, S.T.D.

2010-07-11T22:35:00.001+01:00

From: Ignatius Insight

Winter 1989, downtown South Bend, Indiana. The night is snowy and crisp. Inside the bar, already humid and smoky, the guitarist lights his cigarette, takes a long, patient drag and wedges it among the strings in the head of his guitar. As the smoke drifts from his mouth he begins moving his fingers across the fret board, the distortion turned up to eleven. The opening riffs of Van Halen's "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love" crackle from the bending strings. Standing next to him, I watch his fingers glide effortlessly across the wood and steel. The toe of my boot taps to the chucky thumping as the bassist, my older brother, and the drummer make their entrances. With my forehead already sweaty from the lights and body heat of the room, I gather the lyrics in my head, press the microphone to my lips and begin navigating through the first verse. The crowd packed tightly into the small place begins pulsing with the beat. I feel the palpable rush from that invisible electricity between band and crowd beginning to fill the room. As the music crescendos to the refrain, I saunter over to my brother's side of the stage area where he is cuing the approaching vocal harmonies. He steps up to his microphone and we belt out, "Ain't talkin' 'bout love".

Nine years later in the Cathedral in Portland, Oregon, I lie prostrate, my forehead pressed into the cool marble floor. The smell of incense and burning candles mingles with the warm June air imbuing it with a holy fragrance. The tightly packed church, imploring the intercession of the angels and saints of Heaven, chants the litany of the saints for us who are about to be ordained priests. The invisible and peaceful presence of grace fills the church. After the examination the Archbishop, a successor to the apostles, lays his hands on each of our heads and pours the scented chrism on our hands.

I shake my head a little sheepishly whenever I compare the two scenes in my mind. The black trench coat remains, but the faded jeans, leather boots and concert-T-cut-into-a-tank-top have been traded in for a Roman collar, a shorter haircut and more sensible footwear. I still enjoy rock music, yet now my heart is much more taken by the beautiful simplicity of Gregorian chant and rich texture of Renaissance polyphony. The gig hustling and musical thrill seeking were traded in many years ago for something else, something infinitely better and greater – a pearl of great, great price. I am a Catholic priest.

In this Year for Priests, I have been asked to share something of my own vocation story explaining why a guy of the so-called Generation X would become a Catholic priest. Why would a man of such a generation freely promise lifelong celibacy, obedience to God through his bishop, daily, committed prayer, and then have his life poured out in (hopefully) loving service; to people most of whom he has never met? To top it all off, he is also supposed to have great joy in doing it all? My response on that June day was simply a small echo of the millions of voices of men who have uttered this same 'Yes' for the past two millennia.

Yet a 'Yes' to the priesthood on the surface does not seem an attractive choice to a Gen-Xer. Many of my generation were born amid no-fault divorce and abortion-on-demand; we were all conceived under the ever expanding shadow of the Pill. Any of us could very easily have not been here. Many of my generation unfortunately were never born – the largest wave of casualties from the Revolution of '68. Many of those who survived until birth grew up in single parent households. Even if we were blessed with both a dad and mom at home, many came to understand from their parents that time pursuing a career or pleasure was more important than time with children. Untold hours were spent being entertained by TV and videogames during that rapid and seismic transition from pong to Nintendo.

Now that Generation X is moving into mid-life, perhaps we have seen the ways in which we have perpetuated the brokenness we inherited. Into whichever generation we are born, we and the world are affected by original and personal sin. Detached, distrustful, frightened and thus apathetic and confused are common descriptors of this generation that is especially terrified to risk itself in the vulnerability of true, life-long love. We lived through and observed so many failures of it.

Yet I have no other explanation as to why some Gen-Xers became Catholic priests other than love. The Christian life in general and the priesthood in particular is a life of radical love. Quite simply, it first involves discovering the love that God Himself is and is offering to us; learning to become vulnerable to it and allowing it to penetrate our hearts. Then with His help we can begin to love as He does. It is a personal, daily encounter and exchange of two hearts – one's own with the Heart of Jesus, or to use the vocabulary of theology, to grow in His likeness. The choice to become a priest, therefore, is immersed in a tremendous mystery of love and the reasons for choosing and remaining in this call lie deep in the heart. They often remain deeply personal and private, just as a husband may not be able or even want to explain publicly the reasons why he loves his wife so much. Yet something could certainly be said about some of the major influences and events that shaped this choice. On one level, only in the Catholic Church have I been able to find the fullness of God's revelation of Himself as absolute, total self-giving love. Through her Sacraments and teaching, through her visible unity, universality, apostolic succession and holiness, I am able to encounter the fullness of God's loving presence, a firm place for a Gen-Xer to stake his life in an otherwise chaotic, often disappointing and sometimes brutal world. Ain't talkin' 'bout love? That's about right for our secular culture, but for His Church it's all about love.

Looking back, I consider one of my greatest blessings that I was mercifully spared much of what my generation suffered. Born into a loving, believing and praying family, I am the second of eight children and grew up in the countryside just outside the university town of Corvallis, Oregon. My father, a life-long Catholic, spent a year in seminary during his first year of college, and my mother joined the Church from high Episcopalianism at age sixteen. The foundation of my vocation flowed from my parents living theirs. From an early age I learned from my parents' words and example that God is love (1Jn. 4:8), and to live for Jesus as a Catholic was to live a life of self-giving, and therefore necessarily, sacrificial love. This love, after penetrating the heart, pushes a person to give himself in imitation of this divine love: "Greater love no man has than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" (Jn. 15:13). Divine love asks that one give his whole life in return. It is the closest thing that could be considered "commensurate" to the Lord's self-giving to us – totality in response to totality, even if ours is finite and His infinite.

The beauty of God's sacrificial love attracted me as a young boy. I saw this love in my father who sacrificed career advancement for years because it would have taken him away from spending time with his children. I saw this love in my mother who after putting my Dad through doctoral studies continued teaching in special education for years before becoming a full time stay-at-home mom. They loved the Lord, each other and truly loved us children. I came to understand later in life that I grew up in a marriage-centered family with parents who naturally created secure attachments in their children. I was close in age between two brothers, and I learned many lessons of love growing up with them, sharing a room, doing chores, fighting, playing football and basketball in the yard, and today we are the best of friends.

As I was growing up the thought of priesthood never really crossed my mind. I marvel at the priests I know who had a sense of being called from a very young age. I had no idea. Even as a kid, when my brothers and I played Mass, I did not have much of a desire to be the priest. That role was usually taken by my older brother, who is now an attorney and married with five children. From the age of about six, I was already convinced that I would be a family man and a doctor. Although I had no strong attraction to the priesthood, I did have from my very early years a strong desire to heal others. The discovery of the beauty of divine love in my parents and siblings helped prepare me in the early years of my life for the time when the Lord would call.

No one today would be surprised to read that I did not get this same message of radical, sacrificial love from the wider culture. Like many Gen-Xers, I came to consciousness somewhere in the chaos of the late 1970s where there was much moral and ecclesial confusion. The attempt to be "relevant" without establishing firm roots in the timeless truths of both nature and grace and in the long lived experience of the Church, yielded a "faith" in many of my peers that could not withstand the undertow of the materialism, relativism and pursuit of pleasure in the tide of contemporary American life. Why subscribe to the Christian faith if it is not any truer than much less demanding lifestyles? Because of the confusing times, clarity and tradition became premiums in life to stay anchored. I naturally gravitated toward what Pope Benedict XVI would later coin as the "hermeneutic of continuity" – the principle that looking attentively to the truth, goodness and beauty of the past can teach us how to discern and live the new circumstances of the present, a principle necessary not only for charting authentic liturgical renewal or the development of doctrine but also for the basic flourishing of human life and family. A strong force of continuity in my own young life of faith was Pope John Paul II, the only Pope I knew growing up. He was someone whom I recognized as trustworthy and who constantly offered fatherly guidance on how to live in this world as a follower of Jesus. Perhaps the strong impression this Pontiff left on the Catholics of Generation X is why the Gen-Xers who have become priests have garnered the term, "JPII Priests". If I had not had a hermeneutic of continuity operating in my faith life at home, I would not have discovered my life's mission, and probably would have drifted away from the Catholic faith without ever knowing what it truly was, as many of my peers did.

As the Zeitgeist seemed to be working its way more deeply into the broader culture, at home my brothers and I were fed a steady diet of Bible stories, lives of the saints, and prayer. We knew that Sunday Mass was non-negotiable so don't even ask. Dad and Mom always seemed to have a spiritual book at their bedside and we often prayed as a family. I cannot remember a time when I did not know how to pray the Rosary it was instilled at such a young age. I remember being impressed by St. Francis' radical life of poverty; Charles de Foucauld's dramatic conversion from playboy to ascetic and mystic; St. Damien of Molokai's heroic decision to volunteer to serve the lepers of Hawaii knowing it would mean certain death; St. John Bosco's efforts to win street boys to Christ assisted by his acrobatic talent and charismatic personality; St. ThrŽse's little way of confidence and love; St. Maximilian Kolbe's courage to break rank at Auchwitz and take the place of man condemned to death; and St. John Vianney's simple dedication which resulted in the conversion of his rustic parish and ignited a spiritual renewal throughout France. These men and women, the saints, so diverse in character and background, did share something in common. They had allowed divine love to penetrate their own hearts and through this love became more like Christ – and then they changed the world around them. Ordinary people who became extraordinary in their love. They were heroic, and I wanted to be like them. Even though family life was not always perfect (and whose is?) my parents taught us that everybody is called to sanctity, and the saints are not simply to be admired but imitated.

Not only was I formed at home in an informal hagiographical catechesis and devotional life, my family also spent some time in the charismatic renewal in the 1970s. For several years while I was growing up, my family's spiritual routine was holy Mass on Sunday, a family rosary most days of the week and charismatic prayer meeting on Tuesday. The talks at the prayer meetings could not hold the attention of a young boy, but it still was enjoyable to sing and to witness the more extraordinary gifts of the Holy Spirit and the sincere dedication of regular people to God. I would not characterize myself now as a charismatic in that sense. St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Francis de Sales and the monastic tradition influence me much more in the spiritual life. Yet the charismatic renewal showed me the power of God the Holy Spirit at work, and perhaps more importantly provided me in the late 1970s with a faith-filled environment during a time of much desolation in the culture. Most of all, it was through this renewal that I came to know the priest who would help me to recognize my vocation to the priesthood.

An event in particular that had a great impact on my interior life happened when I was about fourteen or fifteen years old. One afternoon without much to do, I was browsing through my parents' bookcase and found a copy of the revelations of St. Bridget of Sweden. A strange book for a teenager to pick up, and to this day, I am not sure why I did. In any case, I sat down by myself and read it that afternoon. There were many passages beyond my grasp at the time, but the descriptions this mystic offered of the Lord's passion and death touched me deeply, and while reading and pondering, Jesus' personal love from the Cross hit me like lightening. I was moved to tears in gratitude for this love, and became aware of a Presence drawing near to my own heart that, in the intensity of love, was both terrifying and irresistible. Looking back, I think it was the first time I became aware of His Heart, and all I knew at this time is that He loved me and wanted me close to Him.

I remained convinced through high school that Jesus did not want me to be a priest. I had no desire to be a priest. I remained adamant about becoming a doctor and family man, and began preparing the way by working through the preparatory courses necessary for pre-med studies. My folks seemed pleased with my apparent plans, yet continued to encourage – without pressure – all the boys to consider the priesthood. But who listens to his parents in high school? Up until my senior year my life looked pretty normal from the outside. I did well in school, not so well on the swim team, better in music, performing a clarinet concerto with the local symphony. I also went to dances and dated. My brothers and I with a few friends played in a rock band at our high school's annual barbecue and dance. This perception of normalcy was evident at my ten-year high school reunion where, after showing up in a Roman collar, I was voted "Most Unlikely Career Choice" by my schoolmates. I'm sure they meant it as a complement. At times my Catholic faith was tested from within and without. Attending public high school in the mid 1980s, where many of my peers and teachers did not believe in a personal God or live as if He existed, I was often challenged by others about God, the Catholic Church and especially morality. I was compelled to examine and decide for myself if this Catholic faith I had received from my family was in fact the truth and if I was going to try to live by it. Fortunately, the like-minded support from my brothers and best friend helped me to weather the pressures and moral loneliness.

However "normal" my life appeared on the outside during high school, changes began to happen on the inside. I began to go to daily Mass. A Holy Cross priest, Father Charles Harris, who had been leading the local charismatic group, retired nearby my family home and would celebrate morning Mass early enough to allow a high school student to arrive at school before the first bell. I began to see the connection that love is not satisfied until it attains communion with the one loved, and that real communion was that for which every generation hungers and thirsts. I did not have the vocabulary to express it back then, but now I would say in the Mass I was able to encounter Jesus Himself, to enter into His sacrifice of love on Calvary, to witness Him become truly Present on the altar and give me His Body and Blood because He wanted to dwell within my soul – sacramental union with the God who loved me. A closer, more intimate union could not be conceived. And through the Mass I began to see the depth of His love, His desire is to have every human being, made in His image, to partake in His divine nature no matter how troubled or broken their lives may be.

During high school another priest also came into my life. Our parish received a new parochial vicar, Father John Kerns, who had only been ordained for a few years and whose joy and excitement in being a priest left a lasting impression. He took a fatherly interest in the Cihak boys, who for some time had been the primary altar boys in the parish, and was often a guest in our home. We would look forward to his visits as he was also a musician. A further step toward the vocation came in my senior year when my father suggested that I ask Father Harris to be my spiritual director. I had little idea what the term meant. He agreed nevertheless, and we began to meet monthly to talk about how to pray and meditate. I had no intention of changing my plans to be a doctor and family man, and even thought these meetings would help solidify those desires into a call to marriage. At the time I was accompanying a local physician familiar with my family on his rounds once per week.

In the winter of that year, Father Harris went in for a routine hip replacement surgery which was successful. I went to visit him a day or two after the surgery in his hospital room after finishing the rounds with the doctor for that week. He was cheerful and up in bed, and we had a pleasant conversation. I did not know at the time that it would be the last time we would speak. In the middle of the night my father woke up us boys up saying that Father Harris had suddenly and unexpectedly died. We all knelt and prayed the rosary together before going back to bed. One of my brothers and I served his funeral Mass. Something happened to me as I served that Mass. In the Gospel of John, St. Andrew and St. John's moment of the call was "about four in the afternoon" (Jn. 1:40). For me it was during that Mass. The call was not some flashing light on the road to Damascus with a voice rending the heavens (Acts 9:3), but more like the tiny whisper at Horeb (1Kgs. 19:12). The thought of being a priest came to mind and it flooded my heart with joy and peace, some sort of interior illumination, a tiny spark that appeared gently, quietly and undeniably.

Even with this initial realization, I did not head straight to the Seminary. Instead I went off to begin pre-med studies at the University of Notre Dame, to sing in a band and live the life of a college student – football games, road trips and parties. I was not the greatest sinner, but neither was I really virtuous. I was engaged in an interior, sometimes turbulent struggle between my desire and this undeniable spark inside now tied with my awareness of His Heart. Though that spark continued to grow, I continued to drag my feet. Yet I would never miss Sunday Mass and would confess regularly. I continued to go to daily Mass, to pray my rosary, and began to read the spiritual classics. That first year I read The Imitation of Christ and Introduction to the Devout Life. The one or two minutes of silent prayer I gave the Lord grew to spending fifteen minutes before the Blessed Sacrament in our dorm chapel downstairs. Yet that night I could be crooning tunes at some party or club. There was something inconsistent between the messages of INXS and The Imitation of Christ, between singing Mick Jagger tunes and reading St. Francis de Sales even if they were both classic in their respective genre. I was trying to live two lives that the Lord slowly and patiently began to bring together and purify. Now as a priest, I realize the wisdom of our Lord in choosing fishermen to be his apostles. Fishermen know how to be patient. It took time to trust Him, to become vulnerable to His call and to let this call take hold of my heart.

A large part of forging a different life in the Lord was discovering the power of his mercy in confession. Through that Sacrament my walk with Him was deepened radically. I also resumed spiritual direction, but now with a more definite aim: Is Jesus calling me to be a priest? The call grew stronger. A feature of my prayer at the time was to ask Jesus for help – "If you want me to be a priest, please increase that desire and decrease the desire to pursue medicine." Over time, He did both. I remember vividly a moment during lab in the Stepan Chemistry building. I cannot remember the experiment, but I do remember the burner being on and wearing the gloves and goggles. Very strongly inside it dawned on me: "I don't want to be here anymore." In retrospect, I think I was hearing the Lord on a certain level with this deep attraction to being involved in His work of healing as a doctor, not of the body but of the soul.

The Holy Cross priests who lived in my dorm, Alumni Hall, were quite supportive of my interest in the priesthood. One of them told me that if I was thinking about becoming a priest, I should start studying philosophy. So without ever having taken a philosophy course, I switched out of the pre-med track and declared a philosophy major. I immediately fell in love with that study, and fortunately was introduced to the brilliance and enduring relevance of St. Thomas Aquinas by Ralph McInerny and Alasdair McIntyre among others. Looking back I realize how much intelligence was wasted on a dim undergraduate, but their thought did not fail to have an impact, especially in opening my eyes to the importance of showing the reasonability of the Christian faith.

By the middle of my junior year I declared a second major in theology after taking a seminar on St. Augustine, and was introduced to the world of the Church Fathers and quite by accident, over a dinner conversation, the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. I discovered that the Catholic Church contained untold riches to feed a hungry mind that would otherwise starve on the poor diet of contemporary American life or one of the many available versions of "Catholic-lite". This call to sacrificial love found in the Catholic faith radiated a mysterious and attractive beauty.

On the social scene, the playing in bars ceased and I devoted more time to studying, although I still took part in the social life of the campus with my friends. During Christmas break of senior year, I formally applied to begin studies for the diocesan priesthood back home. I graduated that May, and, after spending the summer working in a gang prevention program in south central Los Angeles in the wake of the Rodney King riots, entered the Seminary. I then began several years of seminary formation first in Oregon and then in Rome. Living in Rome instilled a sense of history, tradition, and especially apostolic succession. I saw how we stand on the shoulders of those believers who have gone before us. If not for the direct handing on of the Gospel by the apostles, whose unity is found in Peter, Christians could never be certain they have the story right. What struck me during those years in Rome was that Jesus' message of salvation is timeless and the Church is far wider and deeper than the categories of a single generation; therefore, she has the power to speak meaningfully to every generation and every generation must respond. After those years of study, prayer and formation, I finally came to that ontologically altering day in June of 1998.

The reasons for becoming a priest and the reasons for remaining a priest have not essentially changed over the past twelve years. It is love. But I have grown in a much deeper knowledge and appreciation of what true love entails with the passage of time. Even priests have a honeymoon period in ministry where the sheer newness, power and joy of priestly ministry is blinding – Mass, preaching, confessions, teaching, visiting the sick, offering counsel, etc. It's nothing less than absolutely incredible. I often tell young men considering the priesthood that one of the great things about being a parish priest, which was especially true as a pastor, is that I never had two days that were alike. When I looked at my daily calendar in the morning I knew it was only an inkling of what would actually transpire in the course of the day. Yet as time passes and the newness becomes routine, the priest inevitably comes to the actual work and true suffering in the adventure of love as he seeks to die to self.

This adventure of priestly love is founded upon the fundamental Christian reality of baptism and that original and universal vocation to holiness: allowing one's life to be penetrated by divine love so that one's human, earthly life begins to radiate the divine life. It is nothing less than to allow Jesus to live out His passion, death and resurrection in the heart of His priest. It is the only way a Christian becomes Christlike. There is no other way to become a part of this love without being shaped by the ultimate event of love of the Cross. The process often feels like death but what is actually happening is that the Lord is reconfiguring the Christian into His likeness thereby imparting His eternal life and power in us. And so, in the priesthood a man's entire self, weaknesses and faults included, are to be overtaken by divine love and transformed. A man does not become a priest because he is perfect; he becomes a priest so that Christ may perfect him. Often as a priest, it involves wrestling with the Lord like Jacob (Gen. 32:24) so that we will cease to cling to ourselves and surrender to His love.

The path of love for the priest consists of internalizing as his very own identity and living out the promises (celibacy, obedience and prayer) he makes and the consecration (to preach, to sanctify and to govern) he receives at ordination. The promises and the consecration are bonds of love that bind a priest's heart to the Heart of Jesus. In doing so, his vocation as a priest brings him to fulfillment as man by making him a husband and father on the supernatural level. By his ordination a priest is made into an image of the Bridegroom and thus brought into a spousal relationship with the Church, the Bride of Christ. Through this mystical relationship, a priest in a very real way becomes a husband and father, a spiritual father. His fatherhood perhaps becomes most evident when he baptizes and literally generates new spiritual life in a child and also in the Sacrament of Confession whereby he often brings people back from spiritual death.

The priest coming into his being a spiritual husband and father is concretely lived out in the promises he makes at ordination. Gen-Xers, who perhaps in their 20s were so willing to risk themselves in all sorts of dangerous things (Didn't Gen-Xers invent Xtreme sports?), are often afraid to risk themselves in the greatest adventure of making lifelong commitments in love. It is only in risking oneself in faithful commitment that one can find true love. Like all diocesan priests, I made lifelong promises of celibacy, obedience and prayer. These are the ties that bind a priest's heart to the one he loves, and allows that love to flow into his own heart to become a spiritual husband, father and physician of souls.

In these times, perhaps the greatest sign of contradiction is the priest's free promise of lifelong celibacy. This promise is counter cultural in any generation. Through this free promise we priests stake our entire lives on Jesus' resurrection. Either He is truly God and truly risen from the dead or no life is more absurd than ours. Because the stakes of this risk seem so high when compared to the prevailing value system, celibacy becomes a provocative sign in contemporary American culture, either admired or scorned, rarely ignored. Celibacy does not make for an easy life, but what life of true love in this world is easy? This promise, however, does have the power to create a deep, intimate life with God in the priest's heart. It cannot be lived at all without divine grace and it cannot be lived well without prayer and good human integration.

Because celibacy runs right through the heart of a man and his love, it also binds the priest in a special way to the Cross, the very place and event whereby Jesus Christ made the Church His Bride. Celibacy in a particular way makes absolutely real the holy sacrifice that is the life of a priest, that he himself becomes a living sacrifice. This promise to sacrifice the good and beauty of a wife and children of his own allows the priest to enter into the supernatural paternity and undivided availability to the Church in her needs. Both the joys and the desolation (which can feel overwhelming at times) flowing from this promise have convinced me even more of the soundness of this discipline in the Church and its intrinsic connection to the priesthood, since it characterized Jesus Christ's own priesthood. Thus we priests have moments of breathless exhilaration and of real pain, both of which are part of loving in this world. Those who know love see the celibate priest as one hopefully whose heart is on fire with love for God and for them, one who is risking his life for them.

Perhaps for some priests their promise of celibacy may bear the concrete face of the woman they loved and would have married. This love, when surrendered to God, perhaps becomes part of the great mystery of divine love that animates a priest's life and which understandably remains buried deep in his own heart known only to a few. The key, I believe, to live out the profound mystery of priestly love in celibacy is realizing that joy and meaning is not synonymous with being self-satisfied and getting what I want. Joy and meaning in this life, rather, come from desiring and receiving what the Lord wants for me and being poured out in love for the good and salvation of others out of love for Him.

Along with celibacy, the priest's promised of obedience is another bond of love between his heart and the Heart of Jesus. I would imagine that other priests would agree with me that when we put our hands into the hands of our bishop and promised obedience and respect to him and his successors, we had little idea what that would really mean. This particular promise takes a concrete form in a priest's assignments, that is, his collaboration with the bishop in his apostolic mission. But the place and the type of work are only the circumstances and situations of obedience, which can and do change at any time. In other words, being a priest is not about achievement or having a career in the eyes of the world. That is not to say some priests fall into this trap to the detriment of their own holiness and the good of the Church. The most important aspect of priestly obedience is the love with which he carries out his assignment.

My priest friends and I try to apply to ourselves the wise saying attributed to St. Francis de Sales, "Ask for no assignment; refuse no assignment." As a result, the assignments in my priestly life have been quite varied. Such is the adventure of love. The promise of obedience has taken me to places I otherwise would never have set foot, and into the lives of many incredible people I otherwise would have never have known. Although there have been plenty of times I wish I would have done better in a given assignment, I have yet to regret one. The Lord is so good that He even led me quietly back into the field of medicine. My doctoral thesis was on the problem of anxiety bringing me into the ambit of psychiatry, and a couple of years ago I gave a lecture on anxiety at the University of California, Irvine Medical Center.

The third bond of love of a priest's heart with the priestly Heart of Christ is the promise of prayer. Concretely we offer Holy Mass and pray the Liturgy of the Hours. But I have found that the internalizing and living out of the promises and consecration of ordination must be fueled by daily, vital contact in meditative prayer with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Blessed Virgin Mary, my guardian angel and the other angels and saints of Heaven. I know deep down in my heart that if I didn't pray everyday, I would not be able to persevere in this vocation. Prayer is the personal relationship that is cultivated with the Lord; prayer also deepens and intensifies it. We grow in His likeness by spending time, both quality and quantity, with Him – cheek to cheek as it were. The habit of prayer helps to keep me steady on the days when it doesn't feel so thrilling to be a priest and when the task of love is challenging my selfishness.

Having made those promises and received that priestly consecration in his heart, the priest then lives out his mission of preaching, sanctifying and governing in the Church. Even after the passing of years, and older priests who have served many more years will say the same, the adventure of love in these three aspects of our mission is breathtaking. The priest's life of divine love and the ensuing risks means his life will also be at the very center of the cosmic drama that is human life, the triumph and tragedy found in the confrontation between divine love and human freedom. The ordinary life of a priest is full of tragedy and triumph. It may involve giving counsel to the young unmarried woman who has just learned she is pregnant, bestowing mercy upon and helping to lead a penitent out of a long affair, or giving encouragement to the devout believer in her striving for greater holiness. There is tragedy as when a couple preparing for marriage runs away from the Church to a Justice-of-the-peace because they find the requirements of married love as taught by the Lord in the natural law and His Church too demanding for their tastes. There is also triumph, such as the one who, teetering on the edge of death, reconciles with God in the hospital ICU. After giving absolution and finishing the prayers for the dying with one such man who was unconscious, I bent down and whispered in his ear, "If Jesus comes for you, take His hand." And at that very moment the monitor above his head went to flat-line. Even amid the wailing beep of the monitor, the room was filled with peace, and victory. The ICU nurse came in with tears in her eyes and said, "He was just waiting for a priest." Most any priest could relate similar, and more incredible stories from his ministry.

After nearly twelve years, I can say that being a priest is great but it isn't easy. Married people tell me the same thing about their lives. My brothers who are married often tell me the easiest thing in the world is to get up in the morning and be a bad father. The same is true of spiritual fathers. The priest too is caught in the vissitudes of the drama of salvation going on in his own life. He is a man himself beset with weakness (1Cor. 2:3); the tragedy and triumph of the drama is going on within his life as well. Because of his weakness, the priest also has his painful encounters with the Risen Lord on the shore of Galilee. Like St. Peter, he winces at the healing blade of Jesus' words: "Do you love me? ... Feed my lambs ... Follow me" (Jn. 21:15-16,19).

All the aspects of a priest's life find their culmination in Holy Mass, Jesus' once for all saving action on Calvary brought into the here and now. In the drama of life the Eucharist is at the very core, Jesus' true presence, invisibly transforming the world. In the Mass, the priest finds strength and meaning when overwhelmed by life's tragedies and his apparent or real failure in that he can unite it all to the apparent failure of the Lord's crucifixion and death that brought salvation to the world. Along with prayer and the Mass I have derived great strength and encouragement from good priest friends – a band of brothers to share this same path and help each other along the way.

A call from Jesus coming through the events of an ordinary life is how I became a priest. Even after all this time, I'm still at a loss as to why He called me. I leave it to His own love, freedom and plan. But I am greatly encouraged that when he called his first priests, He didn't call those whom the world considered the best and brightest. They were exceptional in their ability to let the Lord's love and grace take hold of their hearts, and by the end of their lives could say like St. Paul, "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Gal. 2:20). In preparing this article, I recently went online and watched a 2007 rendition of Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love at a reunion concert of Van Halen. The tune musically still rocks. Now that they are well past middle age and onstage – Eddie is still without a shirt and David Lee Roth still in the leather pants (I'm sure it was part of the act) – I wonder if they ever found real love. I hope so. Even if they weren't talkin' 'bout it in that tune, I'm sure on some level they were searching for it – the sex, drugs and rock and roll only go so far. Sin never makes anyone happy. Love always does in the end. Ain't talkin' 'bout love? It's all about love. That is why this Gen-Xer is a Catholic priest.

Invocation 2010 – A festival with a difference

2010-07-06T18:06:00.001+01:00

Last weekend saw the first National Vocations festival of its kind in England and Wales, held at St. Mary’s college Oscott near Birmingham. An event, not necessarily to recruit people to religious orders or Priesthood, but to celebrate, to pray for, and to promote the consideration of vocations to priesthood and religious life.

There was a great mix of inspirational talks from Abbot Christopher Jamison, Sr. Gabriel Davison, Archbishop Vincent Nichols and Dr Andrew O'Connell as well as workshops on Prayer, catechesis, Priesthood, religious life and many more. Each day revolved around daily Mass and the Divine office prayed together in the morning and evening. In the evening after supper, there was exposition of the Blessed Sacrament until the next morning and everyone who attended was advised to spend some time in prayer each day before the Blessed Sacrament. An important part of the weekend was the opportunity for individual confession at a reconciliation service on Saturday. There was also a candle lit Blessed Sacrament procession on Saturday night culminating with Benediction which was outstanding.

At the concluding Mass presided over by Archbishop Nichols a message was read out from Pope Benedict imparting an Apostolic Blessing on all who attended and their families. The message was greeted with a spontaneous round of applause after it was read out which really summed up the gratitude that everyone felt the event deserved.

The first thing that I think of in summary of the event is JOY! Joy because of the affirmation of my own vocational journey to priesthood, but also joy in the experience shared with many others from around the country who are also discerning their vocational call. Overall I felt that Invocation 2010 was a huge success and due to the great atmosphere created by all who participated. Hopefully future events will be organised and I pray that many more people are able to attend even if only to be open to the idea that God is calling them to something special.

John-Paul Evans (seminarian at St. Cuthbert’s Seminary, Ushaw College)

P.S.
The invocation website is to continue and will be built up as a future resource for all who seek to discern their vocation and can be accessed here.

If you are reading this and wish to find out more about a vocation to priesthood please feel free to contact the vocations director Fr. Manny Gribben in complete confidence by emailing emmanuel.gribben@googlemail.com or phone even him on 01946 810324

Invocation 2010: Will Lancaster be represented?

2010-06-23T08:00:00.002+01:00

The first weekend in July this year is an important one for all of us involved in vocations work. It sees the first ever national Vocations Discernment weekend which will be hosted at St Mary’s College, Oscott.

Invocation 2010 is not a recruitment weekend! There won’t be recruitment personnel from dioceses and religious orders desperately attempting to get you to try on one of their habits!

A discernment weekend like Invocation means a weekend that offers you time and space to reflect on the idea of vocation and to pray about what the Lord is asking of you. You don’t have to have decided anything to come along. All we expect of participants is that they be open to discovering God’s will for their lives.

So Invocation is for anyone aged between 16 & 35 who is open to saying ‘Yes’ if they believe the Lord is calling them. There will be some great speakers, including Abbot Christopher Jamison and Sr Gabriel Davison. Archbishop Vincent Nichols will celebrate the closing Mass. Their input, as well as that of other speakers and those who lead workshops, will help create a wonderful atmosphere. The presence of young men and women happy to respond generously to the Lord’s call will also be a great encouragement to you. Indeed - your presence will encourage others as well.

Please do book before places run out. You can download a booking form or book online at: www.invocation.org.uk

End of Term at Allen Hall

2010-06-22T00:02:00.001+01:00

By Seminarian John Millar

Last Wednesday, after two weeks of exams for the philosophy students and two weeks of extra lectures for the divines, term ended with a solemn Mass celebrated by the Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols.

We finished the evening with a barbeque for the students, formation team, external staff and the new students who will be starting with us in September. Another year is over for us at the seminary and the time has come to see the fruits of our labours with the Lord in the season of upcoming ordinations.

On Thursday a contingent from the seminary travelled to Trondheim in mid-Norway for the ordination of Per Einar Odden to the Priesthood. This marks a great change for the life of Allen Hall. For many years the Diocese of Oslo had been sending its seminarians to Allen Hall but with Per Einar and Khiem Duc Nguyen (who will be ordained later in the summer) all the Norwegian students have left and new students will study in Norway itself.

On our return from the far north of the world all the seminarians go on a month’s parish pastoral placement in our home diocese. This is a time of living with a priest in the heart of a parish and experiencing the realities of parish life amongst the people - for me this will be in the linked parishes od St Columba's with St Patrick's, Walney and Sacred Heart, Barrow. This is a vital component of the pastoral formation towards ordination to the Priesthood, one of the four areas of formation highlighted by John Paul II in his document Pastores Dabo Vobis. When this month is over we travel to Lourdes on the diocesan pilgrimage and then have a short break for the summer.

Pope Benedict Ordains 14 new Priests for the Diocese of Rome

2010-06-21T20:49:00.006+01:00

Dear Brother Bishops and Priests,
Dear ordinands,
Dear Brothers and Sisters!

As bishop of this diocese I am especially pleased to welcome fourteen new priests to the Roman “presbyerium”. Together with the Cardinal Vicar, the Auxiliary Bishops and all priests I thank the Lord for the gift of these new pastors of God's people I would like to extend a special greeting to you, dear ordinands: Today you are the focal point of the People of God, a people symbolized by those who fill this Vatican Basilica: they fill it with prayer and song, deep affection and profound, genuine emotion, of human and spiritual joy. Among this people of God, your parents and family, friends and companions, superiors and seminary educators, the various parish communities and the different realities of the Church from which you come and who have accompanied you on your journey and those in which you yourselves have already served pastorally have a special place. Not to mention the unique proximity, in this moment, of many people, humble and simple but great before God, such as, for example, the cloistered, children, the sick and infirm. They accompany you with the precious gift of their prayers, their innocence and their suffering.
It is, therefore, the entire Church of Rome, that today gives thanks to God and prays for you, that puts so much faith and hope in your future, waiting for the abundant fruits of holiness and goodness from your priestly ministry. Yes, the Church is counting on you; it counts a lot on you! The Church needs each of you, in the knowledge that it is the gift that God offers you, together with the absolute necessity of every human heart to meet with Christ, the One and only universal Saviour of the world, to receive from him new and eternal life, true freedom and full joy. Thus we are all invited to enter into the "mystery" of the event of grace that is taking place in your hearts with Priestly Ordination, enlightened by the Word of God.

The Gospel that we just heard shows us a significant moment in the journey of Jesus in which he asks his disciples what people think of him and how they judge him themselves. Peter replies on behalf of the Twelve with a confession of faith, which differs substantially from the view that people have of Jesus, for he says: You are the Christ of God (cf. 9.20). Where does this act of faith come from? If we go back to the beginning of the Gospel passage, we note that Peter’s confession is tied to a moment of prayer: " when Jesus was praying in solitude, and the disciples were with him,"(9:18). That is, the disciples are involved in Jesus’ unique being and talking with the Father. And so they are allowed to see the Master in the depths of his condition as Son, they are allowed to see what others can not, by 'being with Him, "by" being with Him in prayer, comes a knowledge that goes beyond the opinions of people to reach the profound identity of Jesus, to reach the truth. Here we are given an indication for the life and mission of the priest: in prayer he is called to rediscover the new face of the Lord and always the most authentic contents of his mission. Only those who have an intimate relationship with the Lord are grasped by him, may bring him to others, can be sent out. This is the "being with him" that must always accompany the exercise of priestly ministry; it must be the central part of it, above all in difficult times when it seems that the "things to be done" should take priority.

I wish to highlight a second element in today's Gospel. Immediately after Peter's confession, Jesus proclaims his passion and resurrection, and he follows this announcement with a lesson on the path his disciples must take, which is to follow Him, the Crucified, follow the road of the Cross. And he adds - with a paradoxical expression - that being a disciple means "losing oneself", but only in order to fully rediscover oneself (cf. Lk 9.22 to 24). What does this mean for every Christian, but especially what does it mean for a priest? Discipleship, but we can safely say: the priesthood can never be a way to achieve security in life or to gain a position in society. The man who aspires to the priesthood to enhance his personal prestige and power has misunderstood the meaning at the root of this ministry. The man who wants above all to achieve a personal ambition, achieve personal success, will always be a slave to himself and public opinion. In order to be considered, he will have to flatter; to say what people want to hear, he will have to adjust to changing fashions and opinions and thus deprive himself of the vital relationship with the truth, reducing himself to condemning tomorrow what he would praise today. A man who plans his life like this, a priest who sees his ministry in these terms, does not truly love God and others, only himself and, paradoxically, ends up losing himself. The priesthood - let us always remember - rests on the courage to say yes to another will, in the awareness, to be nurtured everyday, that our compliance with the will of God, our "immersion" in this will, does not cancel our originality, rather on the contrary, it helps us enter deeper into the truth of our being and our ministry.

Dear ordinands, I would like propose a third thought for your consideration, closely related to the one just mentioned: the call of Jesus to "lose oneself" to take the cross, recalls the mystery we celebrate: the Eucharist. With the sacrament of Holy Orders you today are gifted to preside at the Eucharist! You are entrusted the redemptive sacrifice of Christ, you are entrusted his body given his blood shed. Of course, Jesus offers his sacrifice, his gift of love full and humble, to the Church his Bride, on the Cross. It was on that wood, that the Father dropped a grain of wheat on the field of the world so that in dying it would become mature fruit, the giver of life. But in God's plan, this gift of Christ is made present in the Eucharist through the sacred potestas that the Sacrament of Holy Orders bestows on you Priests. When we celebrate Holy Mass we hold in our hands the bread of Heaven, the bread of God which is Christ, the grain broken to multiply and become the true food of life for the world. It is something that can not fail to fill you with intimate wonder, vibrant joy and immense gratitude: now the love and gift of Christ crucified and glorious, pass through your hands, your voice, your heart!

We pray to the Lord to give you an ever vigilant and enthusiastic consciousness of this gift, which is at the centre of your being priests! So that he may give you the grace to be able to experience in depth all the beauty and strength of this and at the same time your priestly service, the grace to live this ministry with consistency and generosity every day. The grace of the priesthood, that soon you will be given, will connect you intimately, even structurally, to the Eucharist. For this, it will deeply connect in your heart the feelings of Jesus who loves to the end, until the total gift of self, his being multiplied bread for the holy feast of unity and communion. This is the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit, designed to ignite your soul with the love of the Lord Jesus. It is an outpouring that, while telling of the absolute gratuity of the gift, carves into your being an indelible Law – a New Law, the Law that urges you to make the same love of the Crucified Christ’s gift a part of the tissue of the specific attitudes and gestures of your daily life and to help it flourish. We again hear the voice of the Apostle Paul, even in this we recognize that powerful voice of the Holy Spirit, "you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ" (Gal 3:27). Already with Baptism, and now in virtue of the sacrament of Holy Orders, you cloth yourselves with Christ. Care for the celebration of the Eucharist is always accompanied by a commitment to a Eucharistic life lived in obedience to one great law namely, that of love that gives itself entirely, and serves with humility, a life which the grace of the Holy Spirit helps to increasingly resemble that of Christ Jesus, the Eternal High Priest, Servant of God and men.

Dear friends, the path that today's Gospel indicates to us is the path of your spirituality and your pastoral action, its efficiency and effectiveness, even in the most strenuous and arid situations. Moreover, this is the sure way to find true joy. May Mary, the handmaid of the Lord, who conformed her will to the will of God, who generated Christ gifting him to the world, who followed her Son to the foot of the cross in the supreme act of love, accompany you in your everyday life and of your ministry. Thanks to the this Mother's tender and strong affection, you can joyfully be faithful to the conferral that today is given you as priests: to abide in Christ, Priest, who knew to obey the will of the Father and love man to the end. Amen!

Encourage Priests: New Website

2010-06-20T20:25:00.003+01:00

The above video is a report from Rome Reports on a new website set up to support priests. EncouragePriests.org is to be launched this Sunday, Fathers' Day (20 June). It is an initiative of Catholics Come Home.

Such prayerful support is deeply appreciated

PRIESTS ARE A GIFT FOR THE CHURCH AND FOR THE WORLD

2010-06-16T20:23:00.000+01:00
VATICAN CITY, 13 JUN 2010 (VIS) - The Year for Priests, which came to an end last Friday at a Mass attended by some 15,000 members of the clergy, was the theme of the Holy Father's remarks before praying the Angelus this morning.

"The Year for Priests came to an end on the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus which is traditionally the 'day of priestly sanctification', and this time it was especially so", the Pope told the faithful gathered below his study window in St. Peter's Square.

"The priest", he went on, "is a gift of the Heart of Christ, a gift for the Church and the world. It is from the Son of God's Heart, overflowing with charity, that all the good of the Church comes, in particular the vocation of those men who, conquered by the Lord Jesus, leave everything to dedicate themselves entirely to the service of Christian people, following the example of the Good Shepherd.

"The priest is moulded of Christ's own charity, that love which impelled Him to give His life for his friends and to forgive His enemies", the Pope added. "This is why priests are the primary builders of the civilisation of love. At this point my thoughts go to many priests, the well-known and the less well-known, some raised to the glory of the altars, others whose memory remains indelible in the minds of the faithful, perhaps in some small parish community. This was the case in Ars, the French village where St. John Mary Vianney worked his ministry".

The Pope also mentioned Blessed Jerzy Popieluszko, the priest and martyr who "generously and courageously practiced his ministry along with those committed to freedom, to the defence of life and its dignity. His work at the service of goodness and truth was a sign of contradiction for the regime that then governed Poland" he said. "Love for the Heart of Christ brought him to give his life, and his witness was the seed of a new springtime in the Church and in society".

The Holy Father went on: "If we look at history we can see that many episodes of authentic spiritual and social renewal have been written with the decisive contribution of Catholic priests, animated only by their passion for the Gospel and for man, for his true religious and civil liberty. How many initiatives of integral human promotion began with the intuition of a priestly heart", he concluded.

A Night 27 Years in the Making

2010-06-15T20:09:00.000+01:00

Article: Matthew Hodgson (Seminary of the Good Shepherd)

In a major boost for the Catholic Church in Australia, Cardinal Pell ordained six men to the priesthood of Jesus Christ on 11 June at St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney. This represents the largest group of ordinands in Sydney since 1983. The newly ordained priests - Fr Nen Dang (56), Fr Robert Doohan (47), Fr Joseph Gedeon (37), Fr Kim Ha (36), Fr Andrew James (36) and Fr Joseph Guinea (31) - will all serve the Church in the Archdiocese of Sydney.

The ordinations took place on the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, the last major feast in the year for priests. In his homily during the Ordination Mass, Cardinal Pell thanked God for the generosity of the candidates and for the efforts of the formation staff in preparing the men for ordination (both past and present).

Cardinal Pell spelled out the attributes required of a priest. He said they need to be “strong, wise and compassionate” and that they need to “do the hard things that their people need them to do.” In addition to being pastors of their established flock, they also need to be fishermen and bring in new people. The Cardinal appealed to the New Evangelisation as an essential element of a priestly ministry in the 21st century. He emphasised the instructions of the late Pope John Paul II: “Preach outside the traditional communities.”

The Cardinal then looked to the future. He noted the huge population increases expected in the Archdiocese of Sydney and appealed passionately to young men in the congregation: “We need help!” He continued, “there have to be young men here tonight thinking about becoming a priest. Come! Step forward!” He also urged young women to step forward and enquire about a vocation to the religious or consecrated life.

In line with tradition, the newly ordained priests went out to all corners of the Archdiocese to celebrate “Thanksgiving Masses.” Fr Joseph Gedeon celebrated his Thanksgiving Mass at Holy Family Church in Maroubra on 13 June. At his invitation, the homily was preached by Fr Anthony Percy - Rector of the Seminary of the Good Shepherd. Fr Percy reflected on major elements of the formation process: “the seminary is a long and testing experience ... [seminarians] need to go into the desert with Christ: pray for them!”

Fr Percy also reflected on the symbolism of the ordination ceremony itself. He pointed to the ordinands prostration as a symbol of their emptying themselves in order to be filled with the Holy Spirit. The laying on of hands by the Bishop is a sign of the coming of the Spirit and the laying on of hands by all concelebrating priests present is a sign of the unity of the priesthood.

Fr Percy continued, “ordination is just the start however. The big question you must answer, Fr Joe, is this: are you weak enough to be a priest?” He went on to clarify this question: “We have been chosen because we are weak, not because of our gifts and talents. God chooses the weak to make them strong.” He instructed Fr Joseph to know his limitations and know Christ: “You will be a great priest if you do this - you will change the world!”

After his Thanksgiving Mass, Fr Joseph - who grew up in Lebanon - described his state of mind in one word: “overwhelmed.” He paid tribute to St Rafqa, a Lebanese Maronite Nun, as the main inspiration to following his call to the priesthood. Providentially, the commemoration of the canonisation of St Rafqa is 10 June, the day before Fr Joseph’s ordination date. When asked what he was most looking forward to in his priestly ministry, Fr Joseph replied, “serving the people of God.”

For more information about the Seminary of the Good Shepherd please visit: www.sgs.org.au

THOUSANDS OF CLERGY AT PRAYER VIGIL FOR YEAR FOR PRIESTS

2010-06-14T19:33:00.001+01:00
VATICAN CITY, 11 JUN 2010 (VIS) - A prayer vigil was held yesterday evening in St. Peter's Square for the close of the Year for Priests. The event was attended by some fifteen thousand priests from ninety-seven countries.

During the first part of the vigil, live television linkups enabled those present in St. Peter's Square to share the witness and experiences of a German family with six children, a deacon, an Argentinean priest who works in a poor neighbourhood, a pastor from Hollywood, U.S.A., and a cloistered nun.

The second part of the vigil began with the Pope's arrival in St. Peter's Square by popemobile. Cardinal Claudio Hummes O.F.M., prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, greeted the Holy Father noting how this Year for Priests has served "to promote commitment to interior renewal among all clergy, for an evangelical witness that is more powerful and incisive in the modern world".

Cardinal Hummes continued his remarks: "We would like the Year for Priests never to end; that is, we would like our striving towards sanctity, each in his own identity, never to end, and that on this journey (which must begin in the seminary and last all our earthly lives as a single formative process) we may always be comforted and supported, as we have been in this Year, by the ceaseless prayer of the Church, by the warmth and spiritual support of all the faithful".

Cardinal Hummes thanked the Pope "for everything you have done, are doing and will continue to do for all priests, even those who have lost their way. We know that Your Holiness has already forgiven and will always forgive the suffering some of them have caused you".

A passage from the Gospel was then read out, after which the Pope responded to questions put to him by five priests, representing the five continents.

After praying the Lord's Prayer, the Blessed Sacrament was borne in procession from the Bronze Door to the altar positioned in front of the Vatican Basilica. Following a moment of silent adoration, the Pope read out the prayer of the Year for Priests.

The vigil came to an end at 11.15 p.m. with the Eucharistic blessing and the singing of the "Salve Regina".

Psychological Assessments and Human Formation

2010-06-13T19:20:00.000+01:00
For those Interested...

In recent days, articles have appeared in media outlets that are not typically known for their strong support of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church and orthodox vocations to the Priesthood. Below are two...

From the New York Times: "Prospective Priests Face Sexuality Hurdles"

From America Magazine: "Weeding Out Gays from the Seminary"

Interesting.....

Priests: Accompany Human Beings on their Journey

2010-06-11T19:27:00.001+01:00

PRIESTS: ACCOMPANY HUMAN BEINGS ON THEIR JOURNEY

VATICAN CITY, 11 JUN 2010 (VIS) - Today, Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Holy Father presided at a Eucharistic concelebration in St. Peter's Square to mark the close of the Year for Priests which was called to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the death of St. John Mary Vianney, the holy "Cure of Ars".

The Eucharist was concelebrated by cardinals and bishops of the Roman Curia, as well as by more than fifteen thousand priests from all over the world. The Holy Father consecrated the wine in the same chalice as that used by St. John Mary Vianney, which is conserved in Ars.

In his homily the Pope noted how the Year for Priests was celebrated to ensure "a renewed appreciation of the grandeur and beauty of the priestly ministry. The priest is not a mere office-holder. ... Rather, he does something which no human being can do of his own power: in Christ's name he speaks the words which absolve us of our sins and in this way he changes, starting with God, our entire life. Over the offerings of bread and wine he speaks Christ's words of thanksgiving, ... which open the world to God and unite it to Him. The priesthood, then, is not simply 'office' but Sacrament".

"This audacity of God Who entrusts Himself to human beings (Who, conscious of our weaknesses, nonetheless considers men capable of acting and being present in His stead) this audacity of God is the true grandeur concealed in the word 'priesthood'. ...This is what we wanted to reflect upon and appreciate anew over the course of the past year. We wanted to reawaken our joy at how close God is to us, ... we also wanted to demonstrate once again to young people that this vocation, this fellowship of service for God and with God, does exist".

"It was to be expected that this new radiance of the priesthood would not be pleasing to the 'enemy'; he would have rather preferred to see it disappear, so that God would ultimately be driven out of the world. And so it happened that, in this very year of joy for the Sacrament of the priesthood, the sins of priests came to light - particularly the abuse of the little ones. ... We too insistently beg forgiveness from God and from the persons involved, while promising to do everything possible to ensure that such abuse will never occur again; and that in admitting men to priestly ministry and in their formation we will do everything we can to weigh the authenticity of their vocation and make every effort to accompany priests along their journey".

"Had the Year for Priests been a glorification of our individual human performance, it would have been ruined by these events. But for us what happened was precisely the opposite: we grew in gratitude for God's gift, a gift concealed in 'earthen vessels' which ever anew, even amid human weakness, makes His love concretely present in this world. So let us look upon all that happened as a summons to purification, as a task which we bring to the future and which makes us acknowledge and love all the more the great gift we have received from God. In this way, His gift becomes a commitment to respond to God's courage and humility by our own courage and our own humility".

The Pope continued his homily by commenting on Psalm 23 - "The Lord is my shepherd" - which forms part of today's liturgy. "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want", said Benedict XVI. "God personally looks after me, after us, after all mankind. I am not abandoned, adrift in the universe and in a society which leaves me ever more lost and bewildered. ... The world's religions, as far as we can see, have always known that in the end there is only one God. But this God was distant. ... There was still a recognition that the world presupposes a Creator. Yet this God, after making the world, had evidently withdrawn from it. The world itself had a certain set of laws by which it ran, and God did not, could not, intervene in them". However, "wherever God's loving concern is perceived as getting in the way, human beings go awry. ... God wants us, as priests, in one tiny moment of history, to share His concern about people. As priests, we want to be persons who share His concern for men and women, who take care of them and provide them with a concrete experience of God's concern".

"We should strive to 'know' men and women as God does and for God's sake; we should strive to walk with them along the path of friendship with God. ... The shepherd points out the right path to those entrusted to him. He goes before them and leads them. Let us put it differently: the Lord shows us the right way to be human. He teaches us the art of being a person. What must I do in order not to fall, not to squander my life in meaninglessness? This is precisely the question which every man and woman must ask, and one which remains valid at every moment of one's life. How much darkness surrounds this question in our own day! We are constantly reminded of the words of Jesus, Who felt compassion for the crowds because they were like a flock without a shepherd".

"The people of Israel continue to be grateful to God because in the Commandments He pointed out the way of life. ... God has shown us the way and how to walk aright. The message of the Commandments was synthesised in the life of Jesus and became a living model. Thus we understand that these rules from God are not chains, but the way which He is pointing out to us. ... By walking with Christ, we experience the joy of Revelation, and as priests we need to communicate to others our own joy at the fact that we have been shown the right way".

Explaining the Psalm's reference to the "darkest valley", Benedict XVI pointed out that this can refer to death where, however, the Lord will not abandon us. Yet, "when speaking of the darkest valley, we can also think of the dark valleys of temptation, discouragement and trial through which everyone has to pass. Even in these dark valleys of life He is there. ... Help us priests, so that we can remain beside the persons entrusted to us in these dark nights. So that we can show them your own light", he said.

"'Your rod and your staff - they comfort me': the shepherd needs the rod as protection against savage beasts ready to pounce on the flock; against robbers looking for prey. Along with the rod there is the staff which gives support and helps to make difficult crossings. ... The Church too must use the shepherd's rod, the rod with which she protects the faith against those who falsify it, against currents which lead the flock astray. The use of the rod can actually be a service of love. Today we can see that it has nothing to do with love when conduct unworthy of the priestly life is tolerated. Nor is it love if heresy is allowed to spread and the faith twisted and chipped away, as if it were something that we ourselves had invented. As if it were no longer God's gift, the precious pearl which we cannot let be taken from us. Even so, the rod must always become once again the shepherd's staff - a staff which helps men and women to tread difficult paths and to follow the Lord".

The Psalm closes with a reference to the "table set", to "dwelling in the house of the Lord". In these words, said the Holy Father, "we see a kind of prophetic foreshadowing of the mystery of the Eucharist, in which God Himself makes us His guests and offers Himself to us as food - as that bread and fine wine which alone can definitively sate man's hunger and thirst. How can we not rejoice that one day we will be guests at the very table of God? ... How can we not rejoice that He has enabled us to set God's table for men and women, to give them His Body and His Blood, to offer them the precious gift of His very presence".

Finally, the Pope commented on the two communion antiphons which recount the lance thrust in Jesus' side which caused blood and water to come out. This, the Pope explained, recalls "the two fundamental Sacraments by which the Church lives: Baptism and the Eucharist. From the Lord's pierced side, from His open heart, there springs the living fountain which continues to well up over the centuries and which makes the Church. The open heart is the source of a new stream of life".

"Every Christian and every priest should become, starting from Christ, a wellspring which gives life to others. We ought to be offering life-giving water to a parched and thirsty world. Lord", the Holy Father concluded, "we thank you because for our sake you opened your heart; because in your death and in your resurrection you became the source of life. Give us life, make us live from you as our source, and grant that we too may be sources, wellsprings capable of bestowing the water of life in our time. We thank you for the grace of the priestly ministry. Lord bless us, and bless all those who in our time are thirsty and continue to seek".

Admission to Candidacy at Allen Hall, London

2010-06-08T14:58:00.004+01:00

Last Saturday, 5th June, Bishop Campbell came to Allen Hall Seminary in London to admit three men as Candidates for Holy Orders; Kim Addison (Westminster Diocese), John Millar (Lancaster Diocese) and James Neary (Lancaster Diocese).

This moment is one in which the Church recognises the call by God of an individual to Holy Orders on the testimony of those responsible for his formation in the seminary and others who know him. In response the Candidates promise to prepare themselves for the upcoming grace of Ordination to the Diaconate and the Priesthood. The community then pray for the Candidates that they will be faithful in the Lord’s service.

Last Saturday’s event was a joyous occasion attended by many of the friends and family of the Candidates as well as the whole seminary community. It is a wonderful grace for the Church to have men coming forward to offer their lives to our Lord in the Priesthood.

Please pray for us who are nearing the culmination of our vocation story and for many more seminarians to serve the Church in Lancaster and beyond.

By Seminarian John Millar

Come and Pray for our Priests! - This Sunday (Corpus Christi) Lancaster Cathedral at 4pm

2010-06-04T17:29:00.010+01:00

The final Diocesan celebration for the Year for Priests will be a Solemn Celebration of Vespers at 4pm on Sunday 6th June (The Feast of Corpus Christi) at Lancaster Cathedral. An invitation has been extended to all parishes of the Diocese of Lancaster.

Bishop Michael Campbell OSA will preside and preach and there will be a procession of the Blessed Sacrament (weather permitting) in the Cathedral grounds.

All are especially welcome at this opportunity to pray for our priests and for more priestly vocations in the Diocese.

Encouraging Younger Vocations

2010-06-04T17:04:00.011+01:00

Some time ago here on the Lancaster Vocations Blog we discovered an excellent site dedicated to priestly vocations set up by a global network of friends. And what do they all have in common? They are all teenagers! As they say on their homepage they have produced:

“A website designed and run by teens who are seriously considering becoming Catholic priests. What can we do to help you discern your vocation?”

The vocations site has a great collection of prayers and other resources, including lots of testimonies from young men thinking about their vocation. I know we have a lot of young readers of this blog and I encourage you to contribute to the selection of testimonies. Your full name doesn’t have to be published but what you say may well inspire another
young vocation!

If you are a young person discerning a priestly vocation then get in touch with Fr Manny Gribben, Diocesan Vocations Director (01946 810324 or emmanuel.gribben@googlemail.com)who will be able to support you.

How some Dioceses promote Vocations....

2010-06-04T16:54:00.002+01:00
From Brooklyn, in the United States they do it like this....:

Could you be a priest in the Diocese of Lancaster?

2010-06-02T14:02:00.004+01:00

If you think you could be then contact Fr Manny Gribben for an initial chat with no pressure whatsoever:

Fr Manny Gribben
The Priory
St Mary's
CLEATOR
Cumbria
CA23 3AB

T:(01946) 810324

E: emmanuel.gribben@googlemail.com

Invocation 2010: St Mary's College, Oscott, July 2010

2010-06-02T13:52:00.005+01:00
The first weekend in July this year is an important one for all of us involved in vocations work. It sees the first ever national Vocations Discernment weekend which will be hosted at St Mary’s College, Oscott.

It is not a recruitment weekend! There won’t be recruitment personnel from dioceses and religious orders desperately attempting to get you to try on one of their habits!

A discernment weekend means a weekend that offers you time and space to reflect on the idea of vocation and to pray about what the Lord is asking of you. You don’t have to have decided anything to come along. All we expect of participants is that they be open to discovering God’s will for their lives.

People who know me know that I am totally opposed to the idea that anyone can tell you what your vocation is. They can’t - and if anyone tries to you should run a mile! Only the Lord can reveal your vocation to you and he can only do that if you open your heart to him in prayer. You can then bring your sense of call and the worries you may have to vocations personnel whose job it is simply to confirm the signs if they are already there. They can also give you advice about what your next steps might be - for example the importance of spiritual direction or developing a plan of life or regula vitae. They can also sometimes help clarify questions you may have about the different vocations or about the different sorts of religious life. But they can NEVER tell you what your vocation is. It is important to remember that.

So Invocation is for anyone aged between 16 & 35 who is open to saying ‘Yes’ if they believe the Lord is calling them. There will be some great speakers, including Abbot Christopher Jamison and Sr Gabriel Davison. Archbishop Vincent Nichols will celebrate the closing Mass. Their input, as well as that of other speakers and those who lead workshops, will help create a wonderful atmosphere. The presence of young men and women happy to respond generously to the Lord’s call will also be a great encouragement to you. Indeed - your presence will encourage others as well.

Throughout the weekend there will be Eucharistic Adoration in the Chapel - day and night - and you will also benefit from many other spiritual graces such as the prayers of enclosed convents throughout the land.

For those with an eye to more secular things... there will also be a giant screen for the football!

Please do book before places run out. Contact our Vocations Director Fr Manny Gribben on 01946 810324 or: emmanuel.gribben@googlemail.com or you can download a booking form or book online at: www.invocation.org.uk

Pontiff Thanks Priests in Stormy Times

2010-06-01T15:08:00.002+01:00

From ZENIT

VATICAN CITY, MAY 9, 2010 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI expressed his gratitude for the dedication of the vast majority of priests, despite the sins of a few, when receiving the bishops of Belgium on their five-yearly "ad limina" visit.

At the same time, the Pope encouraged the members of the episcopal conference to promote vocations to the priesthood and to consecrated life, amid the difficulties that the Church has gone through in this country in the past weeks.

Last month, Bishop Roger Joseph Vangheluwe of Bruges resigned after admitting to sexually abusing a minor over a period of time during his priesthood and at the beginning of his episcopate.

For the Holy Father, the visit of the Belgian prelates (both Flemish as well as French-speaking) to Rome is an occasion to reinforce "communion in mutual listening, in common prayer and in the charity of Christ above all in this time in which your Church has been tested by sin."

Great sons

However, the Bishop of Rome asked that the focus not be only on sin but also on the great sons of the Church, as is the case of Father Damien De Veuster (1840-1889), a Belgian missionary of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart.

Father Damien, also known as the apostle of the lepers, went to the island of Molokai, Hawaii, where lepers were sent and lived in isolation. He was canonized by Benedict XVI in 2009.

"This new saint speaks to Belgians' conscience. Has he not been designated the most illustrious son of the nation of all times?" asked the Pope, referring to a popular consultation carried out on Dec. 1, 2005 by Flemish open television (VRT).

"His greatness," the Pontiff continued, "lived in the total gift of himself to his leprous brothers to the point of being infected and dying, lies in his interior wealth, his constant prayer, his union with Christ, whom he saw in his brothers and who, like him, gave himself without reservations."

"In this Year for Priests, it is necessary to propose his priestly and missionary example, in particular to priests and religious. The decrease in the number of priests must not be perceived as an inevitable process," the Holy Father stressed.

Benedict XVI said forcefully "that the Church cannot do without the ministry of priests. Hence, it is necessary and urgent to give them their appropriate place and to acknowledge their irreplaceable sacramental character."

"From this stems the need for an ample and serious pastoral care of vocations, based on the exemplary character of the holiness of priests, in attention to the seeds of vocation present in many young men and in assiduous and confident prayer, in keeping with Jesus' recommendation (cf. Matthew 9:37)," he added.

"May all priests, men and women religious, and laity of Belgium receive my encouragement and gratitude and not forget that only Christ calms every storm and gives strength and courage to lead a holy life in full fidelity to their ministry, to their consecration to God and to their Christian witness," said the Pontiff.

Grieving

During the audience, Benedict XVI was greeted by Archbishop André-Joseph Léonard of Malines-Brussels and president of the Belgian episcopal conference, who presented to the Holy Father a "grieving" Church, "after the serious scandal caused by the forced resignation of one of her bishops."

"Grieving, but determined to address this problem with clarity," the prelate added in reference to the sexual abuse crisis. "A Church determined to continue on her path with transparency, as attested above all by the creation of a commission in charge of examining the denunciations in the matter of sexual abuse that take place in the pastoral context. Determined also to carry out with humility and courage her role in the intensely secularized society in which she carries out her mission."

Archbishop Léonard also mentioned the lack of vocations the Church in Belgium is experiencing: "For the next period we will adopt a series of measure capable of reinforcing the places of formation, in order to re-group a sufficient number of seminarians, so that they are given quality education and project themselves in the world of young people."

Priest loses life saving three from drowning at Goa beach

2010-06-01T14:51:00.003+01:00

From The Times of India

PANAJI: A 38-year-old Catholic priest lost his life after he rescued three youths, swept away by high currents at the Galjibag sea shore, 60 kms from here.

The incident took place yesterday when Fr Thomas Fernandes as a part of the group of parishioners from Nuvem village, had gone picnicking on the beach.

Eye witnesses reveal that a bunch of youngsters had ventured into the sea. As they were dragged in by the under current, the priest ran for rescue when the group cried for help.

The priest was rushed to the district hospital at Margao after he saved two young girls and a boy from the watery grave, but was pronounced dead by doctors on arrival.

"He collapsed after rescuing the youngsters. Desperate attempts were made to resurrect him but we failed," Savio Moniz, part of 56-member-group that went for annual picnic, told reporters outside the hospital here.

Support our Priests and say Thank you

2010-06-01T11:12:00.006+01:00

"SUPPORT PRIESTS, ESPECIALLY IN MOMENTS OF DIFFICULTY"

VATICAN CITY, 5 MAY 2010 (VIS) - In today's general audience, which was celebrated in St. Peter's Square, the Pope focused his remarks on the priest's mission to sanctify humankind.

"Sanctifying a person means putting that person in contact with God", said the Pope, noting how "an essential part of a priest's grace is his gift, his task to establish such contact. This comes about through the announcement of the Word of God, ... and particularly intensely in the Sacraments".

"Over recent decades", he went on, "various schools of thought have tried to make the aspect of announcement prevail in the priest's mission and identity, separating it from sanctification. It has often been affirmed that there is a need to go beyond merely sacramental pastoral care".

"Ordained ministers", the Pope explained, "represent Christ, God's envoy, they ... continue His mission through the 'Word' and the 'Sacrament', which are the two main pillars of priestly service". In this context he identified the need "to reflect whether, in certain cases, having undervalued the faithful exercise of 'munus sanctificandi' has not perhaps led to a weakening of faith in the salvific effectiveness of the Sacraments and, in the final analysis, in the real action of Christ and His Spirit, through the Church, in the world".

"It is, therefore, important to promote appropriate catechesis in order to help the faithful understand the value of the Sacraments. But it is equally necessary, following the example of the saintly 'Cure of Ars', to be willing, generous and attentive in giving the faithful the treasures of grace that God has placed in our hands, treasures of which we are not masters but custodians and administrators. Especially in our own time - in which on the one hand, the faith seems to be weakening and, on the other, there is a profound need and widespread search for spirituality - it is necessary for each priest to remember that ... missionary announcement and worship are never separate, and that he must promote a healthy sacramental pastoral care in order to form the People of God and help them to fully experience the liturgy ... and the Sacraments as gratuitous gifts of God, free and effective aspects of His action of salvation".

The Pope went on to highlight how "each priest knows he is a tool necessary for God's salvific action, but nonetheless just a tool. This awareness must make him humble and generous in administering the Sacraments, respecting the canonical norms but also profoundly convinced that his mission is to ensure that mankind, united to Christ, can offer itself to God as a living and holy sacrifice acceptable to Him".

Addressing himself directly to priests the Holy Father encouraged them "to practice liturgy and worship with joy and love". He also renewed his call "to return to the confessional, as a place in which to celebrate the Sacrament of Reconciliation, but also as a place in which 'to dwell' more frequently, that the faithful may find mercy, counsel and comfort, feel themselves to be loved and understood by God, and experience the presence of Divine Mercy alongside the real presence in the Eucharist".

"I would also like to invite each priest to celebrate and to live the Eucharist intensely", said Benedict XVI. Priests "are called to be ministers of this great Mystery, in the Sacrament and in life".

Likewise, "it is indispensable to strive after the moral perfection which must dwell in each authentically priestly heart", because "there is an example of faith and a witness of sanctity that the People of God expect from their pastors".

Pope Benedict concluded by calling on the faithful "to be aware of the great gift that priests represent for the Church and the world. Through their ministry the Lord continues to save mankind, to make Himself present, to sanctify. Give thanks to God and above all remain close to your priests with prayer and support, especially in moments of difficulty, that they may increasingly become pastors in keeping with God's heart".
AG/ VIS 20100505 (680)

Pubblished by VIS - Holy See Press Office - Wednesday, May 05, 2010

Take a Look at the Beda Collge, Rome (for later vocations)

2010-04-30T16:45:00.002+01:00
Take a look at this...

New Vocations Website from US Bishops

2010-04-30T15:34:00.006+01:00

The U.S. Bishops' Secretariat of Clergy, Consecrated Life and Vocations has launched a new website on 25 April to be a resource for both laity and clergy in the promotion of vocations. The launch date was to coincide with the World Day of Prayer for Vocations and Good Shepherd Sunday.

The site has two goals:

To help individuals hear and respond to the call by God to the priesthood or consecrated life, and

To educate all Catholics on the importance of encouraging others through prayer and activities to promote vocations.

The Vocations Website can be found at www.ForYourVocation.org. A Spanish-language site will be available this fall at www.PorTuVocación.org.

The Site elements include discernment resources for men and women, respectively, aids for promoting a vocation culture within the home, and a range of tools for educators, youth leaders and vocation directors including prayers, videos, best practices, lesson plans and vocation awareness programs.

In response to Pope Benedict XVI's 2010 Theme for the World Day of Prayer for Vocations, Witness Awakens Vocations, the site also hosts videos of priests and religious men and women giving witness to their vocations, as well as testimonies from family members.

Priests must side with child abuse victims, says seminarian in Vatican paper

2010-04-30T15:21:00.001+01:00
To emerge from the sex abuse crisis, priests must make it clear that they are on the side of truth and the victims of abuse, said an article in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano.

The article, which appeared April 24, was written by Davide Russo, a young Italian seminarian studying at the Pontifical Regional Seminary in Molfetta, Italy. He said he and his fellow seminarians were "following with indignation and concern this sad affair" of revelations of the sexual abuse of minors by priests. "We friends at the seminary have often asked ourselves how all of this could have happened, how is it that the same person could first celebrate the sacred mysteries and then carry out such a serious crime, taking advantage of children who, by nature, need to be defended, safeguarded, welcomed and protected? All of this causes me discomfort and unease," he wrote.

Russo also said a defensive attitude against critics does not help the Church. "Rather than side with those who feel sorry for themselves because they find themselves targeted by 'snipers,' concrete choices need to be made, credible signs that make it understood by everyone whose side we're on," he said. "Who has erred must pay. We are on the side of the truth, we take up the defense of the victims of these atrocities, we start with them, we take care of them. There is no other solution," he said.

Message from the Holy Father for Vocations Sunday

2010-04-30T15:16:00.002+01:00

MESSAGE OF THE HOLY FATHER
FOR THE 47th WORLD DAY
OF PRAYER FOR VOCATIONS

25 APRIL 2010 - FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER

Theme: Witness Awakens Vocations

Dear Brothers in the Episcopate and in the Priesthood,
Dear Brothers and Sisters!

The 47th World Day of Prayer for Vocations, to be celebrated on the Fourth Sunday of Easter – Good Shepherd Sunday – 25 April 2010, gives me the opportunity to offer for your meditation a theme which is most fitting for this Year for Priests: Witness Awakens Vocations. The fruitfulness of our efforts to promote vocations depends primarily on God’s free action, yet, as pastoral experience confirms, it is also helped by the quality and depth of the personal and communal witness of those who have already answered the Lord’s call to the ministerial priesthood and to the consecrated life, for their witness is then able to awaken in others a desire to respond generously to Christ’s call. This theme is thus closely linked to the life and mission of priests and of consecrated persons. Hence I wish to invite all those whom the Lord has called to work in his vineyard to renew their faithful response, particularly in this Year for Priests which I proclaimed on the 150th anniversary of the death of Saint John Mary Vianney, the Curé of Ars, an ever-timely model of a priest and a pastor.

In the Old Testament the prophets knew that they were called to witness by their own lives to the message they proclaimed, and were prepared to face misunderstanding, rejection and persecution. The task which God entrusted to them engaged them fully, like a “burning fire” in the heart, a fire that could not be contained (cf. Jer 20:9). As a result, they were prepared to hand over to the Lord not only their voice, but their whole existence. In the fullness of time, Jesus, sent by the Father (cf. Jn 5:36), would bear witness to the love of God for all human beings, without distinction, with particular attention to the least ones, sinners, the outcast and the poor. Jesus is the supreme Witness to God and to his concern for the salvation of all. At the dawn of the new age, John the Baptist, by devoting his whole life to preparing the way for Christ, bore witness that the promises of God are fulfilled in the Son of Mary of Nazareth. When John saw Jesus coming to the river Jordan where he was baptizing, he pointed him out to his disciples as “the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn 1:29). His testimony was so effective that two of his disciples, “hearing him say this, followed Jesus” (Jn 1:37).

Similarly the calling of Peter, as we read in the Evangelist John, occurred through the witness of his brother Andrew, who, after meeting the Master and accepting his invitation to stay with him, felt the need to share immediately with Peter what he discovered by “staying” with the Lord: “We have found the Messiah (which means Christ). He then brought him to Jesus” (Jn 1:41-42). This was also the case for Nathanael, Bartholomew, thanks to the witness of yet another disciple, Philip, who joyfully told him of his great discovery: “We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph” (Jn 1:45). God’s free and gracious initiative encounters and challenges the human responsibility of all those who accept his invitation to become, through their own witness, the instruments of his divine call. This occurs in the Church even today: the Lord makes use of the witness of priests who are faithful to their mission in order to awaken new priestly and religious vocations for the service of the People of God. For this reason, I would like to mention three aspects of the life of a priest which I consider essential for an effective priestly witness.

A fundamental element, one which can be seen in every vocation to the priesthood and the consecrated life, is friendship with Christ. Jesus lived in constant union with the Father and this is what made the disciples eager to have the same experience; from him they learned to live in communion and unceasing dialogue with God. If the priest is a “man of God”, one who belongs to God and helps others to know and love him, he cannot fail to cultivate a deep intimacy with God, abiding in his love and making space to hear his Word. Prayer is the first form of witness which awakens vocations. Like the Apostle Andrew, who tells his brother that he has come to know the Master, so too anyone who wants to be a disciple and witness of Christ must have “seen” him personally, come to know him, and learned to love him and to abide with him.

Another aspect of the consecration belonging to the priesthood and the religious life is the complete gift of oneself to God. The Apostle John writes: “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us; and therefore we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren” (1 Jn 3:16). With these words, he invites the disciples to enter into the very mind of Jesus who in his entire life did the will of the Father, even to the ultimate gift of himself on the Cross. Here, the mercy of God is shown in all its fullness; a merciful love that has overcome the darkness of evil, sin and death. The figure of Jesus who at the Last Supper, rises from the table, lays aside his garments, takes a towel, girds himself with it and stoops to wash the feet of the Apostles, expresses the sense of service and gift manifested in his entire existence, in obedience to the will of the Father (cf. Jn 13:3-15). In following Jesus, everyone called to a life of special consecration must do his utmost to testify that he has given himself completely to God. This is the source of his ability to give himself in turn to those whom Providence entrusts to him in his pastoral ministry with complete, constant and faithful devotion, and with the joy of becoming a companion on the journey to so many brothers and sisters, enabling them too to become open to meeting Christ, so that his Word may become a light to their footsteps. The story of every vocation is almost always intertwined with the testimony of a priest who joyfully lives the gift of himself to his brothers and sisters for the sake of the Kingdom of God. This is because the presence and words of a priest have the ability to raise questions and to lead even to definitive decisions (cf. John Paul II, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis, 39).

A third aspect which necessarily characterizes the priest and the consecrated person is a life of communion. Jesus showed that the mark of those who wish to be his disciples is profound communion in love: “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (Jn 13:35). In a particular way the priest must be a man of communion, open to all, capable of gathering into one the pilgrim flock which the goodness of the Lord has entrusted to him, helping to overcome divisions, to heal rifts, to settle conflicts and misunderstandings, and to forgive offences. In July 2005, speaking to the clergy of Aosta, I noted that if young people see priests who appear distant and sad, they will hardly feel encouraged to follow their example. They will remain hesitant if they are led to think that this is the life of a priest. Instead, they need to see the example of a communion of life which can reveal to them the beauty of being a priest. Only then will a young man say, “Yes, this could be my future; I can live like this” (Insegnamenti I, [2005], 354). The Second Vatican Council, in speaking of the witness that awakens vocations, emphasizes the example of charity and of fraternal cooperation which priests must offer (cf. Decree Optatam Totius, 2).

Here I would like to recall the words of my venerable Predecessor John Paul II: “The very life of priests, their unconditional dedication to God’s flock, their witness of loving service to the Lord and to his Church – a witness marked by free acceptance of the Cross in the spirit of hope and Easter joy – their fraternal unity and zeal for the evangelization of the world are the first and most convincing factor in the growth of vocations” (Pastores Dabo Vobis, 41). It can be said that priestly vocations are born of contact with priests, as a sort of precious legacy handed down by word, example and a whole way of life.

The same can be said with regard to the consecrated life. The very life of men and women religious proclaims the love of Christ whenever they follow him in complete fidelity to the Gospel and joyfully make their own its criteria for judgement and conduct. They become “signs of contradiction” for the world, whose thinking is often inspired by materialism, self-centredness and individualism. By letting themselves be won over by God through self-renunciation, their fidelity and the power of their witness constantly awaken in the hearts of many young people the desire to follow Christ in their turn, in a way that is generous and complete. To imitate Christ, chaste, poor and obedient, and to identify with him: this is the ideal of the consecrated life, a witness to the absolute primacy of God in human life and history.

Every priest, every consecrated person, faithful to his or her vocation, radiates the joy of serving Christ and draws all Christians to respond to the universal call to holiness. Consequently, in order to foster vocations to the ministerial priesthood and the consecrated life, and to be more effective in promoting the discernment of vocations, we cannot do without the example of those who have already said “yes” to God and to his plan for the life of each individual. Personal witness, in the form of concrete existential choices, will encourage young people for their part to make demanding decisions affecting their future. Those who would assist them need to have the skills for encounter and dialogue which are capable of enlightening and accompanying them, above all through the example of life lived as a vocation. This was what the holy Curé of Ars did: always in close contact with his parishioners, he taught them “primarily by the witness of his life. It was from his example that the faithful learned to pray” (Letter Proclaiming the Year for Priests, 16 June 2009).

May this World Day once again offer many young people a precious opportunity to reflect on their own vocation and to be faithful to it in simplicity, trust and complete openness. May the Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church, watch over each tiny seed of a vocation in the hearts of those whom the Lord calls to follow him more closely, may she help it to grow into a mature tree, bearing much good fruit for the Church and for all humanity. With this prayer, to all of you I impart my Apostolic Blessing.

From the Vatican, 13 November 2009

BENEDICT XVI

Allen Hall Seminarians Retreat in France

2010-04-24T19:59:00.003+01:00

By Seminarian John Millar

Each year seminarians and all the clergy have to make some kind of spiritual retreat, a time spent drawing closer to God in prayer and silence. In seminaries this is usually done in common. For the last two years Allen Hall has made its retreat in Blangy-sur-Ternoise in northern France. The abbey here was founded in the 683 A.D by the English Princess St Bertha. Her relics and those of her daughters are still to be found in the parish church of this small French village. Following the French revolution the Abbey was blown up by Napoleon. However the beautiful old abbey farm was taken over by various religious orders until it came to rest in the hands of the secular institute Notre Dame de Vie, by whom it is still run.

Our retreat this year was led by the superior of the Farm Street Jesuit community in central London, Fr James Hanvey S.J. The daily timetable consisted of the offices of Lauds, Vespers and Compline, two hours of Eucharistic adoration, Mass and two spiritual talks by Fr Hanvey.

A retreat was described by our rector Mgr Mark O'Toole, as being like the time the disciples spent with Jesus, listening to the Master and conversing with Him so as to be ready to undertake the mission He has sent us on. This is an important moment in the seminary year bit in terms of vocational discernment and preparation for the mission we undertake. A most important part of the retreat is a moment of personal conversion, of drawing close to Jesus and leaving old ways behind. In the light of the Risen One we can truly see for us that the long night of sin has ended and a new age has dawned.

For those discerning the Call: Some Words from Fr Benedict Groeschel CFR

2010-04-14T15:39:00.003+01:00
Here Fr. Benedict Groeschel of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, in South Bronx, explains his call to the Priesthood:

More Encouraging Words...

2010-04-14T15:28:00.003+01:00
Here Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life explains his call to the Priesthood. I hope it helps you in your own discernment:

Some Advice for those Discerning a Call

2010-04-14T15:24:00.003+01:00
Fr. John Corapi of of the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity explains his call to the Priesthood and offers us some words of encouragement to us:

The Holy Father's Message for World Youth Day 2010

2010-03-31T21:01:00.004+01:00

MESSAGE OF THE HOLY FATHER
BENEDICT XVI
ON THE OCCASION OF THE TWENTY-FIFTH WORLD YOUTH DAY
(MARCH 28, 2010)

“Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Mk 10:17)

Dear Friends,

This year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the inauguration of World Youth Day in response to the desire of the Venerable John Paul II for an annual gathering of young people of faith from throughout the world. It was a prophetic initiative that has borne abundant fruits, enabling the new generations of Christians to meet one another, to listen to the Word of God, to discover the beauty of the Church, and to have a deep experience of faith. This led many of them in turn to decide to give themselves completely to Christ.

The present 25th World Youth Day is one step along the way leading to the next international encounter of young people, scheduled for Madrid in August 2011. I hope that many of you will be there to experience this grace-filled event.

To prepare ourselves for this celebration, I would like to offer you some reflections on this year’s theme: “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Mk 10:17). It is drawn from Gospel passage where Jesus meets the rich young man. It is a theme that Pope John Paul II reflected on in 1985, in a very beautiful Letter, the first ever addressed to young people.

1. Jesus meets a young man

“As [Jesus] was setting out on a journey” – the Gospel of Saint Mark tells us – “a man ran up, knelt down before him, and asked him, ‘Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus answered him, ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: You shall not kill; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal; you shall not bear false witness; you shall not defraud; honour your father and your mother.’ He replied and said to him, ‘Teacher, all of these I have observed from my youth’. Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said to him, ‘You are lacking in one thing. Go, sell what you have, and give to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me’. At that statement his face fell, and he went away sad, for he had many possessions” (Mk 10: 17-22).

This Gospel passage shows us clearly how much Jesus was concerned with young people, with all of you, with your expectations and your hopes, and it shows how much he wants to meet you personally and to engage each of you in conversation. Christ interrupted his journey to stop and answer the young man’s question. He gave his full attention to this youth who was moved with an ardent desire to speak to the “good Teacher” and to learn from him how to journey through life. My Predecessor used this Gospel passage to urge each of you to “develop your own conversation with Christ – a conversation which is of fundamental and essential importance for a young person” (Letter to Young People, No. 2).

2. Jesus looked at him and loved him

In his Gospel account, Saint Mark emphasises that “Jesus, looking at him, loved him” (Mk 10: 21). The Lord’s gaze is at the heart of this very special encounter and the whole Christian experience. To be sure, Christianity is not primarily a moral code. It is an experience of Jesus Christ who loves each of us personally, young and old, poor and rich. He loves us even when we turn away from him.

When Pope John Paul II commented on this scene, he turned to you and added: “May you experience a look like that! May you experience the truth that he, Christ, looks upon you with love!” (Letter to Young People, No. 7). It was love, revealed on the Cross so completely and totally, that led Saint Paul to write in amazement: “He loved me and gave himself up for me” (Gal 2:20). Pope John Paul II wrote that “the awareness that the Father has always loved us in his Son, that Christ always loves each of us, becomes a solid support for our whole human existence” (ibid.). It enables us to overcome all our trials: the realization of our sins, our sufferings and our moments of discouragement.

In this love we find the source of all Christian life and the basic reason for evangelization: if we have really encountered Jesus, we cannot help but bear witness to him before those who have not yet met his gaze!

3. Finding a plan in life

If we look at the young man in the Gospel, we can see that he is much like each of you. You too are rich in talents, energy, dreams and hopes. These are resources which you have in abundance! Your age itself is a great treasure, not only for yourselves but for others too, for the Church and for the world.

The rich young man asks Jesus: “What must I do?” The time of life which you are going through is one of discovery: discovery of the gifts which God has bestowed upon you and your own responsibilities. It is also a time when you are making crucial choices about how you will live your lives. So it is a time to think about the real meaning of life and to ask yourselves: “Am I satisfied with my life? Is there something missing?”

Like the young man in the Gospel story, perhaps you too are experiencing situations of uncertainty, anxiety or suffering, and are yearning for something more than a life of mediocrity. It makes you ask yourselves: “What makes a life successful? What do I need to do? How should I plan my life? “What must I do for my life to have full value and full meaning?” (ibid., No. 3).

Do not be afraid to ask yourselves these questions! Far from troubling you, they are giving voice to the great aspirations that you hold in your hearts. That is why you should listen to them. The answers you give to them must not be superficial, but capable of satisfying the longing you truly feel for life and happiness.

In order to discover the life-project that will make you completely happy, listen to God. He has a loving plan for each one of you. You can confidently ask him: “Lord, what is your plan, as Creator and Father, for my life? What is your will? I want to carry it out”. You can be certain that he will answer you. Do not be afraid of his answer! “For God is greater than our hearts and knows everything” (1 Jn 3:20).

4. Come and follow me!

Jesus invites the rich young man to do much more than merely satisfy his aspirations and personal plans. He says to him: “Come and follow me!” The Christian vocation derives from a love-filled invitation made by the Lord, and it can be lived out only by a love-filled response: “Jesus invites his disciples to give their lives completely, without calculation or personal interest, with unreserved trust in God. The saints accept this demanding invitation and set out with humble docility in following the crucified and risen Christ. Their perfection, in the logic of faith which is at times humanly incomprehensible, consists in no longer putting themselves at the centre but in choosing to go against the tide, by living in line with the Gospel” (Benedict XVI, Homily at Canonizations, 11 October 2009).

Following the example of so many of Christ’s disciples, may you too, dear friends, joyfully welcome his invitation to follow him, and so live your lives intensely and fruitfully in this world. Through Baptism, in fact, he calls each of us to follow him concretely, to love him above all things and to serve him in our brothers and sisters. The rich young man, unfortunately, did not accept Jesus’ invitation and he went away saddened. He did not find the courage to leave behind his material goods in order to find the far greater good proposed by Jesus.

The sadness experienced by the rich young man in the Gospel story is the sadness that arises in the heart of all those who lack the courage to follow Christ and to make the right choice. Yet it is never too late to respond to him!

Jesus never tires of turning to us with love and calling us to be his disciples; to some, however, he proposes an even more radical choice. In this Year for Priests, I would like to urge young men and boys to consider if the Lord is inviting them to a greater gift, along the path of priestly ministry. I ask them to be willing to embrace with generosity and enthusiasm this sign of a special love and to embark on the necessary path of discernment with the help of a priest or a spiritual director. Do not be afraid, then, dear young men and women, if the Lord is calling you to the religious, monastic or missionary life, or a life of special consecration: He knows how to bestow deep joy upon those who respond to him with courage!

I also invite those who feel called to marriage to embrace this vocation with faith, working to lay a solid foundation for a love that is great, faithful and receptive to the gift of life. This vocation is a treasure and grace for society and for the Church.

5. Directed towards eternal life

“What must I do to inherit eternal life?”. This question which the young man in the Gospel asks may seem far from the concerns of many young people today. As my Predecessor observed, “Are we not the generation whose horizon of existence is completely filled by the world and temporal progress? (Letter to Young People, No. 5). Yet, the question of “eternal life” returns at certain painful moments of our lives, as when we suffer the loss of someone close to us or experience failure.

But what is the “eternal life” to which the rich young man is referring? Jesus describes it to us when he says to his disciples: “But I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you” (Jn 16: 22). These words point to an exciting possibility of unending happiness, to the joy of being surrounded by God’s love for ever.

Wondering about the definitive future awaiting each of us gives full meaning to our existence. It directs our life plan towards horizons that are not limited and fleeting, but broad and deep, and which motivate us to love this world which God loves so deeply, to devote ourselves to its development with the freedom and joy born of faith and hope. Against these horizons we do not see earthly reality as absolute, and we sense that God is preparing a greater future for us. In this way we can say with Saint Augustine: “Let us long for our home on high, let us pine for our home in heaven, let us feel that we are strangers here” (Tractates on the Gospel of Saint John, Homily 35:9). His gaze fixed on eternal life, Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, who died in 1925 at the age of 24, could say: “I want to live and not simply exist!” On a photograph taken while mountain-climbing, he wrote to a friend: “To the heights”, referring not only to Christian perfection but also to eternal life.

Dear young friends, I urge you to keep this perspective in developing your life plan: we are called to eternity. God created us to be with him, for ever. This will help you to make meaningful decisions and live a beautiful life.

6. The commandments, the way to authentic love

Jesus reminded the rich young man that obedience to the Ten Commandments is necessary in order to “inherit eternal life”. The Commandments are essential points of reference if we are to live in love, to distinguish clearly between good and evil, and to build a life plan that is solid and enduring. Jesus is asking you too whether you know the Commandments, whether you are trying to form your conscience according to God’s law, and putting the Commandments into practice.

Needless to say, these are questions that go against the grain in today’s world, which advocates a freedom detached from values, rules and objective norms, and which encourages people to refuse to place limits on their immediate desires. But this is not the way to true freedom. It leds people to become enslaved to themselves, to their immediate desires, to idols like power, money, unbridled pleasure and the entrapments of the world. It stifles their inborn vocation to love.

God gives us the Commandments because he wants to teach us true freedom. He wants to build a Kingdom of love, justice and peace together with us. When we listen to the Commandments and put them into practice, it does not mean that we become estranged from ourselves, but that we find the way to freedom and authentic love. The commandments do not place limits on happiness, but rather show us how to find it. At the beginning of the conversation with the rich young man, Jesus reminds him that the law which God gives is itself good, because “God is good”.

7. We need you

Being young today means having to face many problems due to unemployment and the lack of clear ideas and real possibilities for the future. At times you can have the impression of being powerless in the face of current crises and their repercussions. Despite these difficulties, do not let yourselves be discouraged, and do not give up on your dreams! Instead, cultivate all the more your heart’s great desire for fellowship, justice and peace. The future is in the hands of those who know how to seek and find sound reasons for life and hope. If you are willing, the future lies in your hands, because the talents and gifts that the Lord has placed in your hearts, shaped by an encounter with Christ, can bring real hope to the world! It is faith in his love that, by making you stronger and more generous, will give you courage to face serenely the path of life and to take on family and professional responsibilities. Try hard to build your future by paying serious attention to your personal development and your studies, so that you will be able to serve the common good competently and generously.

In my recent Encyclical Letter on integral human development, Caritas in Veritate, I listed some of the great and urgent challenges essential for the life of our world: the use of the earth’s resources and respect for ecology, the fair distribution of goods and control of financial mechanisms, solidarity with poor countries within our human family, the fight against world hunger, greater respect for the dignity of human labour, service to the culture of life, the building of peace between peoples, interfaith dialogue, and the proper use of social communications.

These are challenges to which you are called to respond in order to build a more just and fraternal world. They are challenges that call for a demanding and passionate life plan, in which you use all your many gifts in accordance with the plan that God has for each of you. It is not a matter of accompanishing heroic or extraordinary acts. It means allowing your talents and abilities to flourish, and trying to make constant progress in faith and love.

In this Year for Priests, I ask you to learn about the lives of the saints, and in particular of those saints who were priests. You will see how God was their guide and how they made their way through each day in faith, in hope and in love. Christ is calling each of you to work with him and to take up your responsibilities in order to build the civilization of love. If you follow his Word, it will light up your path and lead you to high goals that will give joy and full meaning to your lives.

May the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church, watch over and protect you. With the assurance of my prayers, and with great affection, I send my blessing to all of you.

From the Vatican, 22 February 2010

BENEDICTUS PP. XVI

Email and Support our Pope!

2010-03-31T20:48:00.002+01:00

Did you know that you can email the Pope? He's at:

benedictxvi@vatican.va

Why not send the pope a message of encouragement and hope, and let him know that he is in your prayers at this difficult time in the life of the Church. Tell him that we are looking forward to his coming to Britain, and that we are loyal to him and love him.