Mary, Queen of Vocations, pray for us!
Dear Serrans! I do look forward to this talk given annually to you Serrans of Johnson County. I look forward to it, not only for the chance it gives me to share with you the 'good news' of vocation work happening in our Archdiocese, but also it is my personal chance to thank each and every one of you for being persistent and joyful in your support of vocations. I was having dinner with a vocation director from Phoenix on Tuesday night in Denver, and he asked me what kind of support and prayer I had in my diocese for vocations. I didn't hesitate to tell him that between the Serra clubs of the Archdiocese and our adoration chapels, we are oversupported as priests, seminarians and religious, and although I cannot say that we pray too much in our Archdiocese, I can say that we pray consistently and well for vocations. Please know that I never take your prayer and your support for granted, even if sometimes as vocation director I do not spend significant amounts of time with you Serrans helping you with your wonderful vocation projects. As Archbishop Naumann likes to tell me, do not grow weary of doing good! I convey the same message to you, with of course my encouragement for you to do more if you can, and my appreciation for all that you do to support vocations.
It is a great joy and a challenge to work in vocations, a vitally important ministry for our diocese. It has been a ministry that has already stretched my faith, and I will admit that the transition from parish ministry to vocation work has been painful at times. During the first year in a new ministry you learn so much, and yet I still feel like I know next to nothing. If nothing else, vocation work keeps one very humble, as the need for good and holy seminarians will almost always certainly outweigh the response. I have learned to receive every new seminarian who actually goes through the application process as a gift, even as you and I work together with the diocese as if every new vocation is the fruit of our work.
As vocation directors, we were challenged this last week during our annual convention to place vocation work within the new evangelization of the Church fostered by John Paul II. If our culture remains unevangelized by the Gospel, then we can expect the vocational response to remain tepid. Fr. Bill Porter tells me all the time that the late Archbishop Strecker used to say this to priests. The Church, while not a product of the culture, is greatly affected by it, so that whatever we see happening in the culture, we will see happen in the Church. In an age where many are evangelized into seeking the comfortable life, the priesthood and religious life remain an option of last resort for many of our young people. Curtis Martin said at our annual convention this week that if we only teach our young people how to be comfortable, we will make them miserable. Our young people are caught between this calling to be comfortable and the calling to be great, with the latter neither being preached nor lived consistently enough to win the hearts of our young people. For vocation directors, then, there is rarely a shortcut to getting a young man to enter seminary withour first re-evangelizing him to this call to greatness, through personally renewing his intimate communion with Christ and through imagining with Christ ways to write the history of man's salvation.
To this end, even as we work to sharpen and improve our vocation programs for the diocese, even our prayer and posters and retreats, etc., there is no replacing the work that is the hardest and most time-consuming. This work is the work of building relationships and friendships in Christ with our young people. I do feel a responsibility to challenge young people to accept vocations to the priesthood and religious life, to challenge parishes and families to develop such vocations, to broadcast the tremendous opportunity to belong to Christ as a religious and to work in His vineyard, yet all of these cannot make up for a lack of being in relationship with our young people. I will talk some more about this as I make comments about our recent convocation done with priests of the Archdiocese. Suffice it for now to say that all our vocation efforts are like a radio station that doesn't come in very well unless we are in good relationship with our young people, so that they can see the joy that we have in Christ as priests and religious.
At our convocation last week, then, we were challenged by Fr. Ron Knott of Louisville to be as priests what we say that we are, an intimate sacramental brotherhood. There is no vocation program that can reproduce or replace the impact made by groups of priests gathering together to pray and to enjoy the redemption they have in Christ Jesus. This should really be the only vocation program worth talking about. How do we display to young people, who deep down want both greatness and communion, that these things are possessed within the presbyterate of the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas? Those who come to me as vocation director who are looking for help entering religious orders almost always tell me they are looking for a convincing and challenging way of living the Gospel within an intimate communion. I can't necessarily blame them for failing to see this in the diocesan priesthood, neither do I blame my brother priests for failing to demonstrate it amidst all their other duties given to them. I came away from our convocation not so much blaming my brother priests for failing to show the attractive beauty of our presbyterate, but with questions in my heart as to how I as vocation director can work more closely with our priests and then make it easy for them to be vocation directors in their respective parishes and ministries. I am hoping that a recent feedback form I gave to priests, alongside some parishes doing the Called by Name program proposed for January of this year, will generate some new ideas and ways forward.
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