May 22, 2005

CNS file photo by Bill Wittman
Father Edward L. Murphy, associate pastor of St. Christopher’s Church in Mississauga, Ontario, talks with young men following Mass at the church.

Just bringing up the topic helps young people begin the process of discernment.

ST. LOUIS (CNS)—Eric Olsen, Erik Lundgren, and David Sailer have many things in common.

They are all students at Jesuit-run St. Louis University, they all attend the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, where they frequently serve at Mass, and they are all discerning a possible vocation to the priesthood.

And they all belong to the Edmund Campion Society, which meets regularly to discuss faith and doctrine and the intellectual tradition of the church. The group has about 20 members, both men and women. About half are considering a vocation.

“Many of them are committed to becoming teachers and bringing a Catholic presence to the classroom,” Olsen told the St. Louis Review, the newspaper of the St. Louis Archdiocese. “Some are called to be teachers, some to be priests, and some to both. Some of the girls [are thinking of] religious life, and some people believe their calling is to marriage.”

Sailer said that through the Campion Society he gained friends to talk to who shared his thoughts and questions. Their meetings include eucharistic adoration, where Sailer first reconsidered a call that had come to him in grade school.

The three young men are part of a larger group of university students who worship regularly at the cathedral basilica in St. Louis. They have made a good impression on the rector, Monsignor Joseph Pins.

Those who are interested in a vocation, he said, “have hundreds of questions about being a priest or religious. It’s exciting for me, and exhilarating for them, to be so involved in the church and in serving the Lord.” He also appreciates “their positive view about religious life and priesthood.”

For Olsen, Lundgren, and Sailer, this positive view includes the subject of priestly celibacy. “We realize this is something very good we are giving up,” Sailer said, “but we realize we’re being called to the priesthood, and that is very good on its own.”

Across the country, in the Archdiocese of Portland, Ore., at St. Mary Parish in the college town of Corvallis, about two dozen young people who have worshiped there have answered a call to priesthood or religious life. Many of them attended nearby Oregon State University.

“We put something in the water,” joked Father John Kerns. He was parochial vicar at the parish in the late 1980s, and he and the parish’s longtime pastor, Portland’s Auxiliary Bishop Kenneth D. Steiner, had a good-natured competition over who could get more people into seminary and religious life.

An effort to issue invitations—along with a focus on eucharistic prayer, intimate community, and social ministry—is the parish’s vocation secret, say the priests, sisters, friars, and deacons who came from there.

“There is a definite connection between eucharistic adoration and vocations in a parish,” said 30-year-old Sister Maximilian Marie. She is in formation as a member of the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist in Ann Arbor, Mich.

She said after college she started praying before the Eucharist and began meeting young women who were interested in religious life.

Then during World Youth Day in Rome in 2000 she heard a priest say that women who choose religious life ought to have a great capacity to be wives and mothers. The idea of becoming a woman religious suddenly emerged strongly, she said.

Bishop Steiner credits prayer and families for the vocations from St. Mary’s. “The vocations are there,” he said. “You just need to pray for them and to provide the type of parish where people are involved in the liturgy, the teaching and social ministry—the mission of the church.”

When he sensed a student had an inkling of a calling, the bishop recruited him or her to serve in youth ministry. When parishioners went to the seminary or began religious formation, he put their names in the bulletin and solicited prayers for them.

Conventual Franciscan Father John Henderson, current pastor at St. Mary’s in Corvallis, tries to engage the entire parish in vocations ministry.

“It’s the people of God who send forth the call that God sends,” he said. “It is more than the priest himself or a sister. The whole community has to be engaged.”

Contributing to this story was Ed Langlois in Portland. Copyright 2005 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops