Vocations: Towards a life-changing realisation

Message from Fr Matthew d’Hereaux, Vocations Director

We are entering a week dedicated to Vocations Awareness.

In my many visits to parishes to promote vocations, I jokingly remind the faithful that there is no ‘Made in Ireland, Italy, India or Nigeria’ tag on the necks of any priests, religious brothers, or sisters in this Archdiocese.

Vocations to the priesthood, religious life and lay consecrated life are not manufactured in some overseas invisible vocation factory. Instead, vocation is the call of God and the response of real human beings to this Call in a context of a family, parish, school, university or even career.

God finds us wherever we are and asks us to do something with our lives for the Church and the Kingdom. We must answer this Call with immediacy like Peter and John who left their nets at once and followed Him.

Vocations are realised; God calls, and men and women come to realise that God is calling them to ministry and mission. Ordinations and professions are the fruits of this realisation.

We come to realise that we are unfulfilled and empty in what we are doing or planning to do. We come to realise that there is something tugging at our hearts. We come to realise that there is something more that God wants of us.

We come to realise that we can offer ourselves to God and we have much to offer. We come to realise that God is seeking our attention and we must give it wholeheartedly.

Our annual Vocations Awareness Week as well as all our year-round activities are an attempt to create spaces for both action and contemplation that brings the faithful to vocational realisation. All that Generation S does is about bringing our people to this life-changing realisation.

My dream for all young people in this Archdiocese is an intentional move towards the realisation that God may be calling them to move from one thing to the other.

I pray that every young Catholic, would think about vocation to the priesthood and religious life as much as they think about the vocation to marriage.

I dream that every Catholic in his/her teens and young adult life would ask the question – ‘What does God want me to do with my life?’