Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid;
from now on you will be catching men.”
When they brought their boats to the shore,
they left everything and followed him.
they left everything and followed him.
As I was reading through some of the blogs I came across this post from Fr. Kyle Schnipple, the Director of Vocations for the Archdiocese of Cincinnati.
As Fr. Schnipple points out, this weekend’s readings are all about hearing and answering God’s call. What better weekend for priests everywhere to use the opportunity provided them as proclaimers and preachers of the Word, to share the stories of their own vocational call, and encourage other young men to listen to that voice that may be calling them also.
I wish I could say that this is the homily I heard this weekend. I am sorry to say, it is not.
What I got was a well-meaning, yet overly simplistic view of how we are all called, in some way, to serve God. Yes, vocations to the priesthood and religious life were mentioned, but the general theme was that we all have a calling and all of those callings are equal. I should also probably point out that this was not a homily by a priest or deacon, but by a “certified lay preacher”.
Now, I know that many can, and probably will, use this as an example of why lay preaching is “bad”, and in this case I have to say, I tend to agree. This, however, does not change my opinion on lay preaching, in general, as I believe that in the proper circumstances, lay preaching should be allowed. I do not want to make this post about that, while I agree that it is part of the problem, it is not the problem I see as being the biggest one in this case.
In my vast and varied career, one of the things I have learned is that a little planning goes a very long way. Knowing that these readings are part of the lectionary, one would think that the people, who are in charge of the Office of Vocations, would have used this weekend as an opportunity to reach out to young men in our dioceses. By encouraging priests (and deacons) to use the homily to talk of the importance of vocations to ordained ministry they could have opened the lines of communication for young men who think they are “being called”, planted the seed in the heads of young men trying to figure out what they want from their lives and helped others in the congregation to see the importance of praying for and nurturing of young men in the discernment process.
Sadly to say, I believe what we have here is another missed opportunity here in the DOR.
If there is ONE time to make the plea for priestly vocations, this was the week. At my parish, this was also replaced by the broad "everyone is called to do something" kind of homily. It wasn't the same parish as you, since a priest gave the homily at mine, but the results were the same. It's a shame. We hear that same homily week after week. No wonder the priesthood is struggling in our diocese. To quote a solid priest, "If bishops want vocations, they will get them."
ReplyDeleteBy their fruits you will know them.
I can't speak to anything in Rochester, as I was at Franciscan University of Steubenville this weekend for Mass. We got some discussion of priestly voactions, some discussion of trying to "catch fish" and the importance of being loyal to Holy Mother Church in doing that. Also about the beauty of being made clean by God (confession, God's love penetrating into our hearts, removing the sin, the ember in Isaiah, etc)
ReplyDeleteIn any case, not too big a focus on vocations either. Of course, there's a ton of people there who answer that call, so I think they hear it quite a bit...
but in a place that has such a vocations crisis--we need to open up young men to God's calling! (and young women to professed religious life!) If it's rare, it needs to be preached on, and as we both know, it's RARE here.