Fr. Ray Blake has a post about an initiative from the diocese of Raleigh in the US: they have a poster asking people to pray for the diocesan seminarians by name.I think this is a fabulous idea. It makes the idea of vocations to the priesthood much more immediate, and young men can see that the men preparing for the priesthood look, well, pretty normal... rather like themselves, in fact!
Fr. Stephen Langridge, the Vocations Director for Southwark has been responsible for some pretty neat posters lately... he might consider trying something along these lines!
2 comments:
That's a very clever indeed.
Each month I get a card from the Frat' with names of people to pray for each day, mostly Priests, but some Seminarians too!
Thank you for this post, and for highlighting our poster! As to the idea of praying for our seminarians by name, it was certainly a work of the Holy Spirit. The day of our first Holy Hour for vocations this past year, I had the thought to create a prayer card with the prayer for seminarians, and on the opposite side a simple request that people pray for our seminarians by name. Those cards took off like wild fire and nearly 15,000 cards later we have distributed them to every student in a Catholic school of the Diocese, and thousands of other people. From there it seemed natural that as we designed the poster that we ask people to say the prayer for our seminarians. A simple idea has grown into a wonderful network of prayer. What is particularly nice is that when people approach our seminarians, they already know their names, and tell them that they have in fact been praying for them by name.
Thank you again.
Sincerely yours in Christ,
Brad Watkins
Asst. to the Director of Vocations
Diocese of Raleigh
P.S. Would you consider linking to my personal blog, romancatholicvocations.blogspot.com? From it's beginning, I have prayed that it would serve as an aid to those discerning, working in, or interested in vocations. Hopefully it is a useful resource for posts, essays, articles, documents, videos, etc. related to vocations. A link on your blog would certainly help to make it more widely known to others.
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