August 15, 2006 Summer Vocations: Where Am I Going?

by Fr. Jeff Coning
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Talk Summary:

• The state is looking good in the Diocese of Columbus.
  • Seven new priests this year.
  • The Gen-Xer's are still out there looking for whatever the Lord wants them to do.
  • then the Millenials are in College and they have an idea of where they want to be and what they will want to do.
  • We offer two programs due to not being able to bring those two groups together.
    • The Gen-Xers are in the world already and they have their own way.
    • The Millenials are group mentality. They want to be in large social groups.
  • SeekHoliness.com is our website.
    • It is our first point of contact.
    • A place to go for information.
    • And a place to go for follow-up and what's happening in the future.
  • Jesus Jams
    • This is a High School Program
    • Podcast is available online
    • Three Hour Event with Mass, Skits, Music, talk and more music
    • 400 in attendance in a given night.
    • Already had one vocation from the Jesus Jams, a Nun
  • We want to allow kids to get excited about their Faith and to allow them to tell others they are thinking of being a priest or nun.
  • Been working with older men to get together on a monthly basis to do different tasks.
• Stumbling blocks to vocations.
  • The financial cost of college.
    • Most Religious orders 50 years ago provided the costs, they ran colleges.
    • Unfortunately, the cost is a concern. They no longer can just put people in the university.
    • We're losing our young people to college.
    • Financial aid and scholarships make parents want kids to go to other schools.
    • The students get distracted then and decide against the religious life.
    • These men and women are living good moral lives, but they're not doing what the Lord wants them to do.
  • Our Motto is: You can run from God, but you can hide from Him
  • People don't think things through and discern. They merely go into another vocation without thinking it through.
  • I am a priest due to Catholic guilt; I new I was supposed to be thinking about being a priest so I eventually became one. It was a good thing.
  • Kids want the college experience.
    • They don't go to Athens because of the great Academic record.
    • The Josephinum is not all work, all pray and no play.
    • The Youth find that if you put college kids together they'll find a way to have fun.
• The Challenge
  • We need to get our message out there. Competing with products, other schools and peers.
  • We need to help people get in touch with Grace. They will have the desire for grace once they experience it.
  • This is the key for not just the priesthood but for marriage as well.
  • Being in the college seminary, they must live that celebacy that they would be expected to as a priest.
• Issues The Vocations Office looks at
  • They need to be God Directed, They want to have God in their life.
    • Not that they need to do it well, but they need to want to do it well.
    • Someone who wants to work with God in their lives.
    • A Tough thing to find.
    • They need the ability to want to love as God Loves. Not just human love, but the way God loves the world. After a while, Human Love becomes selfish.
    • Example: A youth wants to be a lawyer and a priest but he's not willing to give up the pursuit of that degree to enter the preisthood. This is not God Directed.
  • They need the virtue of Frugality.
    • This doesn't mean being Cheap or being in destitute poverty.
    • This is being frugal in your spending; only getting things that you need.
    • I would classify an iPod as a need, especially with all the Christian music I have. But I don't need 5 iPods.
    • Just because a new iPod comes out, we don't go to the store and grab it.
    • You must as yourself, is it responsible for me to have this? Is it responsible for me as a lover of God to have it?
    • I have a laptop and a cell phone to surf with. This is a distraction for me, but I practice good virtue and only use the Internet and computer for the tasks I need to do them with. This is also frugality.
    • And that changes from generation to generation.
    • Two seminarians wanted help with their cell phone bills. We told them to cancel their contracts, they didn't need phones.
  • They need to look at Sound Doctrine.
    • The history of this Church is that it always wanted to wrestle with the Truth and understand what the Truth means.
    • We need to ask yourselves, what is good sound doctrine.
    • People ask if women will ever become priests. It's not an easy answer to explain. At this point in time the short answer is, "No" Just saying no, however, doesn't do it justice as to why we believe this way. We need to be people who want to plum the depths of the Church.
    • There have been teachings that I have had a problem with. However, as I see them play out, I begin to understand the reason why the Church believes what it belives.
  • They need to find themselves at odds with the prevailing spirit of the world.
    • That is not to say all the world is bad.
    • But we must take what is good and beautiful and use that and reject the rest.
    • We need to realize that we need to find happiness in this world, but we will never find true happiness in the world.
    • Taking on the frugal lifestyle and embrace it with Love help this.
    • We should be the kind of people who pray often and can remember the last time we prayed.
    • Utimately we need to be people who can spend time in solitude. Giving God time to be with us and we be with Him.
  • These are things we're looking for when we are talking with young men. even those in High School.
  • These are all things that we all can do as well.

Questions

Question: I went to an all-Catholic elementary school. It seems that the Religious were more visible. Today's day in age it's much harder to have religious visible. Is there a way the religious can come in and visit the children in the schools?

From a Human side I would have to say no.

Take women religious for example, their orders are being decimated. We see the age groups going up. You have to look at the whole picture. the religous groups are formed because the church needs something. Their charism is a special gift to the Church. if you look at the beginning of the US we valued public school but having school children out there wasn't easy but putting religous into schoools was perfect sense. They gave their lives to the Church to educate people. Now the world has moved into a differnet world view and lay-people have taken over the teaching. There are good parts of that but I would say the answer from God is we'll see in the next 10-20 years we will maybe see a rise in orders and getting back into education.

If that is what God wants, that is what will happen. but we don't know that. That is something we need to watch and understand. Some orders will die because their gift is no longer needed. It was valued at the time, but a new gift is going to be needed and new orders are going to grow. It has been seen and has happened before.

I would say to you my job as a vocations director would be easier if I had 45 priests under the age of 45 to put in parishes so people can see them. But unfortunately we're not there yet.

Question: Do men who go into the seminary have to pay for their own tuition?

Bishop Campbell has changed that. The diocese pays the room and board and tuition is paid by the student.

Question: Do they get part-time jobs or how do they finance their education?

They are allowed to work. But the problem is there isn't time to work off campus. In both the formation and the prayer doens't allow them the time. But the Josephinum has a number of jobs like the library and kitchen and front office work.

Question: Can you comment on the similar stituation for women as far as going into religious studies?

The orders that are acepting women at a younger age are doing better than those who want women after college. By that I think they fall prey by the same practice we see. Why can't my son go to Motre Dame? Go there, the problem is you'll start dating and that's fun and being able to balance fun with what God wants, that is a difficult task.

I think young men and women go off to college without an idea of what they want to do, they find themselves living out their lives the way they want to do that.

As I always tell everyone, discernment is a whole body experience.

If you're praying to God, should I do this, should I get marriage. If you're asking that question and you're expecting a neon light to flash, don't trust it, it's false, discernment is found in your daily life. If you're dating and you find someone you enjoy being around, you have to ask yourself the hard questions.

Certainly if you watch 'God or the Girl' you can see discernment in action. a guy was connected with a girl, should I be with her or be a priest and he was in turmoil. It was obvious to me that is where he was supposed to be.

The idea of becoming a priest may be romantic but it was the wrong idea for him. You have to be willing to ask yourself the hard questions.

The challenge there is if you go off to another school and you don't have a good spiritual director and you don't know what you're getting into you may fall into the wrong thing.. for good reasons.

Question: What kind of opportunities exist for married people in the Church in terms of careers?

I've had this conversation before. I would be careful to say don't expect a good career in the Church. The Church teaches just wage, they just don't practice just wage.

Lumen Gencium from Vat II is the call to holiness. All people are supposed to live holy lives. If you break that down to raising children, etc, it goes into the role of priests and religious and single life. This was at Vat II They stated that the greatest gift to single people was the gift of time. To help the Church.

Priests and religious are doing things in the church they shoudn't be doing, making decisions about roofing, accounting, hiring people. These are all things that we need to be asking ourselves. What are our tasks and how can we get those tasks done.

I became a priest becuase I couldn't add 4 and 4 and get 8, but the diocese expects me to put togther a budget and not exceed that budget. So I hired two people to sit down with me and help me come up with that.

At the end, I can put that budget in but I'm not the one doing the number crunching to do that draft of the report. As the vocations director, I have talked to my brothers and sisters in the vocations field in the religious and the priest standpoint and said to find people who know marketing and start putting that into play.

They are against the idea of selling the Church like Macy's sells back to school items. But that's not the point, Macy's gets their name out there like the vocations office should.

Lay people working in the Church, I wouldn't recommend that, it certainly would make living frugal easy. But yes, your gifts and talents are extremely needed. If the priests would get over their sin of pride and ego great things could be donel

Question: I listen to The River a lot, does the Church ever advertise on that station? It's Mostly protestant.

We have an AM station, St. Gabriel Radio. But yeah, I never... I do listen to the River. But I listen to St. Gabriel FAR more often than the river. I have never called into the river to see if they would do that.