The Vocations Team in Ferns Diocese provided information on this lifepath to students during a ‘careers night’ in St Peter’s College Secondary School, Wexford on March 12. Fr Billy Swan, Vocations Director and Breda Murphy from the parish of Kilrush, a member of the Ferns Diocesan Lay Vocations Council represented the diocese in the event.
Having Vocation among career options in those events is not standard practice, but Fr Swan said it is important to show “the young people that there’s another possibility…for one’s life that involves dedication to people, service for people, but also total commitment to Christ and to His kingdom.”
Learning about vocations can affect even those students who are not “called to the priesthood.” The priest said: “The Church is not just priests or religious, it’s also the faith community… It’s not a model of priesthood from the past that we’re advocating, but it’s actually being a priest in a Synodal Church, which is the way of the present and the future. It’s not going back to the past.”
By having clergy and a lay person representing the team showed the students that Vocation concerns the whole Church. “Every lay vocation is a gift to every priest, so every priest and religious vocation is a gift to every lay person, family and parish community,” the priest said.
Fr Swan said “for most of them [students], it was a strange concept. I think that in the culture in which we live, the whole concept of a Vocation is becoming less common. We must not assume that everyone knows what it means, and that whole idea of God calling a person to a life of service, to clarify the difference, I suppose, between a career and a vocation was important to the students.”
