Pastor's Corner, November 9, 2014

Dear Parishioners and Friends,

This past week all the priests of the Diocese of Allentown gathered for our annual Priest Convocation. It was a wonderful week in which we learned more about how to be an effective preacher. We had time to pray together, grow in friendship and priestly fraternity and rest. It was a wonderful time to be renewed in our vocation as priests.

Looking around the room, however, I realized that the clergy in the diocese are aging. We need to encourage more young men to consider a call to the priesthood. All of us can be a “vocation director” in the sense that we can and should encourage young men to consider a vocation. A simply and sincere invitation to someone you know might be the exact things God wants to use to call someone to the priesthood and it might be the exact thing the young man was waiting to hear. I like the ICNU method. We can say something like this: “John, I see in you (ICNU) the qualities that would make a good priest. I want you to think and pray about it.”

If we want more vocations to the priesthood and religious life, we need to ask. Does not Our Lord in Matthew 9: 38 say, “Beg the master of the harvest to send laborers in to the vineyard”? Ask, invite and watch the grace of God work!

In Christ,

Msgr. Baker