It is a challenge today to create a culture of vocation that will encourage and assist our youngest members to respond to God's call. As a parent, you can perform no higher undertaking than to be an example of the Catholic faith and to establish a culture of vocation in your home.
As a parent, you want what is best for your child, but you may not be sure of what to do if your son or daughter mentions the possibility of the priesthood or religious life. This section is for you! It offers answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs) and perspectives from other parents of young people discerning their call to a life of service in the Church.
It also includes prayers, links and downloads to encourage families to pray together for an increase of vocations to the priesthood and consecrated life. The purpose is to help families become more aware of the need for vocations and of the possibility that God may be calling a member of their family to serve the Church in this way.
The resources provided here are to help parents plant the seeds of religious vocation early and to keep them watered! Vocation discernment can be an integral part of the faith formation of children. Information is provided to help parents understand and support their child’s call.
Resources
O Holy Family of Nazareth, community of love of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, model and ideal of every Christian family, to you we entrust our families.
Open the heart of every family to the faith, to welcoming the word of God, to Christian witness, so that it become a source of new and holy vocations.
Touch the hearts of parents, so that with prompt charity, wise care, and loving devotion they be for their sons and daughters sure guides towards spiritual and eternal values.
Stir up in the hearts of young people a right conscience and a free will, so that growing in "wisdom, age and grace", they might welcome generously the gift of a divine vocation.
Holy Family of Nazareth, grant that all of us, contemplating and imitating the assiduous prayer, generous obedience, dignified poverty and virginal purity lived out in your midst, might set about fulfilling the will of God and accompanying with far-sighted sensitivity those among us who are called to follow more closely the Lord Jesus, who "has given himself for us" (cf. Gal 2:20).
Amen!
LINKS
(From: USCCB Website:http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/vocations/parents/)