We’ve lost touch with how precisely Vocations Sundays pastoral letters, etc, target candidates, largely due to trying to keep a straight face, it must be said. The Archdiocese of Glasgow has 2 students in Rome, and two mothballed seminaries. Pope Francis, like all really clever Jesuits, can say what he wants to without actually saying it. As readers of this blog may just be aware, he has offered on several occasions to reassess the status of the secular priest, as well as having actually changed it for the Eastern Church in January. We think it fair to say therefore that To Feed The Flock and Pope Francis are united in not expecting prayers for vocations to result in hundreds suddenly queuing up anywhere to join secular priest seminaries in August 2015. Without attempting to sound Apocalyptic, we assure you, given the statutory five or six year clerical education , the spiritual apathy of Europe and its response to the march of aggressive Islam, it is too late for that.
Instead Pope Francis pointed us last week to vocation as “an attitude of conversion and transformation, an incessant moving forward, a passage from death to life like that celebrated in every liturgy, an experience of Passover”. The journey, he points out is God’s work as “He leads us beyond our initial situation, frees us from every enslavement, breaks down our habits and our indifference and brings us to the joy of communion with Him and with our brothers and sisters.”
Does he possibly suggest here that the “conversion and transformation” of vocation could be extended beyond ordination to the episcopacy, to accepting the necessity of change ?
When will the Church’s bishops accept that it is no longer possible, or right, or ultimately Christian to deny the Eucharist to so many hundreds of thousands of the faithful unless through the medium of a celibate and parish supported priesthood ?

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