Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a nationally syndicated columnist.
I would also like to encourage parents to pray for vocations to come from within their own families: I read about a town in Italy called Lu, in which a number of mothers got together to pray for vocations, and they got quite a lot of them. This is a variation of the prayer they said:
“O God, grant that one of my children may become a priest or religious!
I myself want to live as a good Christian
and want to guide my children always to do what is right,
so that I may receive the grace, O God, to be allowed to give you a holy priest or religious! Amen”
We have prayer ministries for vocations at our parish: one meets monthly to do prayer and adoration for the priests of our diocese, and another involves having one family take a ‘vocation cross’ for the week, and praying daily that week for an increase in vocations. They then return it to the church (at a side altar) for the next family to pick up.
Funny story - I remember some years ago that there was no one praying for vocations for a particular week, so I thought I’d silently do the prayers (I didn’t know what they were, so I just said something simple, I don’t even remember what), and well, long story short, one of my sons is now a first year seminarian at Mt. St. Mary’s in Emmitsburg...
(That was not how I’d planned things to come out - I thought it would be someone *else’s* vocation somewhere else!)
Looks interesting. I may buy this & put it away for a few years til my 3 yr old is a little bigger