By Jay Sorgi • Posted October 31, 2024

“To be a priest is incredibly challenging, but it’s incredibly rewarding,” said Father David O’Brien, vocations director for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

His assessment of the priesthood and religious life for women and men encapsulates a journey of vocational discernment that he and his team invite the entire Archdiocese to embark on during National Vocation Awareness Week, Nov. 3-9.

“I oftentimes say that vocations are symptomatic,” he adds, “meaning that they’re the sign and symptoms of people responding to the universal call to holiness.”

Answering such a call, he said, involves asking the question of what one’s life is ultimately about.

“Why do I wake up every day as a priest? It is the same reason why anyone that’s a baptized Catholic should wake up every day, because we’ve been invited into this life. We’ve been given a new name, adopted sonship in Jesus Christ, and that changes everything,” Father O’Brien said.

“It’s about trying to become our most authentic self, about becoming fully human and fully alive and holy, to be saints.”

Father O’Brien, who helps young men discern God’s call to them through study at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Gwynedd, said religious vocations are signs and symptoms that everyday Catholics are responding to God working in their everyday lives and in their prayer lives.

>>SEE RELATED: New Director Looks Forward to Guiding Catholic Men in Finding Their Vocations

“It’s not like priests just pop up out of the ground. There needs to be a kind of culture of awareness of (how) God is calling each of us to something great, and that may manifest itself a little differently in the life of each individual believer,” he said.

The priest explained that it may be hard today to find oneself attentive to God’s calling because people are so overfed with information and communications in daily life that the whispers of God’s voice aren’t easily heard.

“We need to take time to be in silence and to know that silence is actually a gift,” Father O’Brien said. “He prefers to speak to us at the deep places in our hearts and is inviting us to go there by detaching, taking time for prayer, adoration, the devotionals, things like that.

He described time in spent in silence as “a starting line for this awareness that it’s okay (to ask) ‘What do I want to do with my life?’”

Father O’Brien also suggested that people discerning priesthood and religious life need to build strong community and take everyday actions that foster finding answers to that critical question.

“Get off your phone,” he suggested “Make a retreat. Do a mission trip. Get involved in your parish. Start being active in the faith. It’s an invitation, but it demands a response.”

When Father O’Brien began in his role as vocations director last June, he realized that he simply couldn’t reach every parish and school individually to find men who want to discern the priesthood. So he leans on those communities and seminarians to help the effort.

That’s why a major part of National Vocation Awareness Week involves each parish and school showcasing visual evidence of young men discerning the priesthood. Copies of a poster including every seminarian will be distributed to every parish, school, Newman Center and other entities “so that you could put a name to a face and pray for seminarians,” he said. “I think it’s really important to have a poster of the men from our local church who are studying to be priests who are smiling because they’re invited into this life.”

Other initiatives planned for the week include: a video of seminarian testimonials; an invitation for discerners to attend the 40 hours devotion held at the seminary; a dinner with the seminary’s rector, Auxiliary Bishop Keith Chylinski; and a Mass organized by the Serra Club of Philadelphia with newly ordained priests at the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, to which high school students from across the Archdiocese are invited.

The week will end with a reunion of several young men who were part of the seminary’s summer discernment camp, Quo Vadis.

“(Social media) is a useful communication tool in order to really show some of the things that we’re trying to do as an office, and ways to connect to…the younger generation seeking answers primarily through the internet,” he said.

All the office’s programs, according to Father O’Brien, aim to help young people take the step to ask what God truly calls for in their lives, and to open the door to the possibility of a vocation to priesthood or  religious life.

“It’s a calling to give away your life. And that is what’s both exciting, but also scary,” he said. “Pope John Paul II said, ‘If He’s calling you to something difficult, it’s because He believes in you very much.’”

And as Father O’Brien summed up, “It is not so easy to be a priest, but it’s amazing to be a priest.”