By Tom Tracy, OSV News
NAPLES, Fla. (OSV News) — Prayers and fasting, Eucharistic adoration and getting back to the basics of the Catholic faith are some of the ways the laity can encourage priestly and religious vocations in 2025.
Those were among the recommendations that a panel of lay and religious offered during the 2025 Legatus annual summit for Catholic business men and women Feb. 6-9 at the Ritz-Carlton in Naples. Some 700 people attended the three-day national gathering.
New Jersey native Sister Pia Jude, who entered the Sisters of Life community in 2013 after law school and a short law career in New York City’s Wall Street district, recalled the importance of a strong parish engagement within her family.
“Parish life for me was everything — I was a little altar server and that meant being so close to the Lord standing up there, being involved in the parish and the parish and having Eucharistic adoration Holy Hours available to the young does make a difference,” said Sister Pia Jude, who has an identical twin sister, Sister Luca Benedict, also a Sister of Life.
Sister Pia Jude currently lives at Annunciation Motherhouse in Suffern, New York, and serves as an assistant to Mother Mary Concepta, superior general of her order.
“We had a priest in our parish and his thought was to have a Holy Hour for the parish pro-life society that my mom was part of — she brought her two little daughters to this Holy Hour,” Sister Pia Jude said.
“And so sitting before Our Lord in the Eucharist praying; I didn’t really know how to pray but I knew Jesus was there,” she added.
“I do think that we’re planting seeds we don’t even know and that I couldn’t have articulated back then, but the Lord showed me later on as I was in religious life that ‘I’ve seen you and I’ve known you from this moment. I saw you there, I was calling you, I was drawing you.'”
“Those confirmed my vocational graces, those were bedrock for me,” Sister Pia Jude told the Legatus audience.
Also on hand was Father John Burns, a priest of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee ordained in 2010 and author of “Lift Up Your Heart: A 10-Day Personal Retreat with St. Francis de Sales.” He is the founder of Friends of the Bridegroom, an apostolate dedicated to the renewal of the church through the renewal of women’s religious life.
Father Burns noted that canon law defines religious life as the most perfect way to imitate Christ, “not meaning that it is better than other states in life, but it is the fullest way you can cling to Christ, and it is given to us so that the world may see something of what it looks like to being completely to Christ,” he said.
Recent decades of secularism, clericalism and scandals among the clergy brought the church to a place where many priests are themselves embarrassed by their priestly vocation and identity, he added. They may, as a result, have backed away from the supernatural and attempted to make religious life look more normal and approachable.
“But it isn’t normal; it is supernatural,” Father Burns said of religious vocations.
“I would never trade this life — given a thousand times to redo things I would never choose another pathway,” he said.
“And as a church we are getting comfortable saying, ‘We need holy priests and we need holy sisters and it would be a gift if my son or my daughter were called to that.’ It would be an honor if God might be interested in your son, your daughter, your granddaughter, your grandson and to encourage them in that,” Father Burns said.
He also recommended parishes and the laity adopt prayer, fasting and alms to ask God for an increase in vocations even if the fruits of those efforts are not realized in the short run.
“We have to believe that God wants his church renewed, that God wants holy priests, holy marriages and holy religious and that he is the one doing the work and we have to align with his will,” the priest added. “Be willing to say, God, what do you want to do; how do you want to mobilize us to renew your church?”
Jason Shanks, CEO of the National Eucharistic Congress Inc. which recently announced its next national congress will be held in 2029, told the gathering of his work as a layman organizing a Catholic youth summer camp in Ohio in 2000, replete with jet skis, a ropes course and other adventure sports.
“The kids would leave and would say, ‘We came for the adventure but what we got out of it was the Mass, the adoration, the worship,” Shanks said. “I think the parents would send the kids for the jet skis and the high ropes course but were tickled and touched that they came back talking about Jesus.”
What families need to do is carve out more quiet and reflective time for youth to escape the pressures and distractions of daily life in order to discern their calling, according to Shanks. He agreed with Sister Pia Jude that adoration time is a great time and place for such discernment.
“We live in a world of so much distraction and so much pressure on these kids that we need to create that space of silence so they can discern what the voice of the Lord is doing in their life,” he said, adding that last year’s Eucharistic congress seemed to renew the participating clergy and hierarchy as well.
“All of us in Legatus can be part of that healing solution as this revival moves forward and to love and encourage our priests and our religious and our families every day,” Shanks said.
EWTN’s Colm Flynn, who moderated the vocations conversation, added his recollection of reporting from 2023’s World Youth Day Lisbon in Portugal, and how the event featured a broad range of activities both traditional and secular.
The morning of the final day before the closing World Youth Day Mass with Pope Francis featured a DJ priest “who for 40 minutes did this really loud techno set” of music, Flynn said. “Not one person we interviewed said that was the highlight that touched me, that made me think differently. It was the Eucharist, or the priest who led late night discussions they remembered.”
“There is this idea that if we don’t be more like the world, they won’t come for us, rather than, ‘Let’s invite the world to be more like the Gospel,'” Flynn added.
“A priest I know back in Scotland who had been in Angola for 30 years said to me: ‘You have to tell more young people that besides the supernatural aspect, it is a great exciting life. You travel, you meet people. He said the church needs to be not arrogant but more bold and say, ‘This is the best thing you could ever do with your life.'”
Tom Tracy writes for OSV News from Florida.
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