The day our son told us: "I want to be a priest".Pope Francis explains the figure of the priest at an important congress in RomeThe family of Hasitha Menaka Nanayakkara is striking for its originality. The son of a Buddhist father and a Catholic mother, this deacon of the Archdiocese of Colombo, who is not yet in his thirties, has lived the Catholic faith since he was a child. "My father, who is a Buddhist, respected his wife and children and also his faith. We respected him. In fact, recalls Hashita, "from time to time the subject of religion would come up when we talked at dinner, but each of us knew how not to bring the conversation to a point of division, but to one of seeing diversity and accepting it."
Also in the life of Rosemberg A. Franco, the faith and example of his mother, a catechist since his youth, influenced his piety and vocational discernment. For this Guatemalan, "it is very clear that I met God thanks to the great devotion of my mother, who always bent her knees before Jesus. My vocation I feel deep inside me that it is the vocation that God has thought of since my mother's womb. When I was a child I played to celebrate mass, and something very nice that I remember is playing in processions, because in Guatemala, the popular devotion is very special for all Catholics".
The example of these mothers and fathers was the humus from which God used to make the call to his service grow in these young people. A life of strong faith, as Hashita points out: "Baptizing children is not enough, although it is the most important thing. For me and my sister it was a blessing to have a mother who baptized us and educated us in the faith. She, with her simple faith knew that she had to be light and salt where she was: in her family. My mother took us to Mass and catechesis. Every day, my sister, my mother and I prayed the Rosary at night. Dad didn't pray with us, of course, but he never forgot to turn down the TV so as not to distract us."
Also for Iván Brito, who is preparing to become a priest at the Castrense Seminary in Spain, the "testimony of a priest relative and the religiousness of my family" played a decisive role in his decision to respond to the priestly vocation.
Entering the seminary is always a time of mixed feelings in the family and in the person concerned. Ivan, being a military man, decided that "the best option, with respect to service, was within the Armed Forces."
David Carrascal is in his sixth year at the Conciliar Seminary in Madrid. He recalls how "although I accepted my admission to the seminary, it was a little more difficult for my parents, because they had many doubts about what my life in the seminary would be like; perhaps a little influenced by what they had seen in old stories or movies. But at no time did they make it difficult for me." "For me it was a gift from the Lord that my family, my friends and my parish supported me in my entry to the seminary," says this native of Madrid.
The answer
Although at the age of 13, after a confession Rosemberg Franco told the priest that he felt "that He wants me to be like you, to be a priest."It was a long time before he made up his mind. Years later, he tells Omnes, "I was already a primary school teacher and one day, entering the Church, I met a former teacher, who was surprised and said to me: 'You come to Church? His surprise, Franco emphasizes, came from the fact that "while I studied education, I never showed any religious interest in class".
It was not just a chance encounter. That professor asked his former pupil "What do you say to Jesus in your prayer?". Rosemberg replied: "Nothing, I just see him, I don't know what to say to him. Then he said these words to me, tell him: 'Jesus, help me to fall more in love with You'. From that day on, my prayers begin like this.
Franco had ended his engagement "with a very nice girl who brought me closer to God" and at that time he began to ask the Lord "help me to fall more in love with You".
In 2014 he began attending vocational meetings at the National Major Seminary of the Assumption in Guatemala, and in 2015 he entered the Guatemalan Seminary where he has studied until 2019.
Pedro de Andrés is a deacon of the Diocese of Madrid, trained at the Diocesan Missionary Seminary. Redemptoris Mater-He will be ordained to the priesthood in May 2023. His family, who belong to the Neocatechumenal Way, raised him in theó in an atmosphere of solid and communitarian piety.
In his case, he notes: "The restlessness for the call arose gradually. At the age of 14, when I entered my own community, I seriously considered becoming a priest for the first time, as a joyful response to the unconditional love of Christ for me, which had been announced to me. However, this first impulse did not take concrete form because of my refusal to enter the Minor Seminary due to my shyness. As the years went by, a strong question appeared within me: 'Lord, what is my vocation? What do you want me to be? This question continued to resonate within him until his university years.
In the summer of 2012, Peter went on a pilgrimage to Lourdes: "I laid at Our Lady's feet the question of vocation, because I didn't know what to do. It would be a year later, during World Youth Day, when "after speaking for the first time about my vocational concerns with a priest, the Lord called me during a Eucharist: 'I am the Light of the world, he who follows me does not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life'. These words of Christ were for me the true vocation: God was calling me! It was no longer I who sought to know what His will was for me, it was He Himself who spoke and called me. Full of joy and nerves, I got up to go to the seminary.
"No angel appeared to communicate to me God's call to the priesthood, but little by little I saw that it was my path," says Hasitha Menaka, amused. In his native Sri Lanka, during his early years, he studied at a Catholic school. Later, he attended a Buddhist school. "In that school we were few Christians. When the other students did their Buddhist rites before classes began, I talked to Jesus alone. I had to make an effort to live what I believed. My classmates would ask questions about my faith and I had to search for the answers and how to explain it. This endeavor made me deepen my own faith by looking for 'reasons for our hope' I experienced it as challenges from the environment that make a person grow. When you know and understand what you believe, you want to live it and transmit that truth to others. I believe that in this process I heard the call to the priesthood.
In the face of doubt and fears? Prayer
Any life of relationship, whether with God or with another person, brings with it moments of doubt and inner turmoil. These boys, who are the priests of tomorrow, live it every day. At the same time, they are clear that these doubts and fears have to be dealt with in prayer, because many times they come "when we separate ourselves from our Lord, looking only at our miseries and forgetting the fidelity of Jesus towards us", as Hasitha Menaka points out.
Something similar underlines Rosemberg Franco: "Many times, during my time in the seminary, there have been many doubts and fears and what has kept me on my feet is prayer; my own and that of so many souls who bend their knees praying for me, the help and accompaniment of my spiritual director, confession, and above all the daily encounter with Jesus in Holy Mass.
Sometimes, of course, from my human condition it is difficult for me to abandon myself fully in the arms and plans of God, but it is there where I remember that I must see with supernatural vision everything that happens to me, that if everything is to save more souls, that if everything is for the greater glory of Him, may His will be done".
Doubts and, also, fear before a path that is presented, from now on, especially exposed to criticism and even social mockery. A reality that, in the words of David Carrascal, "is based on three ideas: Recognize who calls to the vocation, knowing that the Lord has not called us to a life without difficulties; The second thing to ask for those who hinder the life of priests, which make more difficult a free surrender to the Lord. And finally, to pray for those who criticize, who dishonor priests, to know how to welcome and love them, because for them too is the proclamation of the Lord".
What is the world asking of us? Holiness
What should the priest of today be like? "Holy," emphasizes Rosemberg Franco. "Today the Church wants holy priests and holy faithful, the call to holiness is as current as it has been since the first centuries". And not only priests, "that the saints of this century, be they priests, religious, nuns and laity, will sustain the faith, will keep alive the love of the Lord, in the face of a society that is sinking into superficiality and individualism, consumerism and relativism".
A conviction shared by Menaka, for whom "living what one believes is the best way of evangelization in a non-Christian environment as well as in a Christian one. The very life of a Christian is a preaching of what he believes and, in a non-Christian environment, the joy and holiness of Christians attract the attention of others".
A universal call to holiness that, in the case of Pedro de Andrés, is concretized in a strongly missionary charism, as he explains: "We walk the Way in a community as one more brother, participating in the celebrations of the Word, the Eucharist and the Conviviality with families, singles, young people, older people, priests... We are one more Christian who follows Christ in the Church. From this relationship with Christ, who loves us as sinners, is born the zeal for evangelization, for the mission ad gentes.".
The Christian's life is the one that can respond to this thirst for God that, without knowing it, permeates the current environment, especially among the young. As David points out: "In my experience with friends and parishes where I have been, I have been able to see that there is a great thirst for God, but, at the same time, many currents and ideals that make it more difficult for young people to find the transcendent".
"I am fully happy."
"Today I can say that yes, I am happy," Peter affirms emphatically - "The source of this happiness is not in goods, not even in human securities. Happiness comes to me from intimacy with Christ. He is the one who called me, the guarantor of my life. That is why every day prayer is a fundamental part of my life, through the Liturgy of the Hours, the prayerful reading of Sacred Scripture, spiritual reading, contemplative prayer... In this precariousness there are times when fears of the future arise, but it is with Christ that I can leave my land and my kindred, like Abraham, to the land that he shows me, where he is already waiting for me and where he will unite me to his cross, which is the source of evangelization".
Hasitha Menaka counts among her reasons for joy, first of all "my vocational journey and my priestly formation in my country and in Spain", but also the fruits of the witness of her family, which is manifested in "my two baptized nephews, my mother's life and my father's good heart".
Stories of vocation, very different lives and one call: to be the voice and hands of Christ in the midst of the world.
