Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Do You Reckon?

"It is also necessary to pray as well so that there are holy spouses, capable of indicating to their children, above all by example, the horizons to which they should tend toward with their liberty."

The words of Pope Benedict XVI on praying for vocations. You can read the entire article here.

May those words flow from his mouth to the ears of my Archbishop, who tends to forget to pray for sacred marriages until couples have been married for 50 years. In my not so humble opinion, any and all prayers for vocations should begin with prayers for the vocation of sacred marriages, because without them, there will be no more generations to be called to the vocations of priesthood and religious life.

4 comments:

Rosemary said...

VERY good point! (Although,on second thought, I have seen several holy vocations to the priesthood come from children of failed marriages. Still, good marriages are really important. No doubt about that.)

Mike Keucher said...

I agree that vocations to the sacred marriage are important, and ought to be prayed for. They are needed in our Church.

But I don't think our Holy Father and our Archbishop are wrong to focus so heavily on vocations to the Priesthood and consecrated life. There would be no Church without the priesthood. Those consecrated to Christ and the Church as priests and religious are the leaders of our Church and we need them so desperately...to bring about vocations of all kinds and to bring us the sacraments. Sacred married couples can do a lot of good (and I don't mean to marginalize it)--but they cannot do something as extraordinary as bring to the faithful the sacraments Christ left as a way to unite us with him.

But of course you are correct, sacred marriage bring those vocations about nicely. But they come from all sorts of situations.

Suzanne said...

I tell ya what..I agree with both of you..angelmeg and Mike. I will add a point to what angelmeg has to say here and that is it still would be nice for the Archbishop and our pastors and priests to start speaking more directly to young people about whatever vocation they are feeling called to, to take it sincerely, pray about it sincerely..marriages have been in a terrible state for years now and if we don't pray to have some holy marriages, there will be fewer and fewer births of future religious and priests to even hope and pray for. Yes, those vocations and even really good ones actually come from families even torn apart, but I think what angelmeg and others like myself are concerned about, is that we should not assume that if we don't pray much more and speak much more about how to have a holy marriage, that things will continue to get worse and that's pretty scary as it stands now. Somehow...we need to hear just a little more..that's all I mean to point out. Now having said that, with more priests and religous coming up, there could be more wise counseling to help people plan for holy marriage and other vocations..full circle. I will say if Archbishop ever is named a saint for anything, it will be his extreme dedicated prayers for the priesthood and religious. Guess that is what he feels the Holy Spirit is prompting him to do more than anything, because he has made that perfectly clear.

Teresa said...

I second what my momma said!