In the Holy Eucharist we give thanks. That is the meaning of the word ‘Eucharist’. We give thanks for the love which is God’s gift to us.  The gift God gives is his own Self, because God is love. That love is made visible and present to us in the Eucharist.  It is offered to us so that we may eat it; and so that, eating this bread, we may live forever in the love of God (Gospel). 

We have completed the celebration of the Passion and Death of Jesus in Holy Week when his blood was poured out and his flesh was given for the life of the world. Now, in the Easter season we rejoice at his Resurrection.  We see the love of God not just poured out with unlimited generosity on the Cross; we also see that God’s love is more powerful than the cruelty, evil, betrayal and death that Jesus endured.
In the first reading we hear how those events affected the unnamed Ethiopian.  The story of the crucifixion of Jesus and his rising from the dead transformed his life and led him immediately to ask to be baptised.  And he ‘went on his way rejoicing’.

That Good News transformed many thousands of lives in the years immediately after the first Easter.  And down through the centuries people were ‘taught by God’ and learned from the teaching of the Father and came to Jesus (First Reading).

Tonight we pray for vocations to the priesthood and religious life.  As the Year of Vocation draws to a close we may sometimes wonder whether our prayers are being heard.   Priests are getting older and fewer.  The situation has changed dramatically in the last few decades.  Not so long ago, Ireland had seven seminaries, preparing priests for the diocesan priesthood, all of them full. Now Maynooth stands alone – and far from full! Besides the economic recession there seems to be also an even deeper recession in vocations!

But when we feel disheartened, we should ask ourselves whether that might not be because we have lost sight of how the mystery of God’s unlimited love continues to be just as powerfully at work in our time, as it was in the time of the first Christians.  In his Message for the Day of Vocations Pope Benedict says:

“Let us give thanks to God, because even today he continues to call together workers into his vineyard. While it is undoubtedly true that a worrisome shortage of priests is evident in some regions of the world, and that the Church encounters difficulties and obstacles along the way, we are sustained by the unshakable certitude that the one who firmly guides her in the pathways of time … is the Lord, who freely chooses persons of every culture and of every age and invites them to follow him according to the mysterious plans of his merciful love” .
The problem does not lie with God’s call, which continues to invite people to follow Christ in the priesthood and the consecrated life.  The problem lies in a world which makes that call harder to hear, a world that leaves little space for reflection and prayer and searching for the ‘still small voice’ in which God speaks” (I Kgs 19:12). [1]

The problem also lies in an environment which does not encourage people to listen to God’s call or to respond to it.  How many young people wonder whether they are being called to the priesthood but do not see any context in which they could talk about that possibility without the risk of being laughed at?  What kind of encouragement do they experience from their families, in their parishes, among their friends?

Tomorrow we begin the month of May, the month of Our Lady, and we celebrate the feast of St Joseph the Worker. Mary was the one who responded with her whole heart to the call of God: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38). All of us who have been baptised into the risen life of Christ need to grow into a more willing and more generous trust in God’s love for us and in God’s plans for us and in a greater readiness to respond.

St Joseph, the patron of St Joseph’s Young Priests Society, was the one who offered Mary the support and encouragement that she needed in making her generous response – a response that she had to make and remake continually.

If we are to have a renewal of vocations we need to have a renewal of our own response – not just the response of those whom God calls, but the response of the whole community and each member of  the community.  And we need to have a community that recognises that its role, like St Joseph, is to encourage and to pray for those who are called and to believe that God is indeed calling today as in the past:.

“Our first duty, therefore, is to keep alive in families and in parishes… and in all the sectors of diocesan life this appeal to the divine initiative with unceasing prayer. We must pray that the whole Christian people grows in its trust in God, convinced that the “Lord of the harvest” does not cease to ask some to place their entire existence freely at his service so as to work with him more closely in the mission of salvation” [2].

We pray that all of us and especially those whom God is calling to priesthood and consecrated life may have something of the openness of the pagan Ethiopian who was ready to allow his life to be transformed by the Good News and who ‘went on his way rejoicing, and that we may have something of the willingness of Philip who when he heard the message: “Be ready to set out along the desert road” undertook his journey which would bring the Good News to the Ethiopian and would ‘proclaim the Good News in every town as far as Caesarea’ (First Reading).
+Donal Murray

[1] BENEDICT XVI, Message for the Day of Vocations 2009,
[2] BENEDICT XVI, Message for the Day of Vocations 2009.