ORDINATION TO THE ORDER OF PRIESTS – Deacon Alfred Tong

Please pray for Deacon Alfred Tong, who will be ordained a priest by Cardinal John Dew on Saturday 24th September 2022, 11am at St Joseph’s Church, Pine Avenue, Upper Hutt. 

Read Alfred’s vocation story here, and listen to our priests and seminarians speak about the call to priesthood in the video below.

 

 

 

VOCATION SUNDAY 2022

From Pope Francis’ message for the World Day of Prayer for Vocations:

“… God addresses a particular call to each of us. He touches our lives by his love and directs them to our ultimate goal, to a fulfilment that transcends the very threshold of death. That is how God wanted to see our lives and how he sees them still.  

Michelangelo Buonarroti is said to have maintained that every block of stone contains a statue within it, and it is up to the sculptor to uncover it. If that is true of an artist, how much more is it true of God! In the young woman of Nazareth he saw the Mother of God. In Simon the fisherman he saw Peter, the rock on which he would build his Church. In the publican Levi he recognized the apostle and evangelist Matthew, and in Saul, a harsh persecutor of Christians, he saw Paul, the apostle of the Gentiles. God’s loving gaze always meets us, touches us, sets us free and transforms us, making us into new persons.  

That is what happens in every vocation: we are met by the gaze of God, who calls us.
Read more

COULD GOD BE CALLING YOU?

Has anybody ever said to you that you would make a good priest?  
Have you thought about the idea, but tried to put it out of your mind?
Do you think you might have a vocation? 

Do you have what it takes? 

“Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach, but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess.

Thomas Merton