Many now enter seminary after conversion experience

The man credited with playing a major role in an upsurge in candidates for the priesthood in Britain has said those involved in vocations promotion need to understand that many young committed Catholics now consider a vocation after a conversion experience.

Addressing a major conference on priestly formation in Maynooth at the weekend, Fr Christopher Jamison, until this autumn Director of England and Wales’ National Office for Vocations, said seminaries need to take account of the fact that men are also now entering seminary after years of experience in the world.

“Losing the autonomy they’ve had for a decade or more is very difficult, yet this personal deconstruction is a necessary part of formation,” Fr Jamison said, maintaining that this should not be “a process of humiliation through silly practices” but instead should be “a real stripping back to the basics of the spiritual life”.

Fr Jamison drew on surveys which reveal today’s young people stay young, in a sense, longer than their predecessors did.

It’s not merely that they enter seminary later, he explained; they marry significantly later and their sense of affiliation to institutions is lower,

While, he says, today’s young Catholic adults cannot simply be pigeonholed as “all conservative”, they do tend to have conversion processes in common, with the vast majority of seminarians in England and Wales being converts, reverts or at least people who can point to when they started to take their Faith seriously.

Continued:  https://irishcatholic.com/rebooting-priest…rmation-maynooth/ ‎