AFTER MY OWN HEART

We visited Knock last month. I was privileged to offer Masses in the Chapel of the Apparition and the Basilica. On each occasion I met Seminarians from Maynooth, the national Seminary of Ireland. They were on work experience as sacristans. They told me that there are 30 students there this year, and there is a growing number of men entering the seminary. There used to be hundreds in the past, and recently there have been as few as 13.

This year’s intake is 12 (September 2025 to July 2026). Next year there will be more, bringing the full college complement to 40. God is producing a gradual increase of vocations to the priesthood in Ireland.

This is mirrored in the English College Valladolid, where men go for a propaedeutic year. That is a time of spiritual formation and discernment before entering seminary. This year there were 12 students from England and Wales, next year there will be 30.

We visited there in Holy Week. We were very impressed with the atmosphere of deep prayer, the foundation on which all priestly life must be based. Also, in talking to the staff, the principle of personal individual development of one’s own potential was stressed. The days of training a regiment of priests in the same mold have passed. Today, the Church needs priests who are authentically true to the unique image of God that they are individually created to be – in other words, mature.

We have been through a time of painful cleansing in the Western World, which was the cradle of Christianity. One feature of this has been that the number of priests has plummeted, It has been God’s preparing a new and greater age of the Holy Spirit to flourish.

Today’s laity must be much more mature in faith and understanding to bring their witness to the world which is so full of potential. For this to happen the clerical monopoly of Church matters had to change into clerical nurturing of the laity into that maturity, which is what the apostles describe as normal. That change of culture takes time and can seem frustrating – even painful. 

The gradual increase of mature modern men entering the priesthood is one sign that God’s preparations are nearing completion. God renews his Church from the depths and gradually. It is right that the numbers are increasing gradually. We might desire spectacular increases, which can in fact be a hidden desire to retreat into former Church models. What is needed is profound development, and that is what God is doing.

In Jeremiah 3:15, God promised: “I will give you shepherds after my own heart, and these shall feed you on knowledge and discretion”.