I have visited a number of schools around the diocese, and in many of them I have sat down with the students and pupils and tried to answer some of their questions. Many of the questions are easy: I have cereal and toast for breakfast, I am not rich and I don't really support any football team. But some of the other questions are a bit more difficult. They ask me why I wanted to be a bishop. That gets a short answer. But when they ask me why I wanted to be a priest, I find it hard to give a very clear answer, because I'm not altogether sure myself. I do know, though, that it was something to do with a priest I knew when I was young. I wanted to be like him. I said this at Worth on 10 June, the day after I was made bishop.
They say that if you treat a child with kindness, the child will grow to be kind. If you treat the child with intolerance, the child will be intolerant. People learn from what we do and the way we are; they do not necessarily listen to what we say. It is no good preaching charity without practising it. Our first vocation as Catholics and Christians is to follow the example of Christ. In his history of the early Church, Professor Henry Chadwick says, "The practical application of charity was probably the most potent single cause of Christian success." If our vocation is to preach the gospel, people will only be impressed if they see that we actually respect and value one another. And as I've gone round the diocese I've seen ample evidence of people's willingness to serve one another. People give their time and energies as teachers in our schools, catechists, ministers within parishes and members of the various organisations that work within the parishes to look after people with needs - the pagan comment about the early Church, "See how these Christians love one another," could be made just as validly today.
But the Church is not only or even primarily a social welfare organisation. The Church exists to bring people to a knowledge of God. Jesus' words in John's gospel makes it clear: "Eternal life is this: to know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent." And knowledge of God is not information about God. It is a personal relationship with God, in the same way that we can only speak about really knowing another person if we have spent time in that person's company.
The first place to know God is in prayer. If we ask again, "What is the Church for?" the answer must reflect the fact that the Church is a community of prayer and a worshipping community. This is what the Church does best, and this is the most important thing the Church does. And the Eucharist, the Mass, is at the heart of the Church's prayer and worship. This is why it is so important to celebrate the Mass properly, with dignity and yet with joy, in a way which expresses our own identity and yet does not leave people feeling excluded.
It has been reassuring, in an odd sort of way, to hear people's anxieties about the decline in the number of priests. What causes most anxiety is the prospect of not having access to daily or even Sunday Mass. It means that Mass is important for people, and that they are beginning to value even more the presence of the priest in the community. Because if the Eucharist is at the heart of the community, then the priest is likewise there at its heart.
Today we are asked to pray for vocations, particularly to the priesthood. We must not forget the place of religious - the people we commonly refer to as 'monks' and 'nuns' - in the life of the Church, because the Church would be a great deal poorer without them. But in praying for vocations, we need to be clear enough about what we are doing. It can't be simply a question of drawing the problem to God's attention and then waiting to see what happens. In praying we associate ourselves with the challenge, in the same way that praying for the poor and suffering in the world reminds us of our personal obligation in that regard - we can't simply pass that problem on to God, either. We ask the Lord to help us, but to help us in what we are doing. And what can we do?
We need to make sure that we have an environment in which people feel that it is good and even normal to choose priestly ministry as a way of life. We need to encourage the possibility of this choice. Families and schools are two places in which this environment can be most easily created. The parish, then, is the place from which a vocation comes. Before a parish asks for a priest, it might ask if it has ever produced a priest: priests do not come from 'somewhere else'. If the life of a priest is to be seen as a viable and even attractive choice, the priests that we have need to be supported, to be valued and to be encouraged. We have 13 students already in formation in the seminaries, and the quality of these men is a tremendous sign of hope for the future.
We have excellent priests in this diocese. They work hard and have made a great sacrifice in giving their whole lives in the service of the Catholic community. This must not be forgotten. I thanked them publicly at the Chrism Mass in the Cathedral in Holy Week, but I want to thank them again now. They are a great support to me personally, and they are a crucial element in the great parishes of this diocese.
Let us pray, then, for the priests that we have, for the religious of the diocese, for the students and for those thinking about serving their Church. Let us pray also that others may be inspired by what they see around them in the Catholic community: the community must be the sort of place where I would want to serve God and my brothers and sisters.
With my own prayers and good wishes.
Rt. Rev. Kieran Conry
Bishop of Arundel and Brighton
