Quotes on Vocations
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"I am often asked, especially by young people, why I became a priest. Maybe some of you would like to ask the same question. Let me try briefly to reply. I must begin by saying that it is impossible to explain entirely. For it remains a mystery, even to myself. How does one explain the ways of God? Yet, I know that, at a certain point in my life, I became convinced that Christ was saying to me what he had said to thousands before me: 'Come, follow me!' There was a clear sense that what I heard in my heart was no human voice, nor was it just an idea of my own. Christ was calling me to serve him as a priest.
And you can probably tell that I am deeply grateful to God for my vocation to the priesthood. Nothing means more to me or gives me greater joy that to celebrate Mass each day and to serve God's people in the Church. That has been true ever since the day of my ordination as a priest. Nothing has ever changed this, not even becoming Pope."
- Blessed John Paul II (Los Angeles, USA, September 14, 1987)
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"If anyone is seeking God, know that the Beloved is seeking that person much more." - St. John of the Cross
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"A vocation is so very sacred that one does not like to speak of it…Always associated with that sense of the gift of a treasure was the frailty of the earthenware pot which was to house it. I would often drive it out of my mind, only to have it come back again. For the most part, the religious vocation is rather a silent but insistent whisper, yet one that demands a response; no violent shaking of bedposts or loud noises in the night. Just "you are called to be a priest."
Neither is the vocation so imperative that it makes acceptance a necessity rather than a willing obedience. In the Old Testament story, when God spoke to young Samuel, there was no voice audible to anyone but the child…Samuel did not at first know it was the voice of the Lord. Neither do most of us, when first we are called, recognize it as such except by its persistence and the calmness and peace with which it possesses the soul.
-- Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Treasure in Clay
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"Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away and He gives you everything. When we give ourselves to Him, we receive a hundred-fold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ - and you will find true life."
- Pope Benedict XVI
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"It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives..."
- Blessed John Paul II
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"Our Lord did not ask us to give up the things of earth, but to exchange them for better things."
- Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
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