I am going to set up an appointment with the Director for Priestly Vocations for my Diocese, and I don’t really know what to expect.
I would like to know if anyone ever gone through this first meeting can tell me what to expect. Also, what kind of preparations should I be thinking about before this meeting? Thank You!
It’s very smart of you to ask this. I wish I had asked about it before my first interview.
I should qualify this entire post by saying that I take a very dim view of how my diocese goes about picking those who are sent to the seminary, and that this may color my memory of things more negatively than is quite right. So, if I come across as being extremely negative, take it with a grain of salt.
When I first broached the subject of the priesthood with him, my pastor assured me that if you think you might have a vocation, you go to the seminary and they help you discern it there. He really made it sound like the only purpose of the application is to weed out the mentally ill.
Since our bishop had been rector of the seminary while my pastor was there, and since the bishop had picked my pastor to be rector of his cathedral when my pastor was just a few years out of the seminary, I assumed my pastor knew what he was talking about. So I went to that first meeting expecting it to be very low-key.
As so often happens in life, reality did not jibe very well with expectation.
After signing in – including showing picture ID to prove I really was who I said I was – the receptionist in the lobby of the “Pastoral Life Center” gave me a “VISITOR” badge to hang around my neck. I then cooled my heels for about 20 minutes until the Vocation Director’s assistant came down to escort me past the electronic door locks and into the building proper.
After minimal preliminaries, the actual meeting was basically a long, extremely personal, job interview. The vocation director read from a long list of questions and scribbled furiously as I tried to answer them off the top of my head.
If my experience is typical, the things you need to think about ahead of time fall into such categories as:
- Your sexual history, in detail, including how you have related to females at all the various points in your life.
- Your personal and family history, including interpersonal relationships, sexuality, drinking, drug use, sexual abuse, how you get along with siblings, etc. (Interestingly enough, despite all the pointed questions about sex, at no point in the entire application process did anyone – including the shrink – ask me anything about same sex attraction.)
- Your educational background, job experiences, etc.
- Why do you want to be a priest?
- What do you think is the role of the parish priest?
Those are all the specific topics I can think of.
General advice:
Try to present yourself as a dewy-eyed innocent who is ready to believe absolutely anything and everything the dear fornicators … um … er … I mean, “FORMATORS” at the seminary tell you.
If you have strong (positive) opinions about Popes John Paul the Great and/or Benedict XVI, the Blessed Mother, obedience to the Magisterium, or the like, try to play them down.
Similarly, if you have strong negative opinions about abortion, the ordination of women, priestly celebacy, or the like, try to play them down as well.
In general, don’t discuss such “controversial” issues with anyone involved in the process until and unless you are certain that the person in question does not hold violently to the polar opposite view to that of yourself and the Church.
HTH,
augie
