Vocations Awareness Week

A week of celebrating vocations

National Vocations Awareness Week is held during the first full week of November each year. Below are some of the ways you can celebrate this week in your home and in your parish.

1. Hold a Holy Hour for Vocations

2. Include Vocation Awareness components at each grade level of religious education

Each grade can do a special project — some children might
interview clergy/religious and write a report

3. Include prayers for more priests and religious in the prayers of the faithful

4. Send greeting cards to each of the seminarians at the beginning of a new semester

5. Send spiritual bouquets to priests, brothers and sisters or to seminarians on special anniversaries

6. Supply material for bulletin boards

— pictures of the seminarians, the pastor or other vocation
interest materials ordered from religious orders

7. Sponsor poster/coloring/essay contests with prizes and exhibition of results

e.g. can be done with Serra, Knights of Columbus, inter-parish, or inter-school

8. Encourage interviews of pastor, priests, sisters, brothers for the school newspaper or parish bulletin

— especially on how they discerned their call

9. Include a page on the parish web site with vocation information, or listing of sites where vocational topics can be explored

10. Create a collage of photos of priests, brothers, and sisters who have come from the parish

11. Post seminarian pictures and brief bios in the church vestibule

12. Have a vocation prayer printed on refrigerator magnets and distribute to the parish

13. Coordinate regional or cluster vocation awareness afternoons, presenting area priests and religious as role models, speakers

14. Provide prayer cards for personal prayer for vocations

15. Promote the lives of the saints in various ways, e.g. in the bulletin, on the bulletin board, on posters, in a bibliography

16. Start a vocation library

17. Sponsor presentations, especially by seminarians – in the classroom, at meetings, or from the pulpit

(Arrange through the vocation office)

18. Organize a group trip to a seminary or motherhouse and pray for vocations on the way

19. Attend the ordination of a diocesan priest or a profession ceremony

20. Sponsor a supper for seminarians

i.e. with a group of high school students or adult men

21. Invite a priest to supper to discuss vocations around the family dinner table

22. Accept an invitation to accompany a religious sister for a visit of her motherhouse

23. Volunteer your services at a fundraiser or festival hosted by a religious community

24. Don’t forget to promote vocations to young people in home schooling situations

— provide materials they can use and involve them in the parish or school projects