It’s a conversation you never anticipated having with your child…You want to do what?

Finding out that your child wants to enter religious life can be surprise.  (At least it was for some of us.)  It’s not that you’re not proud and pleased, you’ve always said you’d support your children in their choices.  But…religious life?  You’d never really thought of that as an option.  And now your son or daughter is telling you they’re discerning a vocation.

You’re probably going to have a lot of questions like:

What the heck is a vocation?

Who pays for seminary?

How long is this going to last?

What about grandkids?

Will my child be unhappy?

What is the seminary like?

Am I going to lose my child to the church?

Don’t priests come from super holy families — the kind that pray the rosary three times a day, never miss daily Mass and are on the fast track to sainthood?

(We can answer the last one — at least for ourselves — we definitely aren’t families of saints.  Many of us are ordinary Catholics and you wouldn’t give us a second thought if you saw us at Sunday Mass.)

A vocation is a journey, not an event.  And it is a journey that will touch the whole family.

Seminarian Parents is a place for parents to find answers and share their stories.  We are the parents and siblings of students in various stages of the vocation journey.  We have a page of questions and answers, links to helpful resources, parent’s stories, and an on-going blog.  If you’d like to share your story (as a seminarian, parent, sibling, vocations director or religious), we’d love to hear from you.  (If you have questions we haven’t answered, please ask and we’ll do our best.  You can contact us at seminarianparents@gmail.com.

We look forward to sharing the journey!