Maintaining Vocations Friendly Parish Is Year-Round Job

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. - Sacred Heart Cathedral in Knoxville, Tenn., is vocations-friendly. For priests, staff and families there, helping parish youth find their calling is a year-round project.

Before each Mass, for example, Father T. Allen Humbrecht, pastor, and Father David Boettner, associate pastor, gather altar servers for a prayer for vocations. At every Mass, a petition for vocations is included in the intercessions.

Vocations to the priesthood get added encouragement. The two priests often visit the parish school to chat with students and eat lunch. Visits to the weekend religious education classes are part of their Sunday routine.

At the school, Mercy Sister Georgeanna Mankel urges students to pray for a specific priest in the diocese each day. She gives each student a brief biography and picture of the priest so that students know whom they're praying for.

Father Humbrecht, pastor at Sacred Heart only a year, claims an admirable record for assisting youth discern vocations. At least four priests in the diocese, including his associate, credit him with helping them. A fifth protégé seminarian Christian Mathis, is slated to be ordained a priest in 2000.

Father Humbrecht found a parish committed to vocations when he arrived.

The 42-year-old parish has produced one of the 17 diocesan priests ordained in the diocese's 10-year history and has two other men completing theology studies for religious orders. It's also nurtured three others who became priests when the parish was part of the Diocese of Nashville.

The young Knoxville Diocese currently has 19 men studying for the diocesan priesthood. They come from parishes of all sizes, including Christ the King Parish in Tazewell, which has just 35 families.

Sacred Heart, the diocese's largest parish, has a range of programs that help young people see the Church as more than an abstract institution.

Its grade school has 753 students, and was named a national Blue Ribbon School of Excellence in 1993. Hundreds of parishioners are involved in parish ministries. For example, more than 100 people turned out for recent Eucharistic minister training sessions. They'll not only assist at Mass, they'll also carry Communion to dozens of shut-ins on Sunday. Forty people came into the Church at the Easter Vigil Mass through the parish's Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults program.

In recent months, the parish has launched a vigorous Hispanic ministry program for Knoxville's burgeoning Spanish-speaking population. The parish has a weekly Mass in Spanish and provides classes in English as a second language.

Outreach programs range from helping the needy and homeless locally through the St. Vincent de Paul Society to raising money for a sister parish in Haiti, which a parish medical team will visit next year. Children at the parish school saved more than $1,500 in pennies to help raise money to build a girls' school in Sudan.

The parish also emphasizes good liturgy, and recently was voted by readers of a local newspaper as having the best church choir in Knoxville.

Sacred Heart's vibrant youth program hosts the annual diocesan-wide Youth Mass each September to celebrate the founding of the diocese.

Father Ragan Schriver, a son of the parish, who was ordained in 1995, says the parish and school atmosphere influenced his decision to become a priest. He cited the Sisters of Mercy who taught him and an associate pastor who came when he was in the eighth grade.

"He said his name was 'Father Mike' and that made him seem more accessible," Father Schriver said.

Father Schriver felt people behind him as he studied for the priesthood.

"I got tons of support from people in the parish," he said. "There was an awareness of who I was. People knew me, and they prayed for me."

Several parishioners said key elements to success in promoting vocations include prayer, encouragement of young people, support and prayer for seminarians, priests who are highly visible around the parish and school, good liturgy with a strong emphasis on the sacraments, vigorous outreach programs, and a good religious education program.

Father Humbrecht plans new initiatives for this Fall, among them inviting young men interested in the priesthood to once-a month dinners at the rectory.

He also plans to invite faculty from the parish school to round-table talks to share stories about how priests and religious influenced them. They will be asked to identify students they feel might have a vocation.

The parish also will start a program in which each week a family will take home a special chalice to be placed on the dining room table. At each meal, that family will pray together the prayer for vocations.

Patrick Donovan, the parish youth coordinator and a religion teacher at the school, feels that a vocations program depends on creating "a whole atmosphere of promoting an awareness of God's presence in one's life."

"Tell a child how blessed he is and help him recognize the gifts and let God work through those gifts," Donovan said. "If the vocation is there, God will do the rest. If the atmosphere is right, we can make it easy for them to hear what God wants in their lives."