This month, the Church in Australia, and we in the Divine Word Missionaries, celebrated National Vocations Week.This is a week to celebrate all vocations, whether to marriage, the single life, priesthood or religious life and we often forget how intertwined all those different vocations are.

Marriage, of course, is the foundational vocation from which all others flow. It is within the loving embrace of family life and faith that the other vocations may take seed and grow. When people sometimes talk of a vocations crisis in the Church, I wonder if part of the problem isn’t really a crisis of marriage and family life. If this is the case, we must do all we can to support family life and help it flourish.

In the SVD AUS Province, we are in the happy situation of having a full seminary and formation house at Dorish Maru College in Melbourne. Young men, from all around the world, have come to us for their SVD formation and we are all the richer for their presence among us. On the flip-side, it is some time since we have had a vocation from Australia or New Zealand, although we are delighted that through our mission in Thailand, we now have two young novices from our own Province joining us at Dorish Maru.

The vocation to religious life is a mysterious thing, a work of God, not something we produce ourselves. As we listen to the stories of the young men who come to us though, there is a strong common denominator, and that is that they more often than not, grew up in a family of strong faith and developed a deep, personal love for Jesus and his people, which flowered into a vocation to missionary life.

So, as we celebrate vocations this month, let’s also celebrate families, which are the bedrock of our faith, our Church, and our community and see how, in our own lives, we can offer the families we know, support and love, especially those who are doing it tough.