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Volunteers weave fellowship, camouflage nets in Ukrainian church

Posted on by Catholic News Service

In the basement of a church in western Ukraine, far from the most ferocious Russian attacks, residents and displaced people contribute to the war effort by weaving camouflage nets, baking vareniki dumplings and making rosaries.

“We’re not just weaving good luck charms for the guys; we are weaving the country together,” said Lyudmila, who fled the battered Kharkiv region and now weaves camouflage netting for the Ukrainian military.

Sitting in front of a wood frame where she threads green, khaki and brown scraps of fabric around plastic netting to shield military vehicles and positions, Lyudmila said she and the other volunteers put their hearts and their longing for their hometowns into each motion.

Father Mykyta Ovchar, one of the Incarnate Word priests at the Church of Christ the King in Ivano-Frankivsk, said, “When our nation is at war, we cannot just stand by.”

While the soldiers take up weapons, he said, others take up prayer, which is one reason why rosary making is one of the projects locals and displaced people are engaged in.

“We weave, make rosaries and pray, pray for our defenders, pray for our children,” Lyudmila said.

Oleksiy, who also fled from the Kharkiv region where he worked at the Institute of Animal Husbandry, cuts and snips the fabric the women use to weave through the netting.

“Our houses and industrial buildings have been destroyed by shelling by Russian troops,” he said, but the people of Ivano-Frankivsk have been welcoming and helping with the nets lets him work with his hands and contribute to the defense of his country.

He said he hopes to return home one day soon, but so much of what existed in eastern Ukraine has been destroyed.

“It doesn’t make much sense,” he said. “These are the apartments of peaceful citizens, which do not have any military function.”

Irina volunteers making vareniki, the traditional dumplings, which are packed in boxes and delivered to the troops.

“We hope that this will somehow lift their spirits, their fighting spirit, knowing that they are cared about,” she said.

As they bake, or cut fabric, or weave nets or string rosary beads, the volunteers also find camaraderie in the church basement.

They drink tea and sing Ukrainian folk songs or hymns.

“We are united, and we believe that our love, our warmth will bring us closer to victory,” Lyudmila said.

Vocationists await canonization of founder

Posted on by Cori Urban

As the cause for canonization of Blessed Giustino Maria Russolillo, an Italian priest who founded the Society of Divine Vocations for men and the Vocationist Sisters, advances, members of the society in Vermont look forward to celebrating “with everyone in the world when the Church officially declares him as a saint.”

That is how Vocationist Father Rijo Johnson, pastor of Mater Dei Parish in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, describes the anticipation.

Pope Francis advanced the sainthood cause of Blessed Russolillo in October during a meeting with Cardinal-designate Marcello Semeraro, prefect of the Congregation for Saints’ Causes.

He approved the miracle needed for the canonization of Blessed Russolillo, who was born in 1891 and died in 1955.

“He is our father of the congregation and we are his children. He was a very humble priest,” Father Johnson said.

The miracle attributed to Blessed Russolillo related to a young Vocationist seminarian, Jean Emile. In 2016 he was hospitalized and suffered from a variety of maladies including seizures and respiratory failure. Vocationists throughout the world prayed to “Father Justin” [as Blessed Russolillo is known in English] for his healing.

On April 18, 2016, a Vocationist brother brought the image of Blessed Father Justin with his relic to Jean Emilie’s hospital room, and by April 21, the young man’s condition had improved. He was released from the hospital on May 3 without any side effects.

Members of the Vocationists now wait for Pope Francis to authorize the publication of the decree that officially will recognize this miracle to be through the intercession of their beloved founder.

“We know we need more vocations in the Diocese of Burlington. We need to pray for vocations more than before,” Father Johnson said. “Now, we are going to receive a saint who lead those prayers for vocations in the Universal Church. … He absolutely fulfills the invitation of our Jesus in Matthew 9:38: ‘So ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest.’”

For more information about the Vocationists, go to vocationist.net.

Vocationist pastor enjoys multi-faceted ministry in Northeast Kingdom

Posted on by Cori Urban

The Carmelite nuns taught Father Rijo Johnson when he was a boy in India, often having him and other students read aloud from the bible. One day a priest came in and heard him reading a passage and said, “You’re reading from the Holy Bible. Do you want to read the Gospel?”

It is the priest who reads from the Gospel at Mass, and that was his way of asking the boy if he wanted to be a priest. “I said yes!” enthused Father Johnson, now a Vocationist priest serving as pastor of Mater Dei Parish based in Newport.

It’s the first time he recalls thinking about becoming a priest, but not the first time he recognized the importance of what a priest does.

His mother was Catholic, his father was not. So it was his mother who brought him and his twin brother to Mass each week. The three of them were sitting at the back of the church when the priest was consecrating the Eucharist. “I really wanted to see the Eucharist, so she lifted me up,” Father Johnson recalled is boyhood self saying. “I always wanted to see Jesus in the Holy Eucharist.”

He remembers as a young teen the feeling that the Eucharist “was like a magnet” pulling him toward it during the consecration.

Born in 1981 in Kerala, India, Father Johnson applied to the seminary after the 10th grade, hoping to be a diocesan priest there. But of the 250 boys at a vocation camp he attended, only 25 could be chosen to pursue the diocesan priesthood; the next 25 were deemed to have a vocation but referred to religious orders because of capacity constraints.

He was in the second group and directed toward the Society of Divine Vocations and came to the United States as a seminarian in 2001. He was ordained for the priesthood in the religious order in 2008 in Newark, New Jersey.

Father Johnson served as a parish priest in Newark and in Patterson, New Jersey, before his religious superior offered him a choice of an assignment in Florida or in Vermont. He leaned toward the warmer climate he preferred in Florida but asked the superior to choose for him, and he was assigned to Vermont. “Whatever the superior or the bishop gives is the best choice,” he said with a smile, adding that he had wanted to “totally surrender” to God’s will in the matter.

A bi-ritual priest of the Roman Catholic and Syro-Malabar rites, Father Johnson became pastor of Mater Dei in 2017.

There he has a multi-faceted ministry, serving churches in Newport, Derby Line and Island Pond with two other Vocationist priests. He happily shows a mug listing the seven Corporal Works of Mercy, noting that Mater Dei Parish is somehow engaged in each.

For example, he visits prisoners at Northwest State Correctional Facility. “I used to be scared” to go into the prison, Father Johnson said, but he has seen that “everyone has good” in them.

Before the pandemic, the parish had a 5-person team of clergy and laity that took turns visiting the prison, no one ever alone. With a 2-hour-a-week commitment, their visit included Mass, bible study, singing, confession, sacramental preparation and visiting.

Though the offering remains the same post-Covid, the number of volunteers has decreased, and Father Johnson is hoping to increase the team’s number from its current one priest and one layman who visit weekly.

Father Johnson is excited about his ministry that also includes sacramental work, visits to the sick and serving as dean. “You’re not doing it for humans,” he said. “You’re doing it for God.”

His cousin, Father Ninto Kannampuzha, a Vocationist priest in India, was inspired by Father Johnson to become a priest, though Father Johnson never knew it until his cousin’s ordination when the bishop mentioned it. “I was shocked. I never thought I’d be such an influence,” Father Johnson said. There is also a seminarian in India who has credited him with influencing his priestly vocation.

Because it can be difficult for Americans who are not familiar with the accents of an Indian priest, Father Johnson has begun to trade parishes for a weekend with other priests of the Diocese of Burlington so that other parishes become familiar with international priests. So far he has switched Masses with Father Scott Gratton and Father Dwight Baker, native sons of Mater Dei Parish.

An additional benefit, he said, is that their Mater Dei parish family members have had the opportunity to attend a Mass celebrated by one of their own. “That promotes vocations,” said Father Johnson who believes “God brings people to church, I just open the door.”

Among his hobbies, Father Johnson enjoys photography, working on the parish website, bible study, blogging about the bible, dining out and boating.

“You can do your job or you can love your job,” he said, making it clear he loves what he does, but it is not simply a job. “It’s a ministry. … You find your passion in it.”

—Originally published in the Winter 2022 issue of Vermont Catholic magazine.

 

Vocational discernment

Posted on by Father Jon Schnobrich

This is a list of nine steps in discerning a vocation provided by Father Jon Schnobrich, vocations director for the Diocese of Burlington.

 

Step 1: Understanding “discernment”

What is vocational discernment?

Vocation comes from the Latin word “vocare,” which means “to call.” God calls each one of us by name to become saints, thereby the first vocation in our lives is the universal call to holiness: “Be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect” (Mt 5:48).

How do perfection and holiness relate to each other? Let’s understand what our Lord means by “perfect” as that word today is so unfortunately misunderstood. Being perfect is not perfectionism.

This call to be perfect comes as the climax in our Lord’s teaching on Christian love: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for He makes His sun rise on the bad and the good and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what recompense will you have? Do not the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brothers only, what is unusual about that? Do not the pagans do the same? So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect (Mt 5:43-48).”

Jesus points to the Father’s love, which is without calculation or condition. The Father loves in truth with mercy. He loves sinners and saints alike. To freely conform one’s life, one’s inner attitudes and one’s way of thinking so as to love unconditionally and mercifully is the holiness of life to which our Lord calls all of His disciples without distinction.

However, to love like this means to love in the way that God reveals. God is love, which means that we as creatures look to our creator to define love. To love as God loves, as St. Thomas Aquinas explains, is to will the good of the other for the other; to desire another to flourish in their being. The perfection to which Jesus calls us relates to holiness of life precisely in love. Love conforms itself to its object; thereby the more we love God who is love, the more we become like God who is love.

To put it simply: If God is love, the more we love love, the more we are able to love as love loves.

The universal call to holiness is the call from Christ through His Church to become fully who God intended us to be. In the words of St. Irenaeus of Lyon, “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.” Because Christ is holy, we, His body, are called to strive each day for the sanctification of our lives, the integration of all that we are into all that Christ is: “Each in his own state of life, tend to the perfection of love, thus helping others grow in holiness” (“Lumen Gentium,” 5, 39). Every disciple is called to perfect love, to love the way the Father loves.

 

Step 2: Desire

Made in God’s image and likeness, each of us has a heart filled with desires created by God and for God. We desire the fullness of life. We desire an eternal love. We desire happiness. We desire to make a gift of ourselves to others. But as much as we feel the intensity of these desires at different moments, Jesus desires them for us even more. Yet, here’s the catch — our desires have to be ordered to God’s will with trust that God always knows what is best for us (see Luke 11:11-13). The prayer of one discerning sounds like, “Lord, help me to want what you want for my life. God, what do you desire for me?” In the discerning heart, trusting in the goodness of the Father opens us to receive whatever He wants for us, through which God reveals Himself.

 

Step 3: Trust

Love is not discovered but received as a gift, and just as every vocation is a call to love, it always comes as a gift from Jesus. To receive this gift, one must trust God from his or her heart. The place where Jesus will ask you to trust Him is wherever you are consciously aware of a reality beyond you (see Matthew 14:22-33). You can’t figure it out; it’s beyond your ability to control. Just like St. Peter being called by Jesus to step out of the boat onto the water during the raging storm, the Lord calls us to trust Him when we are confronted with those realities that are “beyond,” like living celibately or committing to one person totally until death. This classroom of dependence is where God teaches the discerning heart to trust and allows us to experience His great providence caring for us.

 

Step 4: Patience

Rarely is one’s vocation realized in a single moment of inspiration. Instead, it’s revealed to us over time as we grow in our relationship with Jesus. This can feel frustrating at times; we may find ourselves anxious and looking into the future beyond what we know and understand. But God simply wants us to trust Him and to take the next step. St. Ignatius of Loyola did not set out on his life journey with the intention of founding the Society of Jesus. He did, however, nurture his relationship with Jesus, and he realized that acting on what he knew God wanted him to do at that point in time resulted in more peace than dwelling on what he thought God might want him to do in the future. God’s will becomes known to us over time, and patience is accepting this truth.

 

Step 5: Peace

In the presence of Christ, there is peace. Our task is to realize this peace and to desire it. This was Christ’s first wish for us after His resurrection when He said to the disciples, “Peace be with you” (Jn 20:19). If peace, stillness, clarity and gratitude are the interior experiences and feelings one can use to describe a certain situation or decision one is faced with, that person can be confident that Christ is revealing Himself through those experiences and feelings.

 

Step 6: Fear is not of God

Just as there are experiences of God, there are also feelings like fear, pressure and confusion that are not of God. These can arise during busy and stressful times when our wants can become confused with God’s will. During the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus faced the decision to escape His passion or to enter into it. He prayed, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me; still, not my will but yours be done” (Lk 22:42). In the world’s most decisive moment, Jesus turned to prayer and discerned the Father’s will. Through prayer, the sacraments and attentiveness to our interior experiences, we can determine which paths in life are of God and which paths are of the spirit against Christ.

 

Step 7: One With God’s Will

Sometimes we find ourselves asking God for a sign to help us know what God wants for us. However, God has already given us all the “tools” necessary to discern God’s will. The thoughts, feelings and desires we have while we experience peace and stillness in the presence of Christ are God’s thoughts, feelings and desires. By the same token, feelings that flow from fear, pressure and confusion are not of God — they stem from a false belief or lie. To tell where one’s thoughts and desires come from is discernment, and when we do this, our will becomes one with God’s.

 

Step 8: Saying ‘Yes’

Once we realize God’s will through peace during prayer and the sacraments, it’s essential to hold onto it. Remembering His will allows us not only to say “yes” to Christ in other moments of peace but to also say “no” to beliefs and desires that arise from a place of fear and confusion, which are not of God. St. Augustine spent years saying “no” to beliefs and desires that were of God’s will and saying “yes” to his own beliefs that he formed based on the spirit against Christ. This led to years of confusion and a life without direction. He summarized life perfectly when he said, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” After encountering God, St. Augustine repeatedly said “yes” to God’s will and found his vocation.

 

Step 9: Hearing Christ Through The Church

Every vocation must be confirmed by the Catholic Church. Therefore, Christ not only speaks to each individual human heart but also through the heart of His bride, the Church. For those called to the priesthood, this means that Christ’s desire be made clear not only through the man discerning but through those appropriate superiors like the bishop, the seminary rector and the vocation director who can speak with the Church’s authority about one’s particular journey of discernment.

 

For more information, visit the Vocations webpage.

— This article was originally published as a series in Vermont Catholic magazine.

Vocation story: Edmundite Father David Cray

Posted on by Cori Urban

As a priest, Father David Cray for years did not live and minister in the New England culture into which he was born and in which he lived before entering the Society of St. Edmund during college.

He lived mostly in Canada, Europe and the American South until he came to Vermont to serve as pastor of St. Jude Church in Hinesburg and Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Charlotte in 2003.

“The benefit of living in more than one culture is you realize there are very few absolutes apart from God,” he said.

Born into an Irish Catholic family in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston in 1945, he is the youngest of the three children of John F. Cray, a high school Latin teacher, and Alice M. Kernan Cray, who worked in the Boston Public Library.

He smiles when he says that he grew up in a “religious theme park,” because in his immediate neighborhood was the Maryknoll Brothers novitiate, the Daughters of St. Paul motherhouse and novitiate, the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent orphanage and the Greek Orthodox Church seminary.

Because he lived a distance from his parish and parish school, he attended public school but got to know many of his religious neighbors, skating in the park with Maryknoll Brothers or building a tree house on their property, for example.

Sometimes he and his friends would be playing outside when one would suggest going into the Maryknoll chapel to pray the Stations of the Cross. “The religious aspect was part of our lives,” he said.

He graduated from Boston Latin School in 1963 and enrolled at St. Michael’s College in Colchester; his family had ties to Bellows Falls, and he liked the idea of studying in Vermont at a Catholic college where he attended daily Mass.

He intended to become and English teacher, but during his sophomore year, his plans changed as he prepared for study in Europe during his junior year.

In the process of planning with the dean of students, Father Francis Gokey, the Edmundite priest asked him what he intended to do after college. When he replied, “teach,” Father Gokey asked him if he had ever thought of the similarity between teaching and preaching.

Young David Cray got the hint.

He told his friends what Father Gokey had said, and they agreed he’d make a good priest. “Father Gokey sparked and fostered my vocation,” he said.
David Cray entered the Edmundite novitiate and graduated from St. Michael’s in 1968 then studied theology at the University of St. Michael’s College in Toronto, earning a master of divinity degree in 1971.

Burlington Bishop John A. Marshall ordained him to the priesthood in 1972, and his first assignment was as parochial vicar of St. Edmund of Canterbury Parish in Whitton in southwest London, a parish staffed by the Society of St. Edmund.

Father Cray lived in Burlington where he served as director of scholastics for the society and later as secretary general, and he lived in Mystic, Conn., where he was the order’s director of novices.

He served parishes — some years two at once — in Quebec and was episcopal vicar for the English-speaking region in the Diocese of Saint-Jean–Longueuil where, for two years he was a pastor in Greenfield Park.

From Canada he was transferred to Selma, Ala., to serve as programs director of the Society of St. Edmund’s Southern Mission, and from there moved to New Orleans to be president of Bishop Perry Middle School.

Now living in Charlotte, Father Cray said through his experiences outside Vermont he learned what it is like to be in a minority. In England he worked with a religious minority — Catholics — and in Quebec he worked with an English-speaking minority in a French-speaking province in an English-speaking country. In Selma and in New Orleans he worked with the African American population, a minority group in the United States. He lived in a Black community and was in the white minority.

He became accustomed to living as part of a minority population, and he earned a master of theology degree from Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans with a concentration in Black Pastoral Theology.

“I have benefitted tremendously from living in cultures that are not the culture I was brought up in,” Father Cray said. “I lived in cultures that would be foreign to me if I had not lived there and been integrated into them.”

Commenting on the racial and religious tensions that grab headlines almost daily, Father Cray said such division creates an atmosphere that legitimizes racism and violence. “Hate breeds hate. Nasty breeds nasty,” he said.

“You can change the tone of the conversation in your circle of friends and family,” he suggested. “You don’t have to keep intensifying the atmosphere and feelings of alienation, of division, of hatred.  If you do, it just gets worse.”

Emphasizing that all persons are children of God, Father Cray said, “God has given us all one single origin and calls us all to be one single human family.”

Living in different cultures has broadened his perspective and enriched his life. “Division and violence come out of not knowing. When you do not know, have no awareness of or acquaintance with people who are completely different from you, you fear them. When you get to know people and appreciate people, you come to love them, and you don’t fear them.”

A member of the Society of St. Edmund, which is celebrating its 175th anniversary, Father Cray said he has served in various places and cultures because of his vow of obedience. “It is important to discern God’s will and be obedient to it,” he said.

— Originally published in the Winter 2017 issue of Vermont Catholic magazine.

Vocation Night

Posted on by Submitted Article

St. Mary Church in St. Albans hosted a Vocation Night Nov. 10. Pam King, the parish catechetical leader there, was the main organizer. Some 60 attendees, mostly young people, spent some time in prayer, shared a meal and heard from James Dodson, Sister Paul Mary FSE, a married couple and a deacon about vocations and hearing God’s call. “It was really well done with a great turnout. I’d love to see this replicated by others around the Diocese,” said Deacon Phil Lawson, executive director of pastoral ministries for the Diocese of Burlington.