BY KATHI STEARNS

Staff Writer

ATLANTA--The influence of family upon vocations, the importance of promoting cultural diversity in vocations and the restoration of personal focus upon Jesus Christ were discussed during a weekend hosted by Atlanta's two Serra Clubs.

The Serra International District 18 Convention held Oct. 11-13 at the Harvey Hotel featured five priests and one Religious working in the Archdiocese of Atlanta, those in the discernment process and parents of those who have pursued religious vocations.

Father John Hopkins, LC, chaplain at St. Pius X High School in Atlanta, discussed the role of his parents in fostering vocations. Father Hopkins was ordained to the priesthood Jan. 3, 1991 by Pope John Paul II along with his two brothers, Father Peter Hopkins, LC, and Father Edward Hopkins, LC. His sister, Catherine Marie Hopkins, OP, is principal of Overbrook Academy in Nashville, Tenn., where she serves as vocations director for her order.

"When people hear about all the vocations in our family they think I must come from a very weird family," Father Hopkins said. "They wonder if we had to genuflect before we entered our home and if we blessed ourselves with holy water on the way in and out. But if those people had grown up with us they would know that we were really a very normal family. We grew up skiing and playing lacrosse and hockey. We got ourselves into trouble like most other young men and women. We were not a picture perfect family."

Father Hopkins said that he thought his older brother Peter was a little crazy when he entered the seminary. "I just didn't understand," he said. "All I knew was that he was away from home and I didn't like that. My attitude toward his vocation was very critical. I kept wondering why was he ruining his life."

One weekend his brother invited Father Hopkins to visit him at the Legionaries of Christ Seminary in Connecticut. "I was blown away," Father Hopkins said. "I never had seen a seminary before, much less a group of seminarians. I saw men who were in love with Jesus Christ. They were excited about their faith and about going before the Blessed Sacrament; they were excited about having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. These men were going to give their entire lives for the new evangelization, and it was catching. These men had a deep interior peace and joy. You could see it in their eyes. It was something I realized I didn't have."

A weekend after his visit Father Hopkins attended a party and talked to his girlfriend about his observations. "I was going on and on about what a worthwhile thing my brother was doing. After about 10 minutes of this my girlfriend turned to me and said, 'If you think that the priesthood is so worthwhile, why don't you become a priest?' The room erupted in laughter. The thought of Hopkins being a priest was hilarious to everybody."

Two months later Father Hopkins met with the vocations director for the order, but told him he was convinced he did not have a priestly vocation.

"I told him that since freshman year in high school I had not missed a dance," he said. "Since freshman year in high school I had not missed a party. Since freshman year in high school I had not gone three weeks without a girlfriend. God wouldn't have made me this way if he wanted me to be a priest."

The vocations director looked at him and told him that all of the above actions were normal and that the first prerequisite for being a priest was being normal.

He spent the summer in a discernment program for the order. "I said, 'Lord, I don't want this thing, but I feel it is for me so I am just going to trust in you. A vocation to the priesthood is the greatest thing in the world; if I have it I want to take care of it.' I went into the chapel, and I made that leap of faith. Once I had made that decision it was like being hit with a ton of bricks; I realized that I could never be happy being anything other than a priest. Was I scared? Yes, but I had an interior peace that I had never felt before. It was the peace that I had seen in the other seminarians' eyes."

Father Hopkins listed a number of attitudes his parents demonstrated which fostered religious vocations. They were, first of all, role models in their authentic love for Jesus Christ, he said. Each loved his spouse, believed that individuals could change the world and showed that both sacrifice and generosity were necessary in family life. He also stressed the importance of having a father who was excited about his faith and time spent praying together as a family. His parents set high standards for their children, helped them establish good relationships with priests and Religious and supported their vocations whatever they were.

"My parents didn't do anything extraordinary," Father Hopkins said. "They had a passion for Jesus Christ. They lived their faith in every aspect of their life. They knew that without Christ they could do nothing. From a young age I remember my dad receiving Communion and trembling when he received the Body of Christ. I watched him so immersed in prayer that I had no doubt that Christ was there as I watched him shake before the true presence of Jesus Christ his creator."

Father Hopkins said that it is critical for fathers to spend time with children. In today's culture a father's responsibilities in the workplace sometimes seem to outweigh their responsibilities at home. "We are in a crisis of manhood today," he said. "If fathers are not excited about their faith and do not transmit that faith and that excitement to their children, why should kids consider the religious life? Most children grow up saying, 'I want to be like dad.' Moms are usually more naturally religious; they are the heart of the family. But they can't do it alone because it is a two person job."

"When people hear about the number of vocations in my family they say, 'Your mom must be a saint.' She is a great woman who has had an incredibly profound effect on my life, and I love her dearly--but I wanted to be like my dad. I believe my vocation came from my dad."

After lunch Father Richard Lopez, who teaches religion to high school students at St. Pius X, discussed contemporary vocations and the role of Serrans.

Father Lopez told members of the Serra Clubs that they must forget themselves and remain focused on Jesus. "The first thing I would say to you today is that we don't have a crisis in vocations," he said, "we have a crisis anytime we forget Christ. The more we neglect him, the greater the crisis and the greater the fear about the future of religious vocations in the Church becomes."

Using a personal example, Father Lopez said he was preaching at his parish one day when he noticed Atlanta Braves pitcher Tom Glavine in the congregation.

"Once I saw him a wave of self-consciousness overtook me," he said. "I kept wondering if I had remembered to comb my hair; I'm at the age where I sometimes forget to do that because I'm so indifferent to my appearance...And then I started to think about my homily and I began to panic. I had been working on this sermon for a whole week and I feel asleep practicing it--that's how boring it really was! I had this image of Tom Glavine in the Braves dugout talking to Javier Lopez asking him if he was related to that boring priest at St. Andrew's. As this wave of self-consciousness came over me, I turned around and saw something that made me as humiliated as I was self-conscious. I saw the tabernacle. I thought to myself, 'Lopez, you fraud. You jerk! You're worried about those 1,000 people in front of you while behind you is the Christ, the master of the universe in the consecrated host.'...The more I thought about impressing others, the more nervous I got and the more I thought about myself. But when I remembered the person of Jesus Christ, I forgot about myself and thought about him; then I was at peace."

Father Lopez said teaching experiences have shown him how relativism and "indifferent-ism" sap the strength of religion and religious vocations, as they lead people away from the truth.

"Relativism says there is no objective truth except in science; all religion is personal opinion. So, I ask my students, 'Do you think I'd be a celibate priest because of an opinion?' The only reason any man or woman in his right mind would embrace poverty, celibacy and obedience would be if he found someone greater than possessions, marriage, family and independence, and hungered to share that person with others."

Father Lopez said he likewise challenges his students to fight "indifferent-ism," the attitude that it doesn't matter what one believes because all religions are the same. "I say to them, 'Let me put you in a time machine and drop you into the Coliseum where you could whisper into the ears of the martyrs as they are being ripped apart, saying, It doesn't really matter what you believe---all religion is the same.'"

He said Serrans would need to be faith-filled, holy and courageous to meet the challenge of vocations within the Catholic faith. "Love and know the truth called Christ and the Catholic faith; package it with holiness so that others can see the charm of God so the truth will not be wasted; and accept suffering just like Christ did for us to give life to vocations throughout the world," he said.

Father Richard Wise, pastor of Sts. Peter and Paul Church, Decatur, addressed the cultural diversity in priestly vocations.

Father Wise said that children often ask him what Jesus looks like. "Those images we see of Jesus are reflective of our own particular culture. They result from our own perceptions of God, how we fear God and the qualities of virtue that we've projected upon him because of our own experiences," Father Wise said. "But in reality the Lord Jesus was very much a man of his own time. He was probably a brown-skinned individual with dreadlocks and big broad hands accustomed to lifting lumber. He very likely offered prayers with loud cries before the sanctuary as was the custom of his day. If we are to understand who Jesus is through the eyes of the people who knew him, we have to step back from our own particular culture and see Jesus as he was known to his followers."

Father Wise said that six years ago the Church in Africa had over 72 million Catholics, over 200,000 catechists and over 10,000 seminarians. In Central America there were 117 million Catholics, over 13,000 catechists and over 15,000 seminarians. In North America there are over 64 million Catholics, 2 million baptisms and 3,172 seminarians. "If we are really looking at where the Catholics are, the continent of Africa is more Catholic than the United States of America. We have to be very careful when we use the word minority because North American Catholics are the minority in a world-wide sense."

Father Wise told the Serrans that to increase cultural diversity in priestly vocations they should celebrate diverse cultures at archdiocesan liturgies, accept the transcendent nature of culture, encourage vocations among those working in lay ministries, work to establish unity between cultures as new cultures appear, facilitate cultural exchanges between parishes and develop an appreciation of Catholicity and the universal Church.

"The church is Catholic because Christ is present in her," Father Wise said citing the Catechism of the Catholic Church. "Where there is Christ Jesus there is the Catholic Church. The Church was in this fundamental sense Catholic on the day of Pentecost and will always be so until the day of the parousia."

Father Pat Bishop, pastor of the Church of the Transfiguration, Marietta, spoke from his heart as he discussed "Priests and Religious In The Years Ahead."

"I think religious life as you and I have known it in the past is probably gone," Father Bishop said. "The Holy Spirit is molding a whole new religious life experience that will serve the Church very well in its time. So if you trust the Holy Spirit, you will not really be afraid of what may happen."

He said the expectations of the institutional church can be overwhelming to the individual priest or Religious. Without the continued development of his personal prayer life, a priest can become more and more susceptible to the pressures of his ministry.

Equally important, according to Father Bishop, is that the priest of today and tomorrow must be in tune with the daily struggles of people.

"I worry about kids who go into the seminary with a romantic idea of ministry and the priesthood that harkens back to the days of Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's," Father Bishop said. "It wasn't realistic or representative in the '40s and '50s, and it is certainly not true in the '90s. If guys go around pretending that these are the good old days and are not attuned to what is going on today, American Catholics will leave them behind and the priest will become a dinosaur. And that worries me to death."

"The priest of tomorrow, much more than the priest of today, has to be an idealist. It is so easy to get discouraged. Don't get me wrong; I love my priesthood. But there are very few mornings when I get up and wonder, 'Do I really want to do this?' It takes commitment"

"We've gone through some very painful times. It takes an act of faith to put on this Roman collar and go out in public," he said. "You have got to be a person who holds onto your dreams and ideals and can remember how things used to be and have the determination that they can be that way again. We don't need any cynics. We don't need the faint-hearted. We need guys who are willing to stand up and say, 'I'm doing this for the Lord Jesus Christ and I'm committed to him in the family that is the Roman Catholic Church.'"

The weekend also featured two panel discussions focused on vocations. Msgr. Donald Kenny, director of vocations and pastor of St. Joseph's, Marietta, moderated a panel of two men and one woman who are in the process of discernment about their individual vocations. Msgr. Kenny discussed the success of Atlanta's archdiocesan vocations program which currently has 63 candidates pursuing ordination to the priesthood.

Deacon Alfred Mitchell, vicar of deacons, moderated another panel discussion featuring family members of priests and Religious. The panel included Bill Kingery, father of Father Pat Kingery, pastor of St. Bernadette's Church, Cedartown, and Michael Kingery, a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Atlanta; John and Evelyn Euart, parishioners at Our Lady of the Assumption, Atlanta, and parents of Sister Sharon Euart, RSM, associate general secretary of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops; Jo Anne Calsetta, mother of seminarian J. Scott Carlyle, and a candidate for the Mercy nuns.

Sister Rita Adele Comber, SNDdeN, a teacher at St. Thomas More School, Decatur, also discussed family values and the educational system.

The Serra Clubs are lay Catholic organizations whose primary purpose is to pray for religious vocations while supporting priests, Religious and seminarians in various ways.