Some questions are simpler and require simpler answers. Other questions are serious and need full answers. One of those questions is Why are you here?… There is no set recipe for vocational discernment; every Human Being is unique, but we can try and identify some common lines across many vocations. A deep love for Jesus Christ, a great passion for all things “Church”, a desire to help others, a calling to serve the Community and even - why not? - a desire to give witness by wearing the signs of your choice and Christ’s calling, for example, the ‘dog collar’, all intermix together. The vocational calling to the Priesthood is not loud, Jesus did not ring your mobile and say “Hello there… How about becoming a Priest?”. The calling is almost always a combination of various subtle callings, your attraction for the Church, your desire to be closer to Jesus, your will to help out those who need your help and the idea of becoming a Priest tends to sit on the back of your mind, sometimes too often for comfort.

All that is true. And yet… It doesn’t fully answer your question Why am I here?… More to the point, why are you here, given that quite evidently, you could answer the calling in another Church, even perhaps the Roman Catholic Church? So, here we touch a cornerstone of what it means to be in an independent Church and, in our case, a religious Institute within an independent Church.

Independent Churches are the answer, illuminated by the Spirit, to a reality which is centuries old, even a good thousand years old… Sometimes you want to answer that calling to become a Priest, but you do not comfortably fit the terms & conditions of that particular Church. But you still feel that calling and the desire to answer it, so you embark on a quest to find the niche where you fit well. None of this is new… The Roman Catholic Church has hundreds of religious orders and institutes precisely for the same reason, to an extent and insofar as the fundamental rules are not broken, mandatory celibacy, for example.

The point is, however, that the same phenomenon occurs on a wider scale, when even the fundamental tenets of vocational criteria require a broader response, which mainstream churches are unable to provide. So, this is where the independent Churches come into being. And this is potentially why you are here, discerning your vocation to the independent Catholic Priesthood.

The Canons Regular of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (CRSHJ for short) belong in a denominational family, known by a healthy variety of different names. Some call us Old Catholics, others call us Liberal Catholics, and a few others call us Reformed Catholics… Essentially, we are Catholics through and through, but we do not exclude gay men, same-sex marriage, divorced couples, and we do not exclude married men from the Priesthood, obviously we do not have mandatory Celibacy rules, and generally we are a welcoming and friendly bunch. Furthermore, we have jobs and work as Priests as well, we partake in all the usual ups and downs everyone else experiences. And we are Oratorians!… Once ordained, we run an Oratory, usually at Home, as a base covering the surrounding area where we exercise our ministries. At the CRSHJ, people do not walk to the Church, WE ARE the Church, WE WALK to the people.