Family Day at Saint John's Seminary

This Sunday, many of the families and friends of our seminarians will make their way to Brighton. Our 10:30am Sunday Mass, followed by Brunch, is always open to guests and visitors. It is not uncommon for our chapel to be joyfully filled with guests and neighbors, along with a large contingent of students from nearby Boston College. But our annual tradition of Family Day brings with it the particular joy of offering hospitality to those who love our seminarians the most: their parents, brothers, and sisters.

Addressing a gathering of seminarians in 2018, Pope Francis reflected, “Many of us, when we entered the seminary or the house of formation, were shaped by the faith of our families or neighbors. This is how we took our first steps…Do not lose your remembrance and respect for those who taught you how to pray.”

It’s hard to overstate the formative influence of family. Each of us are shaped in significant ways by the unchosen bonds of our family of origin. At its best, a family is an experience in microcosm of that greater communion to which we are all called as sons and daughters of the Father, adopted into the life of grace through Baptism. Families, insofar as they are composed of human beings, are also where we experience the realities of sin, limitation, and the necessity of asking for and extending forgiveness.

When a person takes a step forward to embrace the possibility of a sacred vocation, this inevitably has implications for their family. Given the countercultural nature of a vocation in the contemporary context, families can have questions and concerns. Most of them coalesce around a primary misgiving, motivated by love: “How can my son or brother possibly be happy if he spends his life in this way?”

The first and best answer we can offer is a simple one: “Come and see!” The invitation of Family Day is not just to tour a building but to meet a community of men who have come to know that the Lord is good. In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, “Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ – and you will find true life.”