Family Day this year has stayed with me in the quietest way. What stood out were the sights and encounters: a young man standing a little taller because his mother had her hand on his shoulder, and a father leaning in to hear a chapter of his son’s vocation story he had never quite found the words for at home. One conversation really sticks with me. After Mass a woman, a grandmother I assume, took my hand and said, “I have prayed for this day since he was seven.” In that moment I saw the long, hidden labor of love that no classroom or evaluation can measure.
Watching our good men with their families and friends revealed to me how vocations are almost never solitary. They are received, tested, and steadied by people who loved them first - parents who taught them to pray, siblings who keep them honest, aunts and uncles who still remember the anniversary of a baptism. The day made visible the living web that was already forming these men long before they walked through our doors.
Family Day reminds us that a priest is never formed apart from the Church’s first school, the family home and one’s circle of friends and mentors. A man does not leave his people behind when he enters seminary. He learns, with them, how to belong more deeply to the whole Body of Christ. Their accompaniment does not end at the threshold. It continues in letters never shown, in sacrifices never mentioned, in the quiet “we are with you” that a man carries into prayer and, God willing, into his life as a Catholic priest.
What I saw that day offered me a new perspective on formation: a seminarian introducing his parents with a mixture of pride and shyness; a little sister tugging at a cassock and being lifted up; men serving one another’s families as naturally as they serve at the altar. That is formation, our work - hearts being widened, not only minds being instructed.
Weeks later the ripple remains. Conversations at table are a little more human and men speak of their roots with less apology and more gratitude, and a few have asked how they might pray more faithfully for the people who first believed in their call. The house feels, in a quiet way, more like a family home! Also, having so many young men and women in the chapel and through the hallways that Sunday reminded me that the Lord Jesus is still calling us back to his Heart.
Looking back, I believe the Lord has made clear to us that a priest is a son before he is a father, that family is not an interruption of vocation but one of its first teachers, and that the mission of Saint John’s Seminary is not to take men from their homes but to help them become the kind of priests who can make every parish feel like home!
In this first year as rector, that day was a gift I did not know I needed. It told me, again, that this is the most tremendous life - and that none of us walks it alone!
+Bishop Reed
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Most Reverend Robert P. Reed
Bishop Robert P. Reed, a native of Boston, was born in 1959 to the late William and Jeanne Reed, the youngest of five children. He received his early education at St. John’s Preparatory School in Danvers, Massachusetts, before beginning his priestly formation at St. John Seminary in Brighton. He continued his studies in Rome at the Pontifical North American College, earning advanced degrees from the Pontifical Gregorian University and the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum).
In addition to his theological training, Bishop Reed pursued studies in television management at Boston University’s College of Communication, blending his pastoral calling with a deep interest in television and digital media.
Ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Boston in 1985, he served as pastor of seven parishes over the course of his ministry. In 2016, he was consecrated a bishop and appointed Regional Bishop for the West Region of the Archdiocese of Boston.
Bishop Reed is President of The CatholicTV Network and CEO of its parent organization, iCatholic Media, Inc., which encompasses a parish bulletin service, a printing company, and The Pilot—the nation’s oldest continuously published Catholic newspaper.
He previously chaired the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Communications and currently serves on the Board of Directors of Catholic Relief Services (CRS) as well as the Board of Governors for the Pontifical North American College in Rome.
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