The Somascan Fathers
“Serving Needy Youth in the World”
For five centuries the Somascans
have carried out throughout the
world St. Jerome Emiliani’s legacy:
“Work, devotion and charity are the
foundation of our activity.”
Come
CHARISMS:
• Spiritual and material care of orphans,
abandoned youth and poor
• Human and Christian education of youth
• Pastoral ministry
Join
Serve
LIFESTYLE:
• Community, Prayer, Action
Fr. Italo Dell’Oro, CRS
4419 N. Main • Houston, TX 77009
somascans@yahoo.com • www.somascans.org
St. Jerome Emiliani,
Universal Patron of Orphans and Abandoned Youth
Enter #120 at VocationMatch.com
the citizens . . . .” Once you get to
know them better, and after a few
intermediate stages of answers, you
get to the most honest answer. Not
that the other answers are false, or
bad, but you get to the best one later.
That answer is: “I really don’t know
if I can explain it: It is just something
I feel I am supposed to do.”
Ask most people in religious life
that question and you will eventually
get that exact same answer. I know it
is the best one I have, the answer of
someone responding to what God is
“I really don’t
know if I can
explain it: It is just
something I feel I am
supposed to do.”
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Enter #266 at VocationMatch.com
I serve as a police chaplain now. I
have spoken with and have ridden
along with so many officers, I have
stopped counting. They eventually
end up asking me, “Why do you
want to become a priest?” In turn
I eventually end up asking them,
“Why did you want to become a
cop?” In other words, the question
we are really asking is: “Why on
earth would you want to do something that most people in their right
mind would not even consider?”
The similarities in our answers
are simply amazing. Being a seminarian, I get asked that question all the
time. I have a few different versions
of my “vocation story.” Police officers do, too. The first answer they
give, the one they give to people they
don’t know very well, is the one that
got them hired on the police force. It
usually starts, “To protect and serve
asking them to do. That for me—
despite all the other things I was feeling
and thinking—was the one thing
that I just couldn’t get around. “It is
just something I feel I am supposed
to do.”
You’ll find out
Sometimes God can use other parts
of the Mystical Body of Christ, the
church, to reach out to others. That
is part of what Saint Paul was talking
about in 1 Corinthians 12-14. Some
members of the Body are meant to
be at the service of the others; Paul
went further to say it is the stronger
parts that must be at the service of
the weaker ones. Our strength as a
church flows from the unity we find
in the diversity of God’s gifts. God
gives all the different gifts we need;
we in love should respond to build
VISION 2009
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