Tag Archives: debt

General interest

Supporting Tomorrow’s Vocations Today

Leave a comment

Still looking to make an end-of-the-year donation to support the Church and especially vocations? You might want to consider the Mater Ecclesiae Fund for Vocations.

The Mater Ecclesiae Fund for Vocations assists men and women to follow God’s call to service in the Church through a life of consecration. They operate the St. Joseph Student Debt Relief Grant Program for religious life and the St. John Vianney Student Debt Relief Grant Program for the parish priesthood.

These grants eliminate the delay many young people encounter as they struggle to pay off their student debts before they can enter religious life. A grant pays candidates’ student loan payments while they are in formation for either religious life or the priesthood.

We have profiled this organization on a previous occasion, but we wanted to make a special appeal to our readers based on this message that appears on their website:

We have received 43 applications for our 2012 grant awards. The student loans held by these applicants totals $1.6 million. The annual cost of issuing grants to all applicants would be $216,000. It would be a small miracle if we could meet just one fifth of this demand. A miracle made possible by the generosity of you and our other donors. Please pray to the Lord of the Harvest for a big miracle and consider continuing or increasing your generosity towards the work of enabling vocations.

For more information as to how you may financially assist young men and women who are considering religious vocations, visit Mater Ecclesiae’s site today!

General interest

Funding Vocations

Leave a comment

A few days ago I received in the mail the newsletter of the Mater Ecclesiae Fund for Vocations (MEFV). I remember when Corey and Katherine Huber were going public with the MEFV about five years ago. It seemed like a very good idea then; it seems like a great idea now.

What the MEFV does is help those pursuing priestly or religious vocations by eliminating financial obstacles. Many prospective seminarians or religious aspirants have outstanding student loans that must be paid before they can enter the religious institute. The MEFV takes over the regular student loan payments of its grant recipients once they begin their formation.

For more on how the MEFV grant program works, click here.

What really grabbed my attention, though, was the news that the MEFV awarded 18 new vocation-enabling grants in 2011! The total amount of the grants was $450,000.

It should be noted, too, that the MEFV has a carefully constructed list of approved seminaries as well as criteria for approving religious institutes. We’re proud that affiliation with the Institute on Religious Life is one of the criteria the MEFV uses in determining whether a given institute is faithful to the Magisterium.

Two other features of the MEFV site I really like are of course the numerous vocation stories and the Grant Recipient Milestones page, which provides continual updates regarding entrance into novitiate, first vows, final profession, ordination, and other such important moments in the life of a priest or religious. Those pages mean a lot to those of us who contribute to the MEFV, and they remind us of the great spiritual benefit of all the prayers and Masses that are offered for MEFV benefactors.

That of course brings me to the “Donate to the MEFV” page. For those of you who would like to financially support vocations, I highly recommend the MEFV as a “holy mutual fund” that supports an impressive “portfolio” of seminarians and religious, and which already is clearly paying spiritual “dividends.”