The first ever iPhone app designed specifically for the promotion of vocations to the priesthood was launched in Co Kildare on Monday by Bishop Donal McKeown, Chair of the Vocations Commission of the Irish Bishops’ Conference.
Designed by Fr Paddy Rushe and developed by Magic Time Apps in Dublin, the new Vocations app can be downloaded for free from the Apple iPhone app store.
It is intended to assist those seeking information on the diocesan priesthood in Ireland and includes answers to frequently asked questions about vocations and some 'tests' to help those thinking of priesthood discern their initial suitability.
Launching it, Bishop McKeown of the Diocese of Down and Connor, acknowledged that some would caricature the new app as, “just a churchy gimmick that will try to give the impression of modernity to something that is passé, a vain attempt to market something that belongs to yesterday.”
But he underlined that social media is where young people are. “From my own little venture onto Facebook, I am very aware that this is how news travels. This is the market place, this is the public square.”
He added that people in the Church had to be prepared, like Jesus, to hang around where people are and thus encounter Matthew the tax collector, the Samaritan woman and the lepers in the public forum. He said that like all vocations promotion, the app is not primarily a recruitment exercise.
“Vocations work never seeks just to get people to sign up, to sign their life away. It can only be there to help people get into conversation with themselves, with their own life story,” the auxiliary bishop of Down and Connor said.
He also commented that the, “absence of any reason for meaningfulness in an individual’s life is not unconnected with the plague of suicide and self-harm and the apparent inability of our culture to produce anything of much beauty or grace.”
He added that this was why Pope John Paul II’s letter of 2003 to the Church in Europe focused specifically on the Church as called to generate hope in a society that had lost its sense of direction and seemed unable to create a reason for hope.
“That is the broad environment into which this App is being launched. It is a call to all young people to consider how they want to spend their lives and what they want to leave as their contribution to the welfare of society,” the Bishop said in his address at Kilashee House Hotel, Naas, Co Kildare.
Noting that next year would see Ireland host the International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin and shortly afterwards the European Vocations Service conference would take place in Maynooth, followed by World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro in July 2013, Bishop McKeown said, “I believe that this is a time of grace for this society to stop moaning and start moving."
He added, "This is a critical time in which the future of this society is being cast. This App is an invitation to engage with a process of generating hope, solidarity and healing in a society that is fractured and hurting in many ways.
“It is about freeing people from being prisoners of the past and helping them to be architects rather than victims of the future. I hope that it will help some little groups of rebellious believers to exercise a prophetic role in the footsteps of Jesus who walked in the market place.”
The launch of the new app comes as Fr Willie Purcell from the Diocese of Ossory takes up his appointment as the new National Coordinator of Vocations, taking over from Fr Paddy Rushe who had been in the position for five years.
Some of the highlights of the new “Vocations” app are:
- connection to Twitter and Facebook
- social networking at the service of vocations
- contact details and statistics on the 26 dioceses of Ireland
- frequently asked questions to assist a person to discern his vocation
- news feed running from the national vocations website
- novel and cursory 'tests' to enable the user to reflect on vocation potential
Future updates will include a ‘prayer counter’ to allow people pledge a period of prayer for vocations and a picture gallery that will include some images from the life of a seminarian.