Japanese Manga to promote callings in the United Kingdom. The idea of the English Bishops Conference comes just before the Day of Callings, which falls on Sunday 29th April. For the occasion, the English Bishops have also published the latest statistics on callings, which see the number of applicant priests constantly rising over the last four years. Today there are 150 seminarians in the dioceses of England and Wales. “We have chosen the Manga cartoons for the 2007 campaign, because we hope it will appeal to young people under twenty as well as people in their thirties – explains Paul Embery, director of the national office for callings of England and Wales, to SIR -. Many of today’s priests and religious people say they first thought of their callings at the age of ten, sometimes even earlier”. “With the death of John Paul II there has been a new interest not only in the priesthood, but also in Catholic life in general. It is important for the Church to recognize this and use it in the best way”, added Fr. Embery. The poster with the cartoons showing the future “fathers” of England and Wales has been distributed in nearly five thousand Catholic churches, schools and places of prayer of the country and a dedicated website will be launched next Sunday (www.calledtoday.com). The website tells the life of the five real characters with a real story to tell, experiences that will be told live by a priest, two nuns, a monk and a lay man who devoted his life to the Church. The growth of vocations is concentrated in the bigger cities such as London, which have also witnessed a growth in the number of new Catholics, mainly citizens from countries that have just entered the European Union, such as Poland. But according to Fr. Embery, time is needed before new candidates for the priesthood emerge from these communities that have only recently arrived in the United Kingdom.
