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". 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.
