“God has called me to to support his sons this way”

Photo: by Gregory A. Shemitz

I had the privilege of meeting Rosemary Sullivan last winter during a retreat in Huntington. She’s the real deal. Someone described her to me as “the most important lay person in the American church,” and that’s not an exaggeration.

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Rosemary Sullivan firmly believes that God has directed her to serve the church in a special way.

For more than a decade, she has played an integral role in cultivating vocations to the priesthood, beginning with a part-time position in her diocese’s vocation office and eventually rising to her current role as executive director of the National Conference of Diocesan Vocation Directors.

“God has called me to take my talents to support his sons this way,” said Sullivan. “It’s not a job, it’s a ministry.”

In her fifth year as executive director, Sullivan oversees the national organization’s year-round efforts to provide support and ongoing education to vocation directors in 171 U.S. dioceses and major eparchies, as well as those in vocation ministry in other countries, including Australia, Canada, England, Italy, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Scotland.

Sullivan also serves as one of five consultants to the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Clergy, Consecrated Life and Vocations. She is the only layperson in the group.

…Sullivan joined the national organization as its first events coordinator in 2006 and was promoted to executive director in 2009.

Working in an office based at a seminary has helped Sullivan focus on her ministry. She has prayed, dined and walked the corridors with countless discerners, seminarians and priests for 12 years.

“I’m able to see them throughout all the phases, and that is a tremendous grace,” she told Catholic News Service. “It’s helped me with my work at the NCDVD.

“I saw a lot of these guys as discerners, some of them I knew when they were in high school. I walked with them throughout the application process. I see them as seminarians, and then I see them as newly ordained.”

Father Michael Duffy, an associate pastor at St. Kilian Church in Farmingdale, New York, is one of the men Sullivan has accompanied on the journey to the priesthood. He studied at Immaculate Conception Seminary and was ordained in 2012.

“I’ve known Rose since I was in high school, long before I became a priest,” Father Duffy said. “She has been a rock for me, especially during my time at the seminary. It was not infrequent to see a line of guys waiting to chat with her in her office. She was like another mother to us.”

Father Duffy said he still turns to Sullivan “to talk things through and to get a different perspective on dealing with difficult pastoral situations.”

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