“What an uplifting feeling to know that God has blessed this Church with so many priestly vocations…”

It’s not every day that an American priest gets to celebrate Mass with several hundred seminarians in India.  But Msgr. John Kozar of CNEWA (um, he would be my boss) did just that the other day while on a pastoral visit, and he blogged about it:

We arrived a little after 6 a.m. at St. Thomas Syro-Malabar Apostolic Seminary in Kottayam. Waiting in front of the seminary was the rector, Father Alex Taramangalam. It was still dark and he walked us inside to meet with the priest in charge of liturgy, with some sisters who brought a choir of girls, and with some priests who would concelebrate with me. I had the privilege of celebrating the liturgy in this Syro-Malabar Seminary in the Latin rite, complete with English and Latin sung parts of the Mass.

While we were going over preparations for the Mass, the seminarians were chanting together the morning prayer of the church in their distinct style and their own beautiful local Malayalam language. Father Alex pointed out to me one portion of their morning prayer was for all their benefactors, which includes all our CNEWA family.

My first impression as I processed to the altar was the size of the chapel filled with smiling seminarians, about 300 of them, a mix of those at the philosophy level, theology level and about 35 seeking advanced degrees in Theology and Scripture. What an uplifting feeling to know that God has blessed the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church with so many priestly vocations.

This seminary is one of three Syro-Malabar synodal seminaries, not the oldest (as it is presently celebrating its golden anniversary), but it has the largest student body.

Back to the liturgy … It was very humbling and much appreciated that all the seminarians had copies of all the responses to the newly promulgated Latin rite Mass and were fully in sync with every detail of the liturgy. I think they may have been more comfortable with this rite than so many of our faithful at home still coming to grips with changes put in place since last Advent. And they even sang some responses in Latin.

Read more.

And you can find out more about the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church here.