MIDDLE VILLAGE — At Our Lady of Hope Church, parishioners are working to solve the Catholic Church’s shortage of priests one prayer at a time. 

The parish’s Vocations Committee leads a parish-wide effort to pray for vocations — an endeavor that lasts throughout the year.  

Led by the husband-and-wife team of Laila and Marlon Amrod, who serve as co-chairs, the committee promotes vocations by organizing parish-wide endeavors that include three “Pray at Home” novenas throughout the year, each lasting 54 days.  

To make it easier for parishioners to participate in the novenas, the committee distributes prayer guides with instructions for praying the rosary. 

And the committee’s work doesn’t stop there. Members also organize a “Bring Mary Home” event during the Catholic Church’s “Month of Mary” every May, a month-long celebration of the Blessed Mother.  

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Under “Bring Mary Home,” parishioners get the opportunity to take one of the church’s 12 statues of the Blessed Mother home with them for a week so that they can pray for her intercession to increase vocations. 

“It all starts with Mary,” Laila said. “She is our Blessed Mother, the mother of Jesus, and we look to her for guidance and inspiration to increase vocations.” 

The “Bring Mary Home” initiative has become quite popular, Marlon said.  

“We get eight to 10 families a week,” he said. “We put the statues on the altar for people to pick up, and then we rotate it to the next group of families for the following week.”  

The grassroots effort at Our Lady of Hope Church is taking place amid a shortage of priests in the Catholic Church. According to a study by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University, the number of ordinations in the U.S. dropped by 50% between 1970 and 1990.  

In another study, CARA found there were 35,513 priests in the U.S. in 2020, a sharp decline from 50 years earlier, when there were nearly 60,000 priests. 

But the Vocations Committee at Our Lady of Hope Church remains undaunted, and members said they believe that prayer helps. “I’m here because I want to do whatever I can do, even if it’s just a little something,” member Linda Helldorfer said. 

According to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), prayer helps. On its website, it lists prayer as the most important thing Catholics can do to increase vocations. 

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Our Lady of Hope Church has been fertile soil for growing new priests over the years, said committee members, who pointed point out that there has been a number of men who grew up in the parish and went on to become priests — including Father Thomas Gilbert, a Discalced Carmelite friar, who was ordained in 2005 and is the son of committee member Dolores Gilbert.  

Another son of Our Lady of Hope Church, Father Kevin Abels, who was ordained in 2003, is the pastor of Our Lady of Angels, St. Anselm, and St. Andrew the Apostle Churches in Bay Ridge.  

A more recent example cited by the committee is parishioner Paul Zwolak, a fourth-year seminarian studying at St. Joseph Seminary and College in Yonkers. 

“We have a wonderful parish community,” said committee member Patty Mendolia. “And I think that’s an important part of fostering vocations.”