Following are excerpts from the just-released Vatican document New Vocations for a New Europe:

“Perhaps there is no other area of the Church's life more needing to open itself to hope than pastoral work for vocations, especially where the crisis is most strongly felt…. Therefore we must regenerate it in priests, educators, Christian families, religious families, secular institutes, in all those who must serve life with the new generations.”

To parents and educators:

“You parents are the first natural vocational educators, while you formators are not only instructors who introduce people to the essential choices: you are also called to generate life in these young people whom you will open up to the future. Your fidelity to God's call is the precious and irreplaceable means by which your children and pupils might discover their own personal vocation, so that ‘they may have life, and have it abundantly’” (Jn 10:10).

To children, adolescents, and young people:

“You will be happy and fulfilled only by being open to fulfilling the Creator's dream for his creature…. Know, dearest young people, that the Church anxiously follows your progress and your choices. And how beautiful it would be if this letter would rouse up in you some kind of response, so that a dialogue may continue with the one who is guiding you.”

To pastors, priests, consecrated men and women:

“There is nothing more stimulating than a witness to one's own vocation, which is so passionate as to make it contagious…. Blessed are you, then, if you can express with your lives that to serve God is beautiful and fulfilling, and reveal that in him, the Living One, is hidden the identity of every living person.”