Leo XIV Calls Bishops to Pray and Fast for Vocations
At Vespers in Montevideo he highlighted Uruguay’s seminary rebound and urged clergy to return to Christ in prayer and the Eucharist.
On the evening of November 6, 2026, the first day of his apostolic journey to Uruguay, Pope Leo XIV presided at Vespers in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and Saints Philip and James in Montevideo. Bishops, priests, deacons, religious, and seminarians filled the church. Archbishop Milton Luis Tróccoli Cebedio, president of the Uruguayan bishops’ conference, welcomed the Holy Father.
In his address, the Pope asked the bishops of the whole world to promote in their dioceses “days of prayer and fasting for the increase of vocations to the priesthood and to consecrated life.” He invited parishes, families, and religious communities to join that prayer, and expressed the hope that “the example of this land encourage many others to pray with the same trust.”
A local vocation story held up for the Church
He recalled a concrete Uruguayan experience. In 2024, the interdiocesan seminary Cristo Rey admitted no new candidates. The Archdiocese of Montevideo’s youth ministry then set a calendar of prayer, fasting, and works of mercy for vocations. Five young men entered the seminary in 2025 and eight in 2026. The Pope presented that turnaround as a sign of what steady, trusting prayer can obtain.
To priests and consecrated men and women who have served for many years, he urged a return to the essentials: “Keep the silence of prayer, the listening to the Word, the encounter with Christ in the Eucharist.” He asked them to remain “in communion with the Successor of Peter, who also needs the support of your prayers.”
To seminarians and novices he said: “Look to those who walked the path of dedication before you… Learn from them familiarity with the Lord.”
Resembling the One who is proclaimed
One of the “secrets of evangelization,” he continued, is “to resemble the one we proclaim.” In a land where many contemporaries barely know Jesus Christ and many young people have grown up far from the life of the Church, such witness carries particular force.
The text notes that the heart can remain attached to a work treated as one’s own, to recognition received, or to the security of having everything under control. Fidelity to one’s vocation, he insisted, requires returning always to Jesus Christ.
The Vespers thus set the tone of the visit around communion with Peter, the primacy of prayer, and a shared petition that the Lord send laborers into his harvest—beginning in Uruguay and extending to every diocese.