Lumen Gentium Award Winner: Serra Club

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Margaret “Madge” Thombs remembers growing up when every single Catholic young man at some point was asked if he had ever thought of becoming a priest.
“And every young woman asked herself, ‘Is God calling me to the religious life?’ That was something that was encouraged by the teachers in the Catholic schools, the people in the parish… Now, it’s not as out there,” said Thombs, 68, a founding member of the Providence chapter of Serra International.
The Providence chapter, founded in 2010, consists of lay men and women like Thombs, a former education professor at Roger Williams University, who worked to cultivate a “culture of vocations” through their prayer and works to support active priests and encourage young people to discern the state of life that God is calling them to pursue.
“I nominate them in the area of ‘Evangelization and Communications’ for their dedication to and concern for fostering vocations to the priesthood and therefore helping to provide for future shepherds in evangelization,” Father Brian Morris, the vocations director for the Diocese of Providence, said in nominating the Providence Serra chapter for the 2020 Lumen Gentium Award for Evangelization and Communications.
Serra’s mission is three-fold: to promote and support vocations to the ministerial priesthood; to encourage and promote vocations to the consecrated life; and to assist chapter members to recognize and respond, each in their own life, to God’s call to holiness.
“Serra members are people who have the Eucharist at the center of their lives,” said Thombs, a former resident of Portsmouth who was a daily communicant at St. Theresa’s Church in Tiverton, where she helped run the baptismal preparation program.
“Prayers for priests are obviously so critical,” Thombs said. “Because without priests, you have no Eucharist. The members of Serra are people who live their faith in their whole life very well, and this is one of the ways they feel like they can support the Church and the priesthood.”
The Providence chapter of Serra conducts several activities throughout the year to further its mission. The chapter organizes an annual Holy Hour of Prayer for the World Day of Prayer for the Sanctification of Priests. Members also attend the annual Holy Hour for Vocations on the eve of local ordinations.