Support Tomorrow’s Priests | Second collection May 17-18, 2025

A message from our bishop:

There is never a bad time to count our blessings. Among these, I count our seminarians – the young men who are answering the call of Jesus Christ to serve as our future priests.

This year, we had 19 young men in seminary studies for our diocese. We will be ordaining one of those men to the priesthood on May 24 at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Kansas City.

The cost of seminary education is one of the largest expenses we have as a diocese, but also one of the greatest investments we can make. With tuition, room, board and other expenses, the cost of educating a seminarian is about $50,000 per year. When you multiply that amount by the number of seminarians, it creates an annual expense of roughly a million dollars in seminary education every year.

Each May the diocese takes up a special collection for the “Tomorrow’s Priest” fund, which is essential to offsetting this expense. I am grateful for your past generosity with this collection. Any amount you might be able to provide in this moment would be of great help. In addition to your financial support, please continue to pray to the Lord that he will increase the number of men from our diocese who are being called to the priesthood. The “harvest is abundant, but the laborers are few” as Jesus points out in the Gospel, urging us to petition the Father to inspire more vocations.

Thank you for supporting our work to prepare our future priests, and may God bless you.

Sincerely yours in Christ,

+Bishop James V. Johnston, Jr.