Serra Fund for Religious Vocations

The Church in America needs faithful priests and religious. It needs healthy, joyful men and women who love Jesus Christ and who love the Church, believe all she teaches, and are committed to growing in holiness.

Through your support of Franciscan University’s Serra Vocations Fund, you can help give the Church what she needs.

Student debt is one of the primary reasons young people delay entry to the priesthood or religious life. Franciscan University’s Serra Fund for Priestly and Religious Vocations, however, provides scholarship assistance to young women discerning consecrated life and to young men discerning the priesthood or brotherhood. This scholarship assistance increases their ability to enter formation immediately after graduation and not delay answering God’s call.

Many of the women who benefit from this scholarship fund belong to Mary, Spouse of the Spirit Household. With their household sisters, these women pray, learn about religious life, and build relationships with the religious sisters on Franciscan’s campus.

All of the men who benefit from this scholarship participate in Franciscan University’s Priestly Discernment Program. This program is the only one of its kind in the country. It gives men a foundation for the spiritual, intellectual, human, apostolic, and pastoral formation they’ll receive if they continue on to seminary, while also allowing them to experience the fullness of college life on the campus of a dynamically Catholic, co-educational institution.

In addition to the Serra Fund for Priestly and Religious Vocations, another scholarship—the St. Junípero Serra Fund—provides financial assistance exclusively to young men in Franciscan’s Priestly Discernment Program.

Franciscan University has already formed more than 700 alumni who have gone on to become priests, bishops, and religious brothers and sisters. In the coming years, with your help and the help of others who support the Serra Vocations Fund, we hope to send hundreds more to join them in their work of rebuilding and renewing the Church.