Vocations Spotlight: Fr John Morrill

As the Diocese of East Anglia continues to celebrate its 50th Jubilee Year, we are shining a spotlight on the people who live out their vocations in service to our diocesan family. Each month, we meet a member of our clergy or someone in formation, reflecting on their call, their ministry and their hopes for the future.

This month, we hear from world-renowned historian, Fr John Morrill, Priest at Our Lady Immaculate & St Etheldreda, Newmarket, who shares how his vocation first took shape, what inspires him in his ministry today, and why fostering vocations remains vital to the life of our diocese.

Eighteen months after my ordination as a priest on 21 September 2024, I am still the ‘baby’ amongst the diocesan clergy. Three priestly ordinations later in the year will rob me of that title but, at the moment, I am a 79-year-old baby! I have received in my life three indubitable calls from God.

The first was a dramatic move from angry agnosticism to faith at the Requiem Mass for a good friend in Holy Week 1977. The second was a call to diaconal ministry in the early 1990s, a constant niggle that I was called to offer more of myself, somehow nourished by my weekly home communion round to see residents in a care home focused on those with advanced dementia. Then, as I celebrated my 75th birthday and my silver jubilee as a deacon in 2021 (15 years after I was widowed), I went on retreat and prayed about whether to retire or just scale back. As I prayed, an insistent thought intruded: that a series of what I can only call holy nudges actually seemed to be saying, ‘Could I do more, not less, by taking on new challenges?’

Then a truly astonishing set of coincidences in respect of one person in the final stages of life shifted me from regret (‘I have left it too late, have I missed a call?’) to a startled question (‘What if God has waited until I am past retirement age and has a particular priestly ministry in mind for me?’). And so, after 21 months of discernment and study, I was ordained.

It has been a wonderful first 18 months. Some of it has been deeply challenging (being at the deathbed of a primary school-age child; called to bless a house in which a husband and father had just committed suicide). But for the most part, giving up constant engagement and service in one parish for life as a ‘locum’ priest, covering priests’ holidays and sickness in ten parishes so far, almost all of which I can manage from my own home, has just been exhilarating.

I have been thwarted from ministry in prisons (which I have always craved) because God has told me yet again He wants to use the gifts He has given me, not the ones I wish He had given me. Once more, it is my teaching skills, honed in a secular university over 40 years, that God wants me to adapt. To my dismay, I had been called as a deacon to teach in seminaries and head up diocesan commissions. Of course, God knew better than I did.

So I am leading retreats for the clergy of several dioceses this year and many more parish ‘quiet days’. Of course, this is a different kind of teaching, heart speaking to heart, not brain to brain, but it seems clear that this is what I am called to. It is priestly in that the Eucharist is at the heart of all retreats.

I was asked whether I would encourage others to ask God if He was calling them to ordained ministry. Yes! Spend time with God, always starting by saying thank you and then letting Him help you see connections in events and feelings which you have not been able to see for yourself. We need priests and deacons, but we also need to unshackle the baptised people of God to find which amongst myriad callings God is inviting each to take up.

If any of this resonates with you, speak to your parish priest or to any member of the diocesan vocations team. When I could no longer keep my sense of calling to myself, I told first my spiritual director (a religious sister), then my four daughters (whose faith in God is stronger than their trust in the Church), then I approached Bishop Peter, and then all my eight former and current parish priests. All of them said, of course, it is obviously what you should be and do. I had no idea. I had felt ashamed and presumptuous until everyone else said, ‘Of course’. You may be the last to realise what God is calling you to. Try it and see!

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