I have a great heart for vocations, I pray dearly for them and I hope
everybody else does as well, we desperately need them.
Father James Boyle, ordained in June 2025
Now, more than ever, hope is needed by many people in desperate situations across our Diocese; and our faith communities need new priests to help continue to guide, enrich and care for us and our loved ones.
There are currently twenty seminarians in formation for the priesthood for our diocese. Your kindness and generosity – through a gift to the Priest Training Fund - will help ensure that our seminarians are supported and their daily living and study needs are met.
It costs £25,000 to form and educate a seminarian for a year, living and studying for the ordained priesthood at Allen house in London.
Please Support the Future of Our Church Today
The Priest Training Fund also supports newly ordained priests with further education to help them continue to be formed in the image of Him who came not to be served, but to serve.
Our seminarians and priests work in parishes, schools, hospitals and hospices, as well as in prisons, with refugees, and anywhere a Catholic presence can make a contribution.
Your kindness today will help ensure the next generation of priests can receive the formation, education and support they need to answer God’s call to priesthood.
Father Boyle’s story
My journey to priesthood was protracted, but I think that was part of the Divine plan. I had a happy childhood, Dad was a doctor, mum a teacher. Dad studied for the priesthood in Rome in the 1950s which he describes as the happiest days of his life, so that might have played into my imagination! My first experience of God was as an altar boy. I loved being on the sanctuary.
I had my career as an IT consultant and moved a lot. In my late 20s and early 30s I was disillusioned and filled with confusion about the meaning of it all and my purpose in this world. Then, in confession, I had an experience of God’s love; the fact that God thinks something of me, that He had a plan, and I didn’t have to know it all.
I took my first step towards the priesthood with fear, and spent a few years trying to get God to change His mind and do my will, and realised “this is real, the Lord is calling me”.
It’s been a privileged experience for me to have spent nine years in priestly formation in seminaries [including] Allen Hall in London. I was ordained in June 2025. I love being a priest, and at 56 I’ve never been happier. It’s a tremendous joy, it’s the greatest gift, and I’m grateful to God. A friend was ordained a couple of months ahead of me and said “it’s more work than I thought it was going to be but it’s more joy than I thought it was going to be.”
And that’s a perfect encapsulation of my own feelings.
Ordination day itself was like a dream, it was the happiest day of my life for many reasons.
The first time I felt like a priest was my first Mass. When I held the Eucharist aloft with the words “this my body” there was something about the language – it’s first person. I am standing in the shoes of the Lord which is beyond us to be able to explain. I am ministering His grace as His priest, I am His hands.
I try to feed the people of God with something nourishing and helpful that’s not wasting their time. For me it’s trying to work out a gentle way where I can help them, enrich them, guide them and care for them. It’s a great privilege and a great joy.