Growing up in a typical Irish Catholic household, I always thought that I was very Catholic – I went to Church every week, participated in youth groups, attended Catholic school, and I have two uncles who are priests. Doesn’t that make me a faithful Catholic?

In June 2002, I finished my undergraduate degree in engineering from McGill University in Montreal, Canada – where I was born. A month later, at the age of 21, I found myself being drawn to World Youth Day in Toronto with Pope John Paul II, an event that helped to change the path of my life. Until that point I lived as a typical college student, with very little concerns for anything beyond the next party and the great job and success that I would have as an engineering graduate. However, at World Youth Day John Paul II and the witness of so many faithful young Catholics challenged me for the first time in my life.“I am called to be a saint! I am called to conquer the world for Christ!”

Once I heard my true calling in life, my calling to holiness, nothing was going to stop me from going all the way and living radically for the Lord. The next year was filled with many blessings that ultimately led me to Denver to visit the Fraternas for two weeks for an experience with the community. During that visit, true humanity was manifested to me in the Fraternas that I met. I realized that real joy and communion was possible - life was not about loneliness and superficial relationships. But most importantly, that experience made me realize that God has created me from eternity to be a Fraterna, to consecrate my life so that I can be fully available to serve as His instrument in the new evangelization of the whole world!

To discover my vocation has been the greatest joy in my life. As I start my formation as a Fraterna, I pray that I may always be as Mary giving my fiat to God’s plan at every moment.

Subconsciously the story of my vocation goes back much further. When I was about six I remember being intrigued by a friend of my parents who spent years discerning her vocation to be a contemplative nun; I had a red and white poncho that I used to wear as if it were a nun’s habit and said that I would be a nun too, but that I would be a talking nun. And so they used to call me sister Elizabeth. However as a teenager, when I was reminded of this, I was quick to dispel the suggestion as having been purely a childish whim which I had no intention of living out.

In the summer of 2000 I went to World Youth Day in Rome and from then on I began to take my faith more seriously. I had grown up in a devout Roman Catholic family and had a traditional Catholic education, but since leaving school in 1996 I began to grow lax about practising my faith. There seemed to be better things to do on Sundays than get up and go to mass and I was often too embarrassed to even mention that I was Catholic to new people that I met, let alone stick up for the Church. However at that same time I became aware of a deep yearning to change the world and to become a saint.

At Ascension last year (2005) I went to mass at a church near my work where the gentle yet sincere faith of the priest made me want to start going to mass more regularly during the week. His constant exhortations to personal prayer and to listen to the Lord struck a cord within me and meant that I tried to develop my personal prayer life. From then on, I couldn’t get the words of Psalm 94 out of my head: “oh that today you would listen to his voice”.

When the Fraternas were in London they invited me to visit them in Manchester. Although I initially responded in the negative as I thought I had to study every week-end for my final accountancy exams in November, in the weeks that followed, something inside made me realise that I could free myself up, as I felt an inner desire to accept their invitation. I wanted to get to know them better, to understand more and to chat more. Soon after that weekend I read a newsbite on the vocations crisis, in which it said that it was absurd to think that there were no vocations in the Church as that would mean that God had stopped calling people to consecrate their lives. The crisis was in fact that fewer and fewer people were listening to the Lord and responding to their call from Him. It felt like that email had been written for me!

Two weeks after I went to Manchester I had a sudden conscious change of heart. Over the course of a weekend I realised that I didn’t actually want to marry my boyfriend and nor did I want to continue living in London, training as an accountant. I wanted to concentrate fully on the Church, by dedicating my time to learning the Catholic faith properly and spreading the Gospel amongst all those that I encountered. The Fraternas then told me that I could become an AMI; although I hadn’t heard of this before it seemed exciting and appealing. For the first time in my life I experienced a clarity of vision which brought me internal peace – and I didn’t even really know any concrete details about what I would be doing over the next few months.

In the summer I spent a week with the Fraternas in Rome and Salerno and this helped to confirm my vocation even more as I realised that it wasn’t just the life of the people that I had befriended in Manchester that attracted me but the life of the Fraternidad as a whole. With every Fraterna I met I became more convinced that God was calling me to live like them, to lead a consecrated life in which I could be fully available to announce the Gospel. In August I moved to the community in Manchester where I made my AMI promise and embarked on a new way of life which makes me feel whole and enables me to grow daily in my relationship with God.