The Wellspring board wishes you a Merry Christmas and a happy start to 2020. We thank you for your support for Wellspring’s initiatives: Ernescliff College, Lyncroft Hospitality Training centre and Wilson Heights centre. During this season of Our Lord’s birth we would greatly appreciate you helping Wellspring celebrate Ernescliff’s 25th anniversary by remembering Wellspring in your Christmas giving.
Your donations also help us to provide spiritual direction, confession, doctrine classes, monthly recollections and retreats at the Cedarcrest Conference Centre to men from the Greater Toronto area and Southwestern Ontario. We would like to thank you for your continued support of these activities.
Ernescliff College is more than a home for men who are studying at the University of Toronto, Ryerson University and nearby colleges. It fosters an environment where men can be formed in the human virtues. One such resident is Mantin Pan.
Mantin Pan, a University of Toronto student, came to Ernescliff College from the city of Guangzhou (Canton) in Southern China in the fall of 2018. He came at the suggestion of Denton Lee, his friend and an Ernescliff resident at the time. Mantin was beginning his bachelor’s degree in economics. Mantin had no religious background but began to develop an interest in Ernescliff’s activities of Christian formation which are entrusted to the Prelature of Opus Dei. His first significant contact with the faith came that fall, when he decided to attend a Sunday Mass at Ernescliff. He expected to be simply an observer to an old and mysterious western religious tradition.
Mantin, surrounded by what he describes as role models and friends, quickly came to appreciate the impact that they were having on him at this crucial starting point of his university life. At the suggestion of a mentor, he started reciting a prayer for faith, thinking seriously about being received into the Church. Initially, he obtained little result from his prayer, but soon he found it to be truly transformative. After receiving classes on Christian doctrine over the winter, Mantin was baptized and received into the Catholic Church at Ernescliff’s celebration of the Easter Vigil. He described the experience as feeling that his “body and soul were getting washed.” Mantin continues to reside at Ernescliff, now in his second year of economics. He loves the Ernescliff sense of community, the friendships he’s made, the cultural get togethers and the possibility of growing in a life of faith.