Time for Personal Vocations

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 9/9/04)

There now are 27,000 priests in the parishes of the United States. Their ranks have been thinning about 12-14 percent per decade for many years. Barring some abrupt, vast improvement — something quite unrealistic to expect — by the year 2020 there will be around 20,000 priests in parish ministry, i.e., roughly eight then for every 10 now.

In the long term, though probably not in the short, the crisis these numbers represent has another solution besides the solutions commonly suggested — close or consolidate more parishes, cut back on Masses and other sacramental celebrations, hope permanent deacons and lay ministers can plug the gap (up to a point), import foreign-born clergy, ordain married men, or, contrary to Church doctrine and discipline and the will of Christ, ordain women priests.

The solution is personal vocation.

The ethics of disclosure oblige me to say that "personal vocation" is the title of a book by the theologian Germain Grisez and me (Our Sunday Visitor, 2003). The idea isn't exclusively ours, though. You can find it in the work of giants like St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Francis de Sales, Cardinal Newman, and — over and over again for many years in modern times — Karol Wojtyla, also known as Pope John Paul II.

It's like this.

Start with the fact that there is no vocation shortage in the Catholic Church. What we have is a shortage of vocational discernment. A serious problem, obviously, but a problem of a very different sort.

When Catholics say "vocation," they usually mean vocation in the sense of state in life —priesthood and religious life. When we're asked to pray for vocations, after all, we are usually being asked to pray for more priests and religious. A vocations office is an office that recruits and screens new priestly and religious candidates. The message implicit in this use of the word is that priesthood and religious life are the vocations that count, the really real vocations as it were.

Certainly a calling to the clerical or religious state is a vocation. But state-in-life vocations are not the only ones. Beyond state in life, there is personal vocation. Every baptized person, even if not called to the priesthood or religious life, has a unique and unrepeatable role to play in carrying-out God's redemptive plan. The name for that "unique and essentially unrepeatable role" is personal vocation.

Its raw material consists in the special mix of strengths and weaknesses, likes and aversions, relationships, commitments, opportunities and obligations that make up the stuff of an individual life. Based on discernment — a continuing, lifelong task for a serious Christian, though more urgent at some times than others — a person should shape this material into a vocational response to God's will. The central question isn't "What do I want from God?" but "What does God want from me?"

All very nice, someone may say — but won't telling people they all have personal vocations to discern, accept and live out lead to even fewer candidates for the priesthood and religious? Won't the idea of personal vocation make the situation worse?

The answer of course is no.

As more people seriously ponder and pray over what God wants them to do with their lives, more will see that the answer is priesthood, religious life or some other form of committed service. Exclusive emphasis on the clerical or religious state isn't working well now. Let's give personal vocation a try. And let's create the discernment programs in parishes and schools that are needed to make the idea work.

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