Monday, I spent the day at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Md., where 85 local high school girls were taking part in Fiat Days.

Fiat Days is a diocesan-sponsored vocation discernment camp that is half-prayer and half-play. Now in its third year, the camp has been expanded to five days for the first time. During those days, the campers take part in traditional camp activities — dodgeball, tag, s’mores and crafts among them — but they also have plenty of time to enrich their spiritual lives through talks and small group discussions, morning and evening prayer, daily Mass, confession, and Holy Hours.

While there, I sat in on a talk on “The Beauty of all Vocations,” given by Father Brian Bashista, diocesan Vocations director.

Vocations, he said, have a two-fold purpose, since they are “the manner we can lead others to heaven while we are working out His grace to get ourselves to heaven as well.”

“His plan of salvation is to reconcile all people to Himself and He chooses to use us as His instruments,” Father Bashista said.

The ultimate goal for a married person, he explained, is to get his or her spouse to heaven, as well as any children. For a member of the religious or the consecrated single life, one’s goal would become helping others — spiritual children — make it to heaven.

Father Bashista also stressed the importance of knowing the difference between a career and a vocation and said one must approach discerning one’s vocation much differently from finding a job.

“Priests and sisters are not in their vocation 9 to 5, but 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he said. “A career is a subset of your vocation. … A career is what I do, a vocation is who I am in relation to the other.”

Later in the day, the girls were able to gain firsthand knowledge about the religious life as they had time to talk and compete with visiting religious sisters in various athletic tournaments.

For a complete story and photos, see my article on Fiat Days here. And be sure to check our next issue (coming out July 26) for more photos from the week!