What Vocation Shortage?

By Russell Shaw
March 29, 2004
Originally posted at: Intentional Disciples

The Brothers and retreatants on the annual "In the Footsteps of St. Benedict" Pilgrimage. This program allows men discerning the Monastic vocation a chance to walk and live where our Holy Father St. Benedict did 1500 years ago. (Note: 2 of our Novices, Br. Maximilian and Br. Michael entered the monastery shortly after this experience, Alleluia!!!)

Despite all the talk about a vocation shortage, there is in fact no such thing in the Catholic Church. The real shortage is that of vocational discernment, and that is a very different problem. The shortfall in the number of candidates for the priesthood, the consecrated life and other forms of Christian witness and service would quickly disappear if many more Catholics, and ideally all, made it a practice to discern, accept and live out their unique, irreplaceable callings from God—their personal vocations.

The idea of personal vocation and the practice of discernment are also the key to removing clericalism from Catholic life once and for all and replacing it with a healthy understanding of clergy-lay relationships. Personal vocation and vocational discernment also are crucial to helping the laity, along with everyone else, understand and embrace their proper roles in carrying out the church’s mission.

These are large claims, of course. In weighing them, it is useful to begin with the three distinct but related senses that the word “vocation” has in religious talk.

The first of these is the common Christian vocation received in baptism and strengthened by confirmation. In very general terms, the common vocation consists in what follows from the commitment of faith: loving and serving God above all else and loving and serving one’s neighbor as oneself, and so collaborating in the redemptive work of Christ that is the mission of the church. In 1964 the Second Vatican Council offered a succinct but clear statement of the idea when it said the baptized are “appointed by their baptismal character to Christian religious worship” and have an obligation to “profess before people the faith they have received” (“Dogmatic Constitution on the Church,” No. 11).

The second meaning of the word refers to what traditionally is called “state in life.” The clerical state, the consecrated life, Christian marriage, the life of the single lay person in the world—these are states in life. They are specifications of the common Christian vocation, chosen by overarching commitments that set us on long-term paths that shape our lives by the countless specific choices and actions needed to see them through to the end. Christian states in life are meant to complement and reinforce one another, not to compete.

The third sense in which “vocation” is used is that of personal vocation. It is the unique combination of commitments, relationships, obligations, opportunities, strengths and weaknesses through which the common Christian vocation and a state in life are concretely expressed in the case of someone trying to discern, accept and live out God’s will; it is the particular role intended by God for each of us in his redemptive plan. “We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph 2:10). Or, as Pope John Paul II said in a message for World Vocations Day in 2001, “Every life is a vocation.”

When Catholics speak of vocation, they usually mean state in life. In fact, they usually mean priesthood or religious life. A “vocations director” is someone in a diocese or religious institute responsible for recruiting and screening those who think they may be called to be priests or religious; a “vocations program” is a program with this purpose. From one point of view, there is nothing wrong with speaking of vocation in this way. Priesthood and religious life really are states of life and, for some people, central parts of their callings from God. From another point of view, however, exclusive emphasis on vocation as state of life—and, practically speaking, as a call to be a priest or religious—can do much harm.

The most obvious harm is in communicating to those not called to be priests or religious the message, “You don’t have a vocation.” That may be disappointing for some and welcome news for others; but in either case it is a disincentive to continuing discernment, acceptance and living out of God’s will for oneself. Here is one of the root causes of the clericalist mentality still so widespread among Catholics.

The idea of personal vocation is the antidote. Everybody has one—God calls every member of the church by name. Seen in this light, the challenge is not to find out whether you have a vocation but to identify the vocation you unquestionably have.

The idea of personal vocation is unfamiliar to most Catholics today, but it is hardly new. It is rooted in the Pauline doctrine of charisms and of the church as the body of Christ. Other classic sources of Christian wisdom have developed the insight further. St. Francis de Sales, for instance, spoke of personal vocation in his Treatise on the Love of God, though he did not use the term. It is not God’s will that everyone live the evangelical counsels, he points out, “but only such counsels as are suitable according to differences in persons, times, occasions, and abilities.” Writers like St. Ignatius Loyola and Jean Pierre de Caussade, S.J., suggest the same.

Cardinal John Henry Newman

Cardinal John Henry Newman offered a particularly insightful exposition of personal vocation in one of the sermons he gave while still an Anglican, “Divine Calls.” Newman emphasized the here-and-now, ongoing character of this uniquely personal call: “For in truth we are not called once only, but many times; all through our life Christ is calling us. He called us first in baptism; but afterwards also.... He works through our natural faculties and circumstances of life. Still what happens to us in providence is in all essential respects what His voice was to those whom He addressed when on earth.”

Given the existence of this powerful and persuasive testimony, why have Catholics been slow to grasp the idea of personal vocation? One probable reason is that Martin Luther was an enthusiastic exponent of this truth. “Everyone must tend his own vocation and work,” he wrote. But Luther also rejected the idea of mediation in the spiritual realm and, with it, priesthood and religious life. The reaction this provoked among Catholics helped make the idea of personal vocation suspect in Catholic circles for centuries.

In modern times, nevertheless, the concept can be found in the documents of the Second Vatican Council and in many postconciliar documents of the magisterium. No one has analyzed the idea more carefully or promoted it more vigorously than Pope John Paul II, who wrote about personal vocation long before becoming pope (in Love and Responsibility, which appeared in Poland in 1960) and has returned to it time and again during his pontificate. In his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, published in 1979, he said:

For the whole of the community of the People of God and for each member of it what is in question is not just a specific social membership; rather, for each and every one what is essential is a particular “vocation.” Indeed, the church as the People of God is also “Christ’s Mystical Body.” Membership in that body has for its source a particular call, united with the saving action of grace. Therefore, if we wish to keep in mind this community of the People of God...we must see first and foremost Christ saying in a way to each member of the community: “Follow me.” (No. 21)

The Servant of God, Pope John Paul II

The idea of personal vocation is an important complement to Vatican II’s teaching about the universal call to holiness. All members of the faithful, not just a select few, are called “to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of love,” the council declares (“Dogmatic Constitution on the Church,” No. 39). But there is not much guidance for living this out, and even less incentive to do so, in telling people that if God has not called them to be clerics or religious, they do not have a vocation in any meaningful sense.

Personal vocation puts this matter in a radically different light. Everyone has a personal vocation, an unrepeatable call from God to play a particular role in his redemptive plan and the mission of the church. The task of each is to discern God’s will, accept it and live it out. That is responding to the universal call to be holy.

Contrary to an elitist view of vocational discernment, which tends to treat it as an exercise for a select few, discernment is for everybody. “The fundamental objective of the formation of the lay faithful is an ever-clearer discovery of one’s vocation and the ever-greater willingness to live it out,” Pope John Paul II says in his post-synod document on the laity, Christifideles Laici (1989).

To carry out this mandate, parishes need to become schools of vocational discernment—places where liturgy, catechesis and spiritual direction encourage parishioners to engage in continuing, prayerful reflection on what God is asking of them. The effort should start with children (in an age-appropriate manner) and continue with adolescents, young adults and adults at every stage of their life journey. Special opportunities—retreats, days of recollection—should be provided for those who have major vocational choices to make. The aim is discernment, not recruitment.

But, someone might object, won’t emphasizing personal vocation distract people from heeding calls to the priesthood and consecrated life? Won’t it make the real-life vocation shortage worse?

The answer is no. If many more Catholics practiced ongoing discernment regarding their personal vocations, many more would discover that they are called to the priesthood or consecrated life. The best solution to the dearth of new candidates—and to many other problems in contemporary Catholic life as well—is personal vocation. Indeed, it may be the only one.

Great Video on the Holy Priesthood

Check out this great DVD on the priesthood, produced by the Midwest Theological Forum. Speakers include St. Vincent Seminary's own, Dr. Scott Hahn.

For the Windows Media Version: Click here For the Quicktime Version: Click here

Sacred Reading (Lectio Divina)

From: "The Cloud of Unknowing"
 

 
That without imperfect meekness coming before, it is impossible for a sinner to come to the perfect Virtue of meekness in this life.

For although I call it imperfect meekness, yet I had liefer have a true knowing and a feeling of myself as I am, and sooner I trow that it should get me the perfect cause and virtue of meekness by itself, than it should an all the saints and angels in heaven, and all the men and women of Holy Church living in earth, religious or seculars in all degrees, were set at once all together to do nought else but to pray to God for me to get me perfect meekness. Yea, and yet it is impossible a sinner to get, or to keep when it is gotten, the perfect virtue of meekness without it. 120

And therefore swink and sweat in all that thou canst and mayest, for to get thee a true knowing and a feeling of thyself as thou art; and then I trow that soon after that thou shalt have a true knowing and a feeling of God as He is. Not as He is in Himself, for that may no man do but Himself; nor yet as thou shalt do in bliss both body and soul together. But as it is possible, and as He vouchsafeth to be known and felt of a meek soul living in this deadly body.

 
And think not because I set two causes of meekness, one perfect and another imperfect, that I will therefore that thou leavest the travail about imperfect meekness, and set thee wholly to get thee perfect. Nay, surely; I trow thou shouldest never bring it so about. But herefore I do that I do: because I think to tell thee and let thee see the worthiness of this ghostly exercise before all other exercise bodily or ghostly that man can or may do by grace. How that a privy love pressed in cleanness of spirit upon this dark cloud of unknowing betwixt thee and thy God, truly and perfectly containeth in it the perfect virtue of meekness without any special or clear beholding of any thing under God. And because I would that thou knewest which were perfect meekness, and settest it as a token before the love of thine heart, and didst it for thee and for me. And because I would by this knowing make thee more meek.

121For ofttimes it befalleth that lacking of knowing is cause of much pride as me thinketh. For peradventure an thou knewest not which were perfect meekness, thou shouldest ween when thou hadst a little knowing and a feeling of this that I call imperfect meekness, that thou hadst almost gotten perfect meekness: and so shouldest thou deceive thyself, and ween that thou wert full meek when thou wert all belapped in foul stinking pride. And therefore try for to travail about perfect meekness; for the condition of it is such, that whoso hath it, and the whiles he hath it, he shall not sin, nor yet much after.

Feast of St. Romuald (founder of the Benedictine Camaldolese Monks)

Excerpted from The Church's Year of Grace, Pius Parsch.
 

St. Romuald, the founder of the Camaldolese Order, could not decide for a considerable time whether to serve God in a religious life or to remain in the world. After his father killed a relative in a duel at which Romuald was forced to be present, he went to the monastery of St. Apollinaris, near Ravenna, and did penance for forty days. Later, he entered this same monastery as a monk. Then he became a follower of the hermit Marinus in Venice. In the course of time he founded an order of hermits which received its name after the most famous of his foundations, Camalduli in Tuscany.

Romuald's was one of the strictest orders for men in the West (a branch of the Benedictine Order). Members live isolated in small huts, observing strict silence and perpetual fasting, constantly praying or engaged in manual labor. Our saint enjoyed the grace of bringing sinners, particularly those of rank and power, back to God. When he died, he was a little over seventy years; he had never used a bed, had always sought out ways of practicing severe penances. 15 years later his pupil, the holy doctor of the Church, St. Peter Damian, wrote his biography.

"His greatness lies in the rigorous and austere character of his interpretation of monastic life-an approach that was quite singular and unique. In the deepest recesses of his being, Romuald was an ascetic, a monk; not perhaps, a monk of that serene peace and self-possession exemplified by St. Benedict in his life and described by him in his Rule. Nor was Romuald an organizer who through prudent legislation enabled his spirit to flourish and affect great numbers. He reminds us of the stolid figures inhabiting the Eastern deserts, men who by most rigorous mortification and severest self-inflicted penances gave a wanton world a living example of recollection and contemplation. Their very lives constituted the most powerful sermon. It is in company with men like these that St. Romuald continues to live."

Romuald was not at all a fluent reader. Whenever he made another of his many mistakes, Marinus, his teacher, beat him on his left cheek. Finally it became too much for Romuald. "But, dear master," he said modestly, "hit me on the right cheek in the future. My left ear is almost deaf." The master was surprised at such patience and thereafter acted more considerately.

The saint loved to say, "Better to pray one psalm with devotion and compunction than a hundred with distraction."

When the holy man felt his end was near, he retired to the monastery at Val di Castro. After so many journeys he was eager to begin his final pilgrimage to an eternal resting place. Before the reform of the Calendar in 1969 his feast was celebrated on February 7, the anniversary of the translation of his relics in 1481. His feast is now June 19, the day he died in 1027. In the Calendar reform the Church has tried to move the feasts of the saints to their "birthday" — referring to the day on which the saint died and celebrated his/her birth into heaven.

Symbols: Crutch; ladder.
Often Portrayed as: Monk pointing at a ladder on which other monks are ascending to heaven indicative his founding of his Order.

-------

CAMALDOLITES (called also Camaldolensians, Camaldolese, Camaldules, Camaldulians, from the monastery at Camaldoli near Arezzo): A religious order springing from the movement for monastic reform which also gave rise to the congregations of Cluny and Lorraine, with which it is allied in some respects, though it differs from them in others. The Italian movement is wholly independent of the French, and began later�not before the close of the tenth century, after the Cluniac monks had already reformed numerous monasteries in upper and central Italy. It was more enthusiastic than the French, and had for its object not so much the strict enforcement of the Benedictine rule as the commendation, in opposition to the moral corruption which was even deeper in the south than in the north, of the severest form of the ascetic life, that of hermits. This recalls the Greek monastic originators; and the fact is easily explicable by the strong influence of Greek traditions in Italy, especially in the south.

St. Romuald.

St. Romuald is the most prominent, but by no means the only, representative of this idea. Before or with him were working for the same end the Armenian hermit Simeon, St. Dominic of Foligno, the founder of Fonte Avellana, and the Greek Nilos of Rossano. Romuald was born at Ravenna, of the ducal family there, about 950. He was startled out of a worldly life when his father Sergius killed a kinsman in a duel arising out of a dispute over a piece of property, and retired to the monastery of S. Apollinare in Classe near Ravenna to do penance forty days on his father's behalf. His ascetic zeal was not satisfied here, although the monastery had been reformed not long before by Majolus of Cluny. He began to live a hermit's life near Venice, continued it in Catalonia, and then returned to the neighborhood of Ravenna. Wherever he went, a group of disciples formed around him; but as soon as they were sufficiently numerous in any one place, he gave them into the charge of a superior and left them. Most of these colonies were in central Italy; the three most important were Val di Castro, Monte Sitrio in Umbria, and Camaldoli, where he established a monastery in 1012. His organization shows a combination of the Western cenobite system with the Eastern anchorite life. The brothers lived in single cells, with an oratory in the midst. The whole Psalter was recited every day; the only written memorial left by Romuald was an exposition of the Psalms, which, however, is taken almost word for word from that of Cassiodorus. Meals were taken in common, but they were exceedingly scanty; the brothers went barefoot and wore their hair and beards long; the rule of silence was strictly observed. They busied themselves with agriculture and various handicrafts, those near the sea especially with the making of baskets and nets. We meet for the first time in these hermit colonies with famuli, the later lay brothers, who relieved the monks of the more burdensome household duties The rule of fasting and silence was not so strict for them, but apparently, as at Fonte Avellana, they had to take lifelong monastic vows. This institution was borrowed by Gualberto, a disciple of Romuald's, for his order of Vallombrosa and further developed by him. Romuald's activity was not confined to the founding of these communities. He made a deep impression upon the most variedclasses, and exercised a great influence over the emperor Otto III., who, it is asserted not improbably, promised him to exchange the crown for the cowl after he had conquered Rome. Though Romuald disclaimed any intention of taking part in ecclesiastical politics, he raised his voice loudly in Italy against simony and the marriage of the clergy. His zeal called him to the mission-field; disciples of his penetrated into Russia and Poland, there to meet death for their faith, and the desire of the martyr's crown finally took the aged hermit himself to Hungary. Ill health hindered his work there, and he returned to die in 1027.

The Camaldolese.

His zeal for a reform of monasticism remained active in his followers. They did not, however, emphasize the hermit ideal to the same extent, and the Italian movement gradually approximated to that of Cluny. Romuald's spirit was best followed in the community of Camaldoli, which received papal confirmation from Alexander II. in 1072. Its rule was first written in 1080 by the fourth prior, Rudolph, who modified in some respects the extreme strictness of Romuald's prescriptions, and also founded (1086) the first convent of nuns under this rule, San Pietro di Luco at Mogello. Camaldoli received many rich gifts, and the congregation spread throughout Italy, without, however, producing any very notable men except the famous jurist Gratian. The transition from the hermit to the community life became more marked, in spite of the efforts of Ambrose the Camaldolite of Portico, "major" or head of the congregation in 1431, supported by Pope Eugenius IV., to restore the old ideals. In 1476 the community of St. Michael at Murano near Venice renounced the obedience of Camaldoli, and formed a group of distinctly cenobitic Camaldolese houses, confirmed as a congregation by Innocent VIII. In 1513 Leo X. reunited all the Camaldolese monks under the headship of Camaldoli, providing that the major should hold office for but three years, and be chosen alternately from the hermits and the cenobites. But in 1520 he allowed Paolo Giustiniani to draw up new statutes and to form the new communities of hermits which he was to found into an independent congregation of St. Romuald. This new congregation, which took its name from Monte Corona near Perugia, had a very strict rule; it spread through Germany, Austria, and Poland. A fourth congregation, that of Turin, was founded in 1601 by Alessandro di Leva (d. 1612), to take in the hermits of Piedmont. A breach of this became practically a separate congregation on account of the political views of Richelieu, who was unwilling that the French hermitages should be subject to Italian superiors. By a brief of Urban VIII. (1635), its head was always to be a Frenchman, and directly subject to the pope. From 1642 Gros-Bois near Paris was its mother house. All the French communities perished at the Revolution. The congregation of Camaldoli has now six houses, including Camaldoli itself and one famous for its picturesque site high above Naples. The principal house of the Murano congregation is San Gregorio in Rome, from which came the only Camaldolese monk who has occupied the papal throne, Gregory XVI. (1831-46). Outside of Italy there is only the community of Bielany in the diocese of Cracow, belonging to the congregation of Monte Corona. The total membership of the order is not more than 200. Convents of nuns exist only in Rome and Florence.

(G. GR�TZMACHER.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Petrus Damianus, Vita Romualdi is in Damianus, Opera, ed. C. Cajetanus, ii. 255 sqq., Rome, 1608, and MPL cxliv. 953 sqq. Another Vita is in ASB 7th Feb., ii. 124-140. Consult: G. B. Mittarelli and G. D. Costadoni, Annales Camaldulenses, 9 vols., Venice, 1755-1773; W. Wattenbach, Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen, i. 436, Berlin, 1893; C. W. Currier, Hist. of Religious Orders, pp. 118-123, New York, 1896; P. Helyot, Ordres monastiques, vol. v.; Heimbucher, Orden and Kongregationen, i. 203-208.

The Monastic Tonsure

newadvent.org

(Latin tondere, "to shear")

Since the founding of St. Vincent Archabbey by Archabbot Boniface Wimmer, the tradition of the monastic tonsure during the rite of the reception of the holy monastic habit has been a special tradition retained at St. Vincent even after the Second Vatican Council. This year, six men, on July 10th, will continue this sacred monastic tradition when our Archabbot Douglas Nowicki, O.S.B. using the same pair of scissors Father Boniface Wimmer, O.S.B. used in 1846, will cut our new Novices hair in the sign of the cross to symbolize their complete abandonment to the will of God and to be seen as a poor man (a slave for Jesus Christ) in the world. With that being stated, here is another article on the history of the cleric tonsure.

A sacred rite instituted by the Church by which a baptized and confirmed Christian is received into the clerical order by the shearing of his hair and the investment with the surplice. The person thus tonsured becomes a partaker of the common privileges and obligations of the clerical state and is prepared for the reception of orders. The tonsure itself is not an ordination properly so called, nor a true order. It is rather a simple ascription of a person to the Divine service in such things as are common to all clerics. Historically the tonsure was not in use in the primitive Church during the age of persecution. Even later, St. Jerome (in Ezech., xliv) disapproves of clerics shaving their heads. Indeed, among the Greeks and Romans such a custom was a badge of slavery. On this very account, the shaving of the head was adopted by the monks. Towards the end of the fifth, or beginning of the sixth, century, the custom passed over to the secular clergy.

As a sacred rite, the tonsure was originally joined to the first ordination received, as in the Greek Church it still is to the order of lector. In the Latin Church it began as a separate ceremony about the end of the seventh century, when parents offered their young sons to the service of God. Tonsure is to be given by a candidate's ordinary, though mitred abbots can bestow it on their own subjects. No special age for its reception is prescribed, but the recipient must have learnt the rudiments of the Faith and be able to read and write. The ceremony may be performed at any time or place. As to the monastic tonsure, some writers have distinguished three kinds: (1) the Roman, or that of St. Peter, when all the head is shaved except a circle, of hair; (2) the Eastern, or St. Paul's, when the entire head is denuded of hair; (3) the Celtic, or St. John's, when only a crescent of hair is shaved from the front of the head. In Britain, the Saxon opponents of the Celtic tonsure called it the tonsure of Simon Magus. According to canon law, all clerics are bound to wear the tonsure under certain penalties. But on this subject, Taunton (loc. cit. inf.) says: "In English-speaking countries, from a custom arising in the days of persecution and having a prescription of over three centuries, the shaving of the head, the priestly crown, seems, with the tacit consent of the Holy See, to have passed out of use. No provincial or national council has ordered it, even when treating of clerical dress; and the Holy See has not inserted the law when correcting the decrees of those councils."