Fr. Roger J. Landry
The Anchor
Editorial
January 13, 2012
Today is the fifth and last day of Vocations Awareness Week in the Catholic Church in the United States. This observance began in 1976 in order to help the whole people of God recognize that the entirety of Christian life is meant to be vocational. National Vocations Awareness Week begins with the liturgical celebration of the Baptism of the Lord, which the Church celebrated on Monday. Christ’s Baptism in the Jordan made holy the waters of Baptism so that, when Christ’s Baptism was culminated in blood on the Cross, the waters of Baptism might become sacramentally capable of transforming us into sons in the Son, into true temples of God’s presence. Jesus’ Baptism evokes the importance and the consequences of our own.
Vocational awareness begins by grasping that Baptism brings with it a direct, personal call by God as His beloved son or daughter in whom He is well-pleased, a real summons to be holy as God is holy, to love as God loves, to live as God lives by living in communion with God. It is out of this baptismal vocation that all other vocations in the Church flow. From Baptism flow the vocations that pertain to our state of life — like the vocation to marriage and parenthood, to the priesthood, to religious life, to consecrated virginity, to apostolic lay celibacy — because they are paths that God gives us in order to help us advance on the path of holiness and build up His family on earth. From Baptism flows as well those vocations that pertain to the work we will do, as teachers, farmers, doctors and nurses, athletes, actors, computer programmers, and so on, which are all means by which we are called to fulfill our mission to fill the earth and subdue it, to have dominion over all creatures, and to be the salt, light and leaven of the earth.
The importance of this week is only growing as the years go by because there is a real crisis of vocational awareness in the Church. Normally when we hear the expression “vocations crisis,” we think of the diminishing numbers of priests or religious. The expression is also now commonly being used to refer to the crisis in the understanding of the vocation to the Sacrament of Marriage; not only is the number of sacramental marriages way down and the percentages of divorce, cohabitation and civil unions way up, but many Catholics seem to be incognizant that marriage is a true calling by God, not just a consequence of ephemeral sexual or emotional attraction.
The root of these vocational crises, however, is the greatest vocational crisis of all: the lack of a basic vocational awareness among Catholics, a chronic incapacity to perceive that, as Martha of Bethany said to her sister Mary in the Gospel, “The Master is here and He is calling you.” Many Catholics are unconscious that the Master is always present and calling us in some way or another. If Catholics are unaware of this, it’s unsurprising that they will not hear His more specific calls to follow Him down particular paths.
This lack of general vocational awareness is a direct result of the metastasizing cancer of secularism within the Mystical Body of Christ. Secularism, as Pope Benedict often says, is living si Deus non daretur, as if God did were not a given. While virtually all Catholics would readily affirm that God exists and confirm their general faith in Jesus, many Catholics live most of their day as practical atheists, because they’ve separated their faith from their daily life. Surveys show that most Catholics do not pray every day; among those who still do turn to God daily, most dedicate only a few minutes to prayer at the end of the day, a habit of conversation that would not be enough to sustain a marriage and is certainly not enough to keep vibrant a covenant of love with God.
Many Catholics have tuned out God’s calling them and seeking to guide them throughout each day. Increasing numbers of Catholics are going through life deaf to the Lord’s eagerly inviting them to eat His Passover meal at Sunday Mass, to His beckoning them with tenderness to receive His forgiveness in the Sacrament of Mercy, to His summoning them to build their love lives on His pure, chaste, demanding, responsible and fruitful love, and to His challenging them to perfection through self-denial, giving of themselves to the poor and coming to follow Him up close. If the Church is ever going to respond to the crises of vocations to the priesthood, religious life and marriage and respond to the challenge of the new evangelization, then she must begin by raising up this general vocational awareness that God is constantly calling us, that He is continually seeking to engage and evangelize us, that He is unceasingly trying to help us to build our day-to-day existence on Him and to learn from Him how to turn every moment in life into an occasion of loving communion with Him and others.
The opposite of the practical atheism flowing from secularism that is leading many Catholics — sometimes even unaware — to ostracize God from life is the vocational awareness that the Church is trying to stimulate this week: this is a consciousness not only that God exists, but that He is present and active calling us at each moment to Himself and entrusting us with His mission to others.
The crisis in general vocational awareness is why the Church as a whole is in need of the Year of Faith that Pope Benedict has announced will begin on October 11. On Saturday, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published, at the pope’s request, a series of pastoral recommendations for the Year of Faith (see the article on page two). These pastoral recommendations proposed a series of 10 ways each that individual parishes, dioceses, countries and the Church universal can live the year to help strengthen the faith of believers and equip them to live and share it. We’ll have a chance to examine these recommendations in future editorials as we draw closer to the beginning of the ecclesial year. What is important for us to grasp now is that the lack of general vocational awareness among Catholics comes from an insufficient understanding of, and formation in, the faith among the baptized.
The faith to which God calls us is an “obedient” one in which we personally and with trust adhere to God. Obedience comes from the Latin expression ob-audire, which means to “listen attentively.” Our faith is meant to help us to hear the Lord’s voice and to act on what we hear. It’s meant to make us conscious of, and attentive to, the Lord’s constant calling. The Pastoral Recommendations stress that Jesus seeks to show us the art of living in an “intense relationship with Him,” a dialogue of love. In every age, the congregation continues, Jesus “convokes” — literally “calls together” — the Church, entrusting her with the Gospel. The Church is basically the body of those who have heard this call to come together with Jesus and whom Jesus wants to form and send to make others aware of this same calling. The upcoming Year of Faith is basically meant to be, among other things, an International Vocations Awareness Year, a cure for cancer of secularism that begins by infecting our hearing and then spreads to impacting our entire life.
As we conclude Vocations Awareness Week in the United States, it is a good time for us to recalibrate our own listening to the Lord in our day-to-day life and to help those we know, especially the young, learn how to tune their ears and their lives to the Lord’s voice as He seeks to guide us to follow Him day-to-day through the various stages and trials of life to true happiness, holiness and Heaven.