Michael Kelly
I’m sometimes asked by dioceses and religious congregations for advice on vocations strategies. I don’t have anything close to all the answers, but I’m happy to share my experiences of what I have seen work elsewhere in terms of fostering a culture of vocations and how one might go about communicating a life-encompassing commitment of service in the contemporary world.
Everyone – or almost everyone – agrees on the urgency of the need to promote vocations to the priesthood and religious life. Where differences arise is in how one should go about that. As the discussion unfolds, almost invariably, someone – usually a priest or religious – will raise a concern that a focus on priesthood and religious life might make married or single people feel left out.
Emotion
It’s a genuinely-felt emotion and comes from a good place. But it also runs the risk of paralysing any authentic promotion of priesthood and religious life to young adults.
In the bid to be all-inclusive, one can tend to de-emphasise the specificity of priesthood and religious life in the work of the Church to such an extent that all is lost in the fog of vague platitudes about the fact that everyone has a vocation.
I’ve lost count of the number of well-meaning homilies I’ve heard on Vocations Sunday which extol the ‘vocation’ to the single life. This is a response to the fact that there are a large number of people who are single in our congregations.
But, here’s the thing: there is no such thing as a vocation to the single life per se. One is either single and free to marry or one is not single and free to marry. It is a logical absurdity to say that one can be called to be what one is; nor is there a vocation to marriage – not, at least, in the sense of a supernatural vocation. Marriage is man’s natural state. Some people are called to forego the natural state in view of the Gospel and the Kingdom. Others are not.
People who are single – and therefore uncommitted in any life-encompassing way – are single for a variety of reasons. Many I have met acutely feel pained at not being married and yet don’t discern a call to priesthood or religious life. Singleness is not, in the Church’s long tradition, part of God’s plan for people.
This is why it strikes me as very odd that people in the Church would encourage people to discern a vocation to the uncommitted lay single life in the same way that we might encourage young people to discern a vocation to priesthood or religious life or to be open to marriage?
The Church teaches that true human flourishing can only come about through dedicated, self-sacrificial love. As was stated in the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes the human person “cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself”.
It makes no sense to guide anyone towards a life of deliberate non-commitment. The high number of people who are single is not, I suspect, indicative of a very healthy culture – that being said, uncommitted single people must never be regarded as anything less than full members of the Church.