For decades now there has been a concerted effort by many Catholics to consider the concept of vocation in broader terms than merely the calling to priesthood, diaconate, and forms of consecrated virginity lived out either in a religious community or alone.
There is a healthy aspect to this. There are also dangers.
The healthy aspect is that this conversation has made people think about the fact that all Christians have a primordial vocation to be holy before the Lord in their own lives. An unfortunate tendency throughout the Church’s history, on the part of some Christians, is to treat holiness as the business of priests, monks, nuns, and other religious—the “professionals.”
It has been said that the laity are called to “pay, pray, and obey,” or, in a more American formulation, “pay up, pray up, and shut up.” More entertainingly, as Msgr. George Talbot said in a letter to St. John Henry Newman: “What is the province of the laity? To hunt, to shoot, to entertain.”
Sayings that limit the laity to some personal piety and plunking envelopes in the collection basket or, worse, simply having a life of entertainment, miss the point. All are called to the fullness of holiness—something that people who read the Gospels, the Fathers, St. Francis de Sales, and countless other saints would know. The “you” in the Sermon on the Mount is directed to all: “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).
Yet these notions persist. That is why the Second Vatican Council’s dogmatic constitution Lumen Gentium dedicates a section to “The Universal Call to Holiness in the Church.” Here, we read, “The Lord Jesus, the divine Teacher and Model of all perfection, preached holiness of life to each and every one of His disciples of every condition.” Further, “it is evident to everyone that all the faithful of Christ of whatever rank or status, are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of charity…” (LG 40).
We all “have a vocation” insofar as we are in Christ. We must be completely holy whether we are priests, nuns, presidents, postmen, parents, or any other state of life, rank, or status.
Yet, we do talk about a different level of vocation: namely, to a particular state of life. And this sense of “having a vocation” is usually to the more extraordinary callings of holy orders or religious life. Some are called to the priesthood or diaconate. They make promises to their bishop and—even for married men ordained to the diaconate or priesthood—renounce the possibility of marriage. (Some rare dispensations are given for married deacons who are widowed, for instance, those with young children, who are considered indispensable by their bishops.) Some are called to a vocation of religious life where they witness to Christ’s dramatic call to abandon all and follow Him through: a vow of poverty, in which they forsake having their own money at all; a vow of chastity that is lived out as a renunciation of the option to marry and have children; and a vow of obedience to their superior in all things that do not involve sin. There are also an order of consecrated virgins and an order of widows in which women not married or once-married pledge a life of celibate chastity for the good of the Church.
Most people do not have a call to the priesthood or religious life, either in community or alone. They will marry or remain single. Are these “vocations” in the strict sense?
Marriage is a state of life. Most of Catholic history has not considered marriage a “vocation” in the same way as the calling to priesthood, religious life, or consecrated celibacy of one form or another, even if Church Fathers such as St. John Chrysostom did, however, suggest that married people must be like monks. Today, however, many Catholics talk about a “vocation to marriage,” sometimes citing the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator” (CCC 1603). Rather than deciding the question of whether marriage is a vocation, though, this passage is a kind of general statement of the truth about man as male and female—marriage is a kind of default calling felt by most.
But is marriage a vocation in the same way as a vocation, say, to be a cloistered Benedictine or a diocesan priest?
Even though many talk about marriage as a vocation in the same way, I doubt the wisdom. The traditional notion of a vocation is a specific state of life in a particular community or mode. Translating that to marriage is a bit tricky. Are you called in the same way to marriage with a certain person? Some become convinced that, because marriage is a calling, God has a “special someone” picked out for them. Their job is to find that special person who will be a “soul mate” for a “marriage that was made in heaven.” This can lead to heartache and unrealistic expectations.
Better to act on the basis that one is free to pursue marriage as long as God has not called one to a more specific vocation, such as religious life. In contrast to the soul-mate view, discerning marriage is better understood as exercising one’s freedom to find a woman or man of faith and virtue to whom one could reasonably pledge one’s life and make a covenant of fidelity, permanence, and openness to the children God may send.
Some have quoted Pope Francis’s Amoris Laetitia to say that marriage is definitely a vocation in the same way as the priesthood or religious life. What he says seems closer to the way of thinking I suggest: “Marriage is a vocation, inasmuch as it is a response to a specific call to experience conjugal love as an imperfect sign of the love between Christ and the Church. Consequently, the decision to marry and to have a family ought to be the fruit of a process of vocational discernment” (72).
That is, considering marriage should be within the general vocational call to discern how our lives should be lived. This is not to say marriage is a vocation in exactly the same way as the priesthood or consecrated celibacy. Considering that quotation, it might be better to think about the vocation within marriage to bear witness to Christ’s love for the Church rather than about a particular vocation to marry a particular someone. In the former sense, we can think about the vows freely made as parallel to religious vows.
So, if marriage is a vocational question but not quite a vocation in the stricter sense, what about just being single? You will sometimes hear people, having been told that marriage is a vocation, arguing that being single should also be considered a vocation.
On the one hand, there is something interesting here. The term “monk” comes from the Greek monachos, the root of which means “one” or “single.” (Think “monocle” or “monotone.”) In a certain way, most traditionally understood vocations are about being single. Monks, friars, sisters, hermits, and consecrated virgins and widows all vow celibate chastity. As noted, married priestly and diaconal vocations include the vow to remain single if they are widowed. Those who enter holy orders unmarried vow not to marry. Those who enter when married know they will not marry again.
But when people talk about being single as a vocation, are they talking about taking a vow of singleness to serve God like hermits or consecrated virgins do? Simply being unmarried involves the call to be fully holy just as much as being a Carthusian monk or a diocesan priest does. Being unmarried because one has not found someone one wants to marry is not itself a vocation, however. Rejecting a marriage proposal to care for an ailing parent might be something God calls you to do, but it’s not clear it’s a vocation in the strict sense of a calling to a state in life. Unless you are committing yourself to lifelong singleness for God, it’s not a vocation in the sense the Church has usually used.
That not all of us have a particular and special vocation should not bother us. We are where God has placed us. If he wishes us to live an ordinary life, married or single, it does not mean we have no calling from him at all. We are all called by God to be as Christ-like as possible. If our lives are ordinary lives of married commitment or single witness in our work or neighborhood, we should not be upset. The special calls of vocations in the strict sense are given to particular people for the life of the Church. Whether we have one or not, we are all called to a blessedness that is beyond what eye has seen and ear has heard.
(Editor’s note: This article first appeared, in a slightly different form, in The Catholic Servant and is reposted here with kind permission.)
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Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body.
I appreciate David Deavel’s efforts to further parse for us the distinctions between vocational callings to Holy Orders and Matrimony. But we need to realize that our culture has managed to almost totally destroy the essential meaning of marriage. Faithfulness to one other person for life has become chimerical at best. Why? Because Man has no flippin idea who he is. Without a reference to God, the notion of Man is meaningless. If Man no longer knows who he is, how could marriage have any meaning at all? Reality, which is to say all of Creation, is relational. If Man does not know who he is, he cannot live in reality.
Excellent article and food for thought, if I may say so. This is a topic that needs a lot more theological attention.
So-Not sure what you’re trying to say!
Our vocation should be “You shall therefore be perfect, as your Father, Who is in Heaven, is perfect”, that´s the Lord’s call, whatever we do in life, as priests, consecrated life, married or single.
We get a call (Latin vocatio) to holiness at our baptism and again at our confirmation. Every further vocation is but a specification of that call.
The idea that marriage is a vocation like those to the priesthood or religious life is something I have only encountered in the last few years. It is sometimes goes along with the idea that single men are almost doomed to be habitual sexual sinners. But that means baptism is insufficient to give grace for continence. The pervasive sexualization of contemporary Western life is said to make continence almost impossible, but what about the culture of whoremongering in many earlier Christian societies, including Catholic ones, in which it was assumed unmarried men would go to prostitutes, and prostitution was legal and omnipresent? The preaching that the lay single state is grossly inferior and that almost everyone not called to priesthood or the consecrated life must get married is likely to lead to unwise marriages that either lead not to holiness or can lead to unusual holiness either by suffering an unhappy relationship or by suffering a divorce which leads one back to the suffering and the same temptations of the single life, and often a fall into poverty.
Catholic marriage is sacramental binding and commitment. It is different to natural marriage although natural marriage can attain the dispensation within the call of Christ.
Amoris magnifies the errors going from failing to properly address various distinctions including concerning marriage; and as I recollect, also by keeping the sacramental bond off to the margin or as not a imperative reference.
A man and woman do not just promise fidelity to one another. They vow it. Vows are, by definition, made only to God. So how can a vowed state not be a vocation?
Do you have to have a vow to have a vocation?
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary – 11th Edition:
vocation: summons;1 a) a summons or strong inclination to a particular state or course of action; esp; a divine call to the religious life b)an entry into the priesthood or religious order 2a) the work in which a person is regularly employed: OCCUPATION b)the persons engaged in a particular occupation 3: the special function of an individual or group (I imagine Mother Theresa would be a good example of 3)
Wouldn’t marriage be like being a kid; it’s just that situation you are in, not a vocation — now a mother raising her family that could be a vocation, right?
No thanks to the dictionary.
A vow in answer to Christ’s call would be in the patterning of a Christian vocation.
Let’s see. I will reflect on my own question I put to John. Why was Holy Communion withheld from Jacinta? Maybe they felt that without it she would die humble for a certainty? Or maybe the story that they were late is true? The story is that on the last evening the priest detected no urgency. He departed to return the next day and she dies that evening. Also, the BVM had shown the children the Scapular. Did they at least invest Jacinta with it? I do not know.
I wrote an article on this topic some time ago. Tobias Nathe, “The Vocation to Marriage and Related Observations on Christian Discernment,” Nova et Vetera 13 (2) (2015). I’d be happy to send a pdf to whoever emails me with the request.
David, you are putting your finger on something I have been thinking about for some time. As a priest, I encounter young people who struggle to discern a vocation precisely because they treat marriage, single life, priesthood and religious life as four relatively equivalent options. I explain to them that marriage is, as David says, our default or ‘natural’ vocation. We are all capable of marriage by nature – marriage as such does not require discernment. Which specific person I will marry does, of course, require discernment. In contrast to marriage, the vocation to priesthood and religious life comes as a distinct and specific grace given by God to some but not all. What needs to be discerned, therefore, is whether God is giving me the grace of a priestly or religious vocation. As Fr Willie Doyle explains in his classic pamphlets on vocations and priesthood, the presence of the grace of a priestly or religious vocation can be detected by specific observable effects. If such a grace is detected, then the individual has a free choice to accept or reject that grace. I have found that this way of thinking about vocations immediately makes things clearer to young people. Some realise straight away that God is indeed offering them a priestly vocation. Others realise that no such grace is being given.
Marriage is a typical vocation, but it is not the default vocation. It requires a change.
Frankly, most of this talk is wrong-headed. The true vocation of every Catholic is to sanctity. Period. PERIOD. According to legend, St. Theophilus sold his soul to become a bishop (but through sincere repentance and the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, he died a saint). His elevated position within the Church would not have profited him in hell. On the other hand, St. Maria Goretti was not called to the priesthood (obviously), nor to the religious life, nor even to your “default” vocation of marriage, but for all that, she is a SAINT.
I don’t get why there is such a tendency in Catholicism to think that whenever two things are different, one must be better and the other worse. Does no one read 1 Corinthians 12? If you are made an eye, then see the best you can; if an ear, hear the best you can; but do it all in humility. There is no room in Christ’s Church for a caste system, relegating singles to the status of untouchables who have missed their vocations.
Trying to define Marriage or being single as a “vocation” sounds a lot like winning a “participation” trophy in children’s sports. Everyone knows it means absolutely nothing and is intended as a sop to those who failed to win. Marriage has indeed been the default position for most humans in our society, and people roll into it more or less naturally if they meet the right person. PREISTS and religious like nuns have a vocation. They are giving up a great deal of what people consider a fulfilled life in order to serve God. That is a huge sacrifice and requires much prayer and discernment before making a commitment.
Personally, I am tired of whiners who keep trying to reduce the role of priests at Mass in order to placate the noisy laity who wish to see themselves as equals of Priests. I am a woman who serves in a church ministry on the altar, but would NEVER consider myself in the same category as a priest. Nor would I whine if my ministry was placed back into the hands of the priest. A little tired too of seeing communion distributed by EM’s during the weekday Mass when they are frankly not needed for the number of communicants present. Let the priest do it. If certain laity had their way the priest would only rise from his chair to consecrate the Eucharist. To me the whiner’s whole attitude smacks of a lack of humility.
Amoris regularizes vagary, whimsy, provisory, vaporous, stop-gap and other things that our Lord excludes from sacramental marriage, see Matt. 19:10-11.
If you want to do apostolate with a whimsical person, why must you have it that he or she she is designated for sacramental marriage automatically.