Not Everyone “Has a Vocation” in the Narrow Sense: Roma locuta est

One of the paragraphs of the post-synodal apostolic exhortation Christus Vivit that has flown most unfortunately under the radar is the following:

For those who are not called to marriage or the consecrated life, it must always be remembered that the first and most important vocation is the vocation we have received in baptism. Those who are single, even if not by their own choice, can offer a particular witness to that vocation through their own path of personal growth. (CV 267)

I say this is unfortunate, because this paragraph really has settled a question which was left open for far too long. (I’m not aware that the status quaestionis was moved to “Roma locuta est” before March 25, 2019.) And the settling of this issue is deeply important for the abuse crisis.

If your experience is anything like mine, you will have heard a homily—or two, or three, or a half-dozen or more—on how everyone has “a vocation,” by which it is meant a vocation to marriage or to consecrated life, the latter being the combined technical term for Holy Orders (episcopate, priesthood, or the oft-forgotten permanent diaconate) and/or a life of the vows formally accepted by the ecclesiastical institution (monks, nuns, female and male religious, the ancient Order of Virgins, etc.). The better of these homilies will root these supplementary vocations in our more important baptismal call to holiness. I heard one of them this past Good Shepherd Sunday.

But this is actually not something the Church teaches. In fact, the Magisterium teaches the exact opposite.

Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation for young people explicitly addresses a group that is excluded from this theory or ideology of vocation: “those who are not called to marriage or the consecrated life.”

This is huge. The implications are massive.

For anyone in a position of authority to assert that the Church teaches something which it emphatically doesn’t is bad enough. When the thing is actually directly refuted by the Magisterium, that’s even worse. But to damn it all threefold to hell, when the matter touches on not just one section of belief or morality, but the very orientation and meaning of the person’s entire life—that is horrendous beyond words.

Anyone in a position of authority who declares categorically that every baptized Catholic has “a vocation,” meaning to marriage or to consecrated life recognized by the ecclesiastical structures, is committing abuse of conscience, with all the psychological and spiritual damage that that entails (cf. CV 98).

Abuse of conscience is a serious thing. For the victim, it will become harder to hear the very voice of God in what Saint Francis de Sales calls “the fine point of the spirit.” Why? Because that very point of communion has been violated, battered, abused. What it is actually saying, in concert with the teaching of the Church, has suffered violence. And however much the perpetrator of this abuse of conscience may try to blame a lack of generosity or a “me” mentality in today’s generation, the reality is, discernment has been made difficult, if not sometimes practically impossible, by the very priests or ecclesiastical representatives abusing people’s conscience about the topic of vocation itself.

It’s not hard to see a link to the vocations crisis. Certainly, this kind of abuse doesn’t explain the whole vocations crisis. But one would have to be blind to deny that it has played a role. You can’t violate someone’s conscience, especially about the topic of discernment itself, and then expect them to, as if by magic, discern well.

Moreover, if the universality of “a vocation” is the subject of a homily, the abuse happens in a liturgical setting. What happens is that some people are effectively excluded from the assembly’s collective “we.” But on this, the recent apostolic letter on the liturgical formation of the people of God has something supplemental to say: “The liturgy does not say ‘I’ but ‘we,’ and any limitation on the breadth of this ‘we’ is always demonic.” (Desiderio Desideravi 19) The terms are emphatic and admit no exceptions whatsoever: “any limitation,” “always.” To assert, directly or de facto, that someone doesn’t belong to the liturgical assembly because they are neither married, nor in consecrated life, nor discerning, is demonic, in Pope Francis’ words. It’s diabolical in at least the etymological sense: it throws accusations and divides.

Even just thinking with my own imagination, not with the pronouncements of the Magisterium, it boggles my mind that anyone could suppose that “everyone has a vocation.” Even if I completely lay aside the effect of sins people commit obscuring their judgment, I can see plenty of circumstances that impede “having a vocation”: People with sufficient intellectual developmental difficulties. Some people who die young. Some people stuck in a coma for a decade or more. Not a few people who clearly have given themselves to God alone but who come to the Church too late to find a partner or enter consecrated life in any form that they know of. And the elephant in the room: anyone whose conscience has been so abused about vocation itself that they lack sufficient psychological ability to discern about it.

And the latter category is multiplied and solidified by the abusers of conscience who tell us that “everyone has a vocation.”

Are we not supposed to be done with a “throwaway culture”? What is it doing in catechesis or a liturgical setting? Ah, well:

They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. (Mt 23:4 NRSV)

As I was sitting there at Mass on Good Shepherd Sunday—and for the hours and days afterwards that I suffered psychosomatic symptoms from a reactivation of so much of the trauma I went through at the seminary—I got to thinking about the day’s readings. I understand why the lectionary in the Easter season continues on with the Acts of the Apostles and the First Letter of John. But in my imagination, I pondered what it would be like if we moved up the first reading from the Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B) to be given on Good Shepherd Sunday:

Ah, shepherds who let the flock of My pasture stray and scatter!—declares God. Assuredly, thus said the Eternal, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who should tend My people: It is you who let My flock scatter and go astray. You gave no thought to them, but I am going to give thought to you, for your wicked acts—declares God. And I Myself will gather the remnant of My flock from all the lands to which I have banished them, and I will bring them back to their pasture, where they shall be fertile and increase. And I will appoint over them shepherds who will tend them; they shall no longer fear or be dismayed, and none of them shall be missing—declares God.

See, a time is coming—declares God—when I will raise up a true branch of David’s line. He shall reign as king and shall prosper, and he shall do what is just and right in the land. In his days Judah shall be delivered and Israel shall dwell secure. And this is the name by which he shall be called: “God is our Vindicator.” (Jer 23:1–6 NJPS)