Responding to the Vocations Crisis
by Fr. Roger J. Landry - January 11, 2008
Next week, the Church in the United States marks National Vocation Awareness Week. It is meant to be a period of intense prayer to the Lord of the harvest to send laborers to gather his harvest alongside his Son. As we celebrate the Baptism of the Lord on Sunday, we are all called to ponder the meaning and purpose of our own baptism, how we have been consecrated to God and chosen by him to share in his mission of the salvation of the world. As we transition into Ordinary Time on Monday, we are then moved to reflect on how God is calling us to spend best the limited time we have been given. Each of us is asked to recall that our entire existence is vocational — that God has called us into existence, from "before the foundation of the world," to be "holy and blameless in his sight" (Eph 1:4). God has, in short, chosen us to love him and to love others, to be a holy disciple and a fervent apostle, to become a saint and a saint maker.
National Vocation Awareness Week is a response to the roots of the much talked about "vocations crisis" in the Church, which extends far beyond a shortage of priests, brothers and religious sisters. The deepest part of the crisis concerns how Catholics as a whole are responding to their primary vocation to be saints. Forty-five year ago, the fathers of Second Vatican Council powerfully and beautifully reminded all Catholics of the "universal call to holiness," that each of us is called by God not just to be a "good person" but heroically virtuous, to get not merely a passing grade on the final exam of life but to strive with God's help to make the eternal honor roll. Once one begins to focus one's life on receiving and reciprocating God's love, then the particularity of one's "vocation within a vocation," of one's state of life within the universal call to holiness, becomes rather secondary. For once one gives back to God the gift of life he or she has received, once one reaches the point of saying to God, "thy will be done" and "let it be done to me according to your word," then it really doesn't matter how God decides to spend the blank check one has given him.
The deepest roots of the vocations crisis are found here: relatively few Catholics are giving God that blank check. They will give to God, but within limits. Like with the Rich Young Man, they will keep the commandments, but when Jesus asks them to trust him enough to detach themselves from their possessions, give them for the good of others, and then come to follow him fully as their pearl of great price, they cling to their stuff rather than to him (Mt 13:46, 19:16-30).
To remedy the shortage of vocations in the priesthood and religious life begins with addressing head on the shortage of those seeking sanctity in the Church. There is a need to change the "culture" within many Catholic families and parishes so that young people and old grow accustomed once again to giving God their all and their best, to making his priorities their own, to saying freely and joyfully "not my will, but thine, be done." That is why National Vocation Awareness Week begins on the feast of the Lord's baptism, so that we, in reflecting on the meaning of our own baptism, will remember that our life is already consecrated to God and the value of our life is found in how we live out and daily renew that consecration.
It's also the reason why last month the Vatican's Congregation for Clergy, in seeking a worldwide effort to address the shortage of priestly vocations, focused most of its attention on seeking to get the people of God as a whole, both in their parishes as well as in their "domestic churches," to dedicate themselves to prayer, to adoration of Christ in the Eucharist, to consecration to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and to the spiritual adoption of priests and future priests. In a deeply moving booklet entitled "Adoration, Reparation and Spiritual Motherhood for Priests," as well as in two accompanying letters, the Congregation appeals to bishops, priests, religious and faithful to change the "vocational culture" by focusing on these activities.
The first is prayer. The Lord Jesus himself told us that the first response to a shortage in vocations is to pray to the Harvest Master to send laborers for his harvest (Mt 9:38). The Congregation encourages prayer for priestly vocations, beginning from the members of one's own family. It lifts up the example of the tiny Italian village of Lu Monferrato in northern Italy. In 1881, the mothers of this little village of a few thousand inhabitants began to gather each Tuesday afternoon for Eucharistic adoration to ask the Lord for vocations. They would pray together, "O God, grant that one of my sons may become a priest! I myself want to live as a good Christian and want to guide my children always to do what is right, so that I may receive the grace, O God, to be allowed to give you a holy priest! Amen!" That prayer, and their fervent desire for vocations, bore more fruit than any of them could have ever imagined. In the span of a few decades, this one village parish — much smaller than many of the parishes in the Diocese of Fall River — produced 152 priestly vocations and 171 religious women to 41 different congregations.
The second activity is Eucharistic adoration. Following the appeal of Pope Benedict in Sacramentum Caritatis, the Congregation asks that each diocese appoint a priest to devote himself full time to promoting Eucharistic adoration in parishes and Eucharistic shrines. It is not a surprise that in those U.S. dioceses that are thriving with vocations, the practice of Eucharistic adoration is also thriving. Focusing on Christ in the Eucharist not only helps one to center one's existence on the Lord but points one's attention on the need for priests without whom there would be no Eucharist.
Third, the Congregation promotes consecration to the Blessed Virgin Mary, who, even as a young girl, shows us all how to say yes to the will of God, and teaches all mothers, in particular, how to raise their kids to do God's will.
Finally, it begs the faithful, especially women religious, to spiritually adopt and mother priests and future priests, helping them with their self-offering, prayer and penance.
Vocations are everyone's business. This upcoming week is the time for us, individually and together, to get down to business through these means. If we do, with God's help, there's no reason why the Diocese of Fall River cannot become the Lu Monferrato of the 21st century.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
