Today is the memorial of Pope St Leo the Great, who in the 5th century worked tirelessly to defend the Church against the errors of that day (e.g., Manichaeism, Pelagianism, Nestorianism) and to promote a closer bond of unity between the bishops and Rome. Pope Benedict XVI, the successor of Peter and Leo, has the same concerns and is deeply committed to Christian unity.

The foundation of the Church on Peter (Mt 16:18) teaches us that there is only one Church, not many “churches.” The disunity among Christians is not by the design of Jesus Christ. Therefore, as we work to promote unity among Christians, we must not seek only a superficial sense of agreement, a certain “false irenism” as Pius XII put it, wherein we merely tolerate or get along with one another. Rather, the only way for Christians to become unified is by turning to Jesus Christ through the Church. In the office of the Holy Father, then, we find that solid foundation against which the gates of Hell shall not prevail. The Church is truly our objective standard, “the pillar and foundation of the truth” (1 Tim 3:15).

Priests, according to Pastores dabo vobis, must be promoters of communion and artisans of communion, though these phrases are usually rendered in English as “men of communion.” In other words they share in the work of the Holy Spirit, “governing all things firmly and gently” (Wis 8:1).

If the gates of Hell have prevailed in any part of our own lives, then, this is a wound against the Church and against our task of promoting unity. We ourselves must turn back to our standard, and, like St Leo, put aside our own interests for the sake of the Church.

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The above is the substance of a homily that I gave to the college seminarians this morning.

I swear the oath of fidelity with my hand on the Book of the Gospels.

Then I sign my profession of faith, oath of fidelity, and promise of celibacy.

Finally, I give the documents to the rector.

I find it easy to see why people have difficulties understanding certain things properly today. I am thinking, for example, of the doctrine of the reservation of Orders (i.e., that the Church has no authority to confer Holy Orders on women). This topic has come to mind because of the recent attempted ordinations in St. Louis.

This issue in particular is very hard to understand because of several cultural factors, especially: Nominalist philosophy, Pragmatism, Neo-Manichaean notion of the body’s relation to the person, etc. I am not surprised or upset in the least when people have questions about why women cannot be priests. It is certainly difficult to explain sometimes (I once had to explain it to a devout little girl in about twenty seconds on her way into the church with her mother).¹

The problem in understanding this issue seems to me to be related to why we are finding it increasingly difficult to conceive of the family as a natural (much less a divine) institution. If sexual differentiation doesn’t matter for the priesthood, then it doesn’t matter for marriage either, and we are seeing all kinds of related issues on that front. The deeper problem is one of human nature. People no longer want to see sex as an essential part of a person. Rather, we like to separate the person from his body in our minds such that sexual differences are treated as purely incidental, accidental, and as not having to do with a person’s identity.

Of course, the consequences of this split between a person and his body are frightful. Sexuality is no longer thought of as involving a real relationship but is seen as merely physical, etc. Obviously, marriage and priesthood suffer. The whole sacramental system begins not to make sense, and even the Incarnation begins to mean nothing to us.²

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1 She asked her question with an adorable expression: “Can girls be priests?” She was very young, so I felt kind of bad telling her “No.” I didn’t feel bad because of the truth but because I was afraid she would confuse priesthood with devotion to the Church and thus feel dissuaded from piety. In fact, I tried to go the route of explaining that God made people different and so we have to love him and serve him in different ways. If I had more time, my plan was to ask her about families (although, this is risky since you never have any idea what a child thinks constitutes a normal family), then to ask her what we call priests (”Father”), trying to explain that the Church is like a mother and a priest is like the father of a parish. I didn’t get the chance to get that far because they were on the move, though.

2 Incidentally, when did believing God simply because he is God stop being considered a good thing? There was, for example, an article on the attempted ordinations which asked, “What would Jesus do?” The question seems strange, since the Church has always held the opposite answer from the article by asking the question: “What did Jesus do?”

And the A Priori Award for most redundant blog post title goes to … this post!^*

Do we buy into the “self-made man” mentality that we’ve inherited from Existentialism? Interestingly enough, I like to call Existentialism the “philosophy of Original Sin” because its starting point is man as he finds himself after the Fall rather than God and man made in the image of God. Guess what? This philosophy is the result of Pride and it teaches us Pride as a way of life.

We may think that we’re immune, but how often do we find ourselves asking children, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

What kind of a question is that? We ought to be asking, “What do you think God wants you to be when you grow up?” Do we take for granted that our kids will get married? Take over the family business? Go to college? Is their life about what we want them to do? Is it about what they want to do? No. It’s about God and the special way of loving him for which he made them that we call a ‘vocation’.

In my own life, I’m often asked, “Why did you decide to become a priest?” Becoming a priest is not something that someone “decides” to do (in the usual sense of the word). Granted, it’s something that I must commit myself to and love intensely, and I do, but the Church could tell me at any time before I’m ordained, “We don’t think you have a vocation to the priesthood,” and I would accept that! I don’t have a right to be ordained because priesthood is a vocation: it’s literally something to which I must be called, not merely something to which I can aspire.

I am not the first principle of my vocation! God forbid it (as if it were possible)! I am merely responding to God. A better question is, “Why do you think God wants you to be a priest?” The answer is, of course, that he made me for that purpose. He designed me for that and every smallest grace that he gives me will make me the type of person he wants me to be, if I let him.

Christ not only calls us, but he models for us (and gives us the power to imitate him) the appropriate response. “The Son does nothing on his own but only what he sees the Father doing.” In the same way, let me not “decide” on a state in life alone, but rather let me choose only what Christ has chosen for me.

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* Thank you! Thank you! This is so unexpected … I’d like to thank God first of all, of course. There’s also a very special woman that I need to mention … mom, come on up here! (Inner monologue: “Blast it! I was hoping for the coveted Tautology Award.”) [and so forth]

The Culture of Death kills our desire and ability to respond to the vocation God has given us in life. Working to build a Culture of Life is intrinsically linked with a fruitfulness in the area of vocations. This should be obvious to us, but oftentimes does not seem so because we have grown accustomed to thinking of our lives within the framework provided by the Culture of Death.

Abortion–the most heinous example–is a personal matter for everyone. First, it is an offense against God. Second, it does unspeakable violence to people that we love. Third, it is an insult against our own dignity because it claims that our lives have only arbitrary or subjective value.

Committing offenses against God (e.g., those sins which tear down the Culture of Life, i.e., build the Culture of Death¹) always wounds Charity which makes it harder for us to do God’s will.

We also must turn a somewhat stark glance to the consequences upon the world of the Culture of Death. How many priests we would have now if we hadn’t killed tens of millions of children by abortion in the last few decades in the United States alone? How many mothers and fathers? How many great saints?²

The Culture of Death teaches us to think of our lives as fundamentally purposeless, in fact, as not fundamentally anything since it teaches us that we have no origin as persons who are intended to exist and no destiny for which we are intended.³ When we think of our lives as separated from the purpose for which we were made, any concept of a vocation–much less the ability to respond to it–becomes impossible.

If we think the consequences on the priesthood have been bad, let’s look at married life. The Culture of Death is a direct (undoubtedly demonic) attack on the family. The family, after all, is rightly called “the domestic Church” because it is there that the newest members of the Church first learn to know and to love God.

While abortion is a denial of the dignity of every human person–and this has a very personal and concrete effect on each one of us–it causes not only harm to each individual but to families. After all, my vocation is not for my sake, it’s for the sake of the Church: every person can say that. The worst offense is not that my dignity as a person is absolutely insulted by the Culture of Death: it’s that God’s honor and sovereignty are insulted, it’s that the Church is insulted, and it’s that unspeakable violence is done to the least of my brothers–the poorest of the poor.

If the root of our lack of zeal for doing God’s will is Pride, then we must also recognize that the Culture of Death is a culture of Pride. It’s a culture that says “my value comes from me, or from the fact that I can stand up for myself, or from my own accomplishments, or from the government, etc.” That’s Pride. The Culture of Life always recognizes in humility that life is a gift that is not deserved but which is loved greatly–that the great value of every human person comes from God alone and not from us.

Non nobis, Domine, non nobis sed Nomini Tuo da gloriam.

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1 I did not merely say “build the Culture of Death” because the Culture of Death is, more accurately, an anti-culture. Since evil is not a substance, any so-called “culture” which promotes evil (and therefore leads to death) is only a corruption of something more substantial. “God did not make death” as it says in Wisdom 1.

2 This is not to imply that those children who died by abortion are not saints but simply that their greatness has not been manifested in the world as it should have been.

3 Interestingly, this is an important reason that the Eucharist is the cure for the Culture of Death as well as for our lack of response to vocations: the Eucharist is the source and the summit of Christian life whereas the Culture of Death primarily teaches us that our lives have no source and no summit. I plan to develop this theme in a later post.

I recently read a petition for the General Intercessions at Mass that asked God for openness to “Church vocations.” Is there such a thing as a non-Church vocation? The only way in which I could see this making sense is if it is speaking of a “Church vocation” vis-a-vis a “secular vocation,” e.g., “married life” as opposed to “carpentry” (although St. Joseph seemed to reconcile these without a problem).

I certainly hope that “Church vocation” was not meant to be synonymous with “priesthood or religious life.”

There is often talk these days of a “vocations crisis” in the Catholic Church in America. I believe this is an accurate diagnosis, but I would clarify that I believe we have a “vocations crisis” properly speaking, that is, we are not merely lacking priests (or even religious) in terms of numbers. No, the problem is much deeper and more serious than one of manpower.

What is the vocations crisis we are facing:

1. The vocations crisis is a “crisis of response to vocations,” that is, a vocation is a calling from God. Certainly, there is no lack on God’s part.

2. The vocations crisis necessarily affects every vocation. Vocations are complementary because they are given for the benefit of others, of the Church. Therefore, the crisis affects the married life (look at the state of family life in America), the single life (in various manifestations), the priesthood, and the religious life.

3. The vocations crisis is symptomatic of an “identity crisis” inasmuch as people either no longer believe that God created them for a purpose or they would rather invent their own purpose in life.

This identity crisis is fostered by our culture, and it strikes at the heart of every human person. Those who do not know that God created them out of love, to be happy in Heaven live a tragic existence, and it is the duty of Christians to evangelize the culture as well as those persons who suffer in this way. Those who believe God has a purpose in mind for them–a way of loving for which he especially designed them, a way that they will be of service in the Church as they ought to be, a way for them to be happy–but who would rather invent their own purpose are in a different situation. They do not lack Faith–as do those who do not believe God has a vocation for them–they lack Love, which is the more serious deficiency. In fact, it is deadly.

The lack of Faith and the lack of Love have the same cure: the sacraments. These physical meetings with Christ that give us grace are the only way that the disease of Pride will be eradicated from our hearts.

There is a fairly concrete way to overcome the vocations crisis that I can see:

1. The worthy celebration of the liturgy according to the norms of the Church (Without worshiping God rightly, we cannot serve him well in other ways).

2. A rejection of sin, especially sins that undermine the dignity of the human person such as abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, and contraception (These sins, in a very powerful way, teach us to regard the persons whom we ought to love as objects. They destroy the family, which is rightly called “the domestic Church.” Without a family united by real love, it will be very hard for someone to give his life to God.)

Without these, our hearts cannot be free enough to give our lives to God.

Many will say that Vatican II brought the idea of the “universal call to holiness.” Of course, the universal call to holiness is not new: it is written on human nature and made explicit by our Lord himself, who said “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The Vatican II Council, however, beautifully re-emphasized against certain errors the dignity of the lay vocation.

There had been and is still a dangerous tendency in the Church to speak of a “vocation” only to the priesthood or religious life. What a pity! It’s as if God only has a plan for certain of his children, and the others belong to a catch-all category of “lay people.” How far from the truth!

There is an unfortunate coincidence from the beginning with the word ‘lay,’ which means in a secular sense “someone who is not an expert,” but it is not used this way by the Church. Lay people must be experts in holiness.

A lay person is someone who fulfills the call of his baptism by sanctifying the temporal order. Christifideles Laici says, “The vocation of the lay faithful to holiness implies that life according to the Spirit expresses itself in a particular way in their involvement in temporal affairs and in their participation in earthly activities” (17).

The laity can help evangelize the world in a way that priests and religious cannot do.

In fact, given that the New Evangelization recognizes that the Church herself is the first object of evangelization, that is, that the Church herself must always grow more faithful to Christ even as she preaches him to others, it might be appropriate to express the complementarity of the priesthood, religious life, and lay state in terms of evangelization. The priesthood exists to support the lay state through: teaching, the sacraments, and shepherding. The religious life provides an example of radically living the Beatitudes. These two vocations evangelize, by all means, but they express in a certain way the eternal order. This is why celibacy is very fitting for the priesthood and religious life: they witness before the Church and the world the reality of Heaven “where they neither marry nor are given in marriage.”

The lay state, on the other hand, can sanctify the temporal order of the world. I imagine that it says something about the difficulty of this task that God gives more people the lay vocation than any other vocation.

There are a few tendencies, which exist today, that undermine the dignity of the lay state. Christifideles Laici points out two, especially: the tendency to be over-involved in “Church work” and the tendency to separate faith and everyday life (CL, 2).

We all see these tendencies crop up in various ways.

For example, I read the other day in a vocations discernment guide, the following statement, “Some [vocations] are more important for the work of the Church, but all lead to personal sanctity.” The work of the Church is sanctity, the “salvation of souls” (Code of Canon Law, 1752).

Another example. I was talking with a priest awhile ago. The subject of the purification of sacred vessels at Mass came up since this was not too long after many parishes had begun to have only priests, deacons, and acolytes purify the vessels after Holy Communion. He explained to me the difficulty in implementing this particular change at his parish, telling me that it hurt people’s feelings because they felt like Rome was telling them that they were not holy enough to touch the vessels.

How sad! I wonder whether the people at that parish are ever told about the purpose of the lay vocation? It’s a tragedy that people think that holiness comes from doing the things that priests do. For priests it does, but not for others. What an insult to the faithful, to let them think that they’re not participating at Mass or that they’re not active in the Church if they don’t perform a specific function like proclaiming the readings or acting as an extraordinary minister of Holy Communion.

Especially in certain liturgical matters, such as when extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion are needlessly multiplied–as if this is a way to participate more at Mass–the universal call to holiness is being presented as a “universal call to priestly ministry.”

Redemptionis Sacramentum says:

[12.] On the contrary, it is the right of all of Christ’s faithful that the Liturgy, and in particular the celebration of Holy Mass, should truly be as the Church wishes, according to her stipulations as prescribed in the liturgical books and in the other laws and norms. Likewise, the Catholic people have the right that the Sacrifice of the Holy Mass should be celebrated for them in an integral manner, according to the entire doctrine of the Church’s Magisterium. Finally, it is the Catholic community’s right that the celebration of the Most Holy Eucharist should be carried out for it in such a manner that it truly stands out as a sacrament of unity, to the exclusion of all blemishes and actions that might engender divisions and factions in the Church.

Personally, although I do not believe that I have the lay vocation, at this time in my life I am in the lay state, and I find it insulting when lay people are treated as second-class members of the Church, when their rights are trampled on by priests who refuse to celebrate the liturgy according to the liturgical norms. Priests are supposed to support the lay faithful, exercising Christ’s priestly office in the celebration of the liturgy. Is it any wonder that there is such a crisis of family life, then? The vocations of the Church are complementary. There is, indeed, a “vocations crisis,” not only a crisis of vocations to the priesthood and religious life.