The link between the vocation problem and making disciples

From hprweb.com by Father Damian J. Ference was ordained for the Diocese of Cleveland in 2003. He earned his licentiate in philosophy at the Catholic University of America in 2009 and is currently an assistant professor of philosophy and member of the formation faculty at Borromeo Seminary in Wickliffe, Ohio. This article appears in the February 2011 issue of HPR.

For some time now we as a Church have been scrambling in an earnest attempt to remedy our vocation problem. The vocation of marriage has taken the worst beating, as over half of the marriages in our country end up in divorce, Catholic marriages included. Rare are the women who are entering religious orders, which seems to be a big part of the reason the Vatican is conducting their current visitation of women’s religious communities; men’s communities are doing a little better. Our diocesan seminaries finally seem stable, although our numbers are far from what they could be. Candidates to the permanent diaconate appear to be the lone bright spot, although they have their own issues. And then there is the vocation to single life, which, like the sacrament of confirmation, in some sense still seems to be searching for a theology.

Millions of dollars have been spent by vocation offices on prayer cards, lesson plans, vocation week activities, homily helpers, discernment brochures, websites, and an array of other vocation promotion materials, but have these approaches really made a significant impact on our young people? Sadly, the answer is no. For all the effort that has been put into vocation awareness in recent history, our returns have not been very good, but it is not for lack of effort. Bishops, vocation directors, DREs, catechists and parents, have been working diligently to address the lack of vocations in the Church, but very little has changed. Sure, there are some orders and some diocesan seminaries that are doing better than others, but the overall vocation picture remains the same. It seems to me that the real problem is that we’ve misdiagnosed the vocation situation, and therefore, we’ve been spending all our time, effort and money on the wrong things. In other words, we’ve been treating the symptoms without ever recognizing the disease.

The root of our current vocation problem is a lack of discipleship. Of course, a disciple is one who encounters Jesus, repents, experiences conversion and then follows Jesus. All too often those of us in positions of Church leadership presume that all the folks in the pews on Sundays, all the children in our grade schools, high schools and PSR programs, all the kids in our youth groups, all the men in our Men’s Clubs and all the women in our Women’s Guilds, and all the members of our RCIA team are already disciples. Many are not. (The same can be said of staffs and faculties of Catholic institutions.) Our people may be very active in the programs of our parishes, schools and institutions, but unfortunately, such participation does not qualify for discipleship.



If the root of our vocation problem is a lack of discipleship, then the remedy is to make more disciples, just as Jesus commanded. But how is this accomplished?

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