This year the Catholic Church in the United States will celebrate National Vocation Awareness Week (NVAW), Nov. 1-7. During this week, dioceses across the U.S. lead the effort in church parishes and Catholic schools to uphold and encourage the fostering of vocations among the faithful and to pray for those currently discerning a call to ordained ministry and consecrated life.
My name is James Rome. I am a seminarian from Our Lady of Prompt Succor Church parish in Golden Meadow who has been discerning to be a priest for the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux. Apart from simple acknowledgement of National Vocation Awareness Week, I petition you as one of your own, to foster, promote and pray for vocations regularly.
It was through the efforts of the diocese to ‘normalize vocations’ that I came to understand a second meaning for vocation. Up until that point, my perspective of vocations involved what I was going to be when I grew up, i.e., what career/job was going to support me. I believed my vocational career choice was who I was; therefore, I was an accountant. However, for those of you, who through no fault of your own think as I thought, the word vocation means a “call,” which presumes someone calling and someone called. As Catholics, we identify the caller of a vocation as God himself.
Through a vocational call, God is calling us ‘to be’ and not just ‘to do.’ Different from merely a job, we believe God has a plan for each of us where he invites us, to consider and hopefully to accept, that which includes much more than just financially supporting oneself and family. Even though my father was an accountant, it was not the result of him or anybody else calling me that I chose an accounting career: An easy means of a good paycheck is not exactly a calling. Rather, God’s call “to be” in a personal relationship, in which one speaks and the other listens, is not always easy when one’s objective is an earthly payment.
God’s plan involves being a part of the holy Body of Christ functioning in order to best save souls. Notice I said “holy” Body of Christ. NVAW works from the basis that all have consciously accepted God’s primordial call to holiness. No one ‘does’ holiness as a job, but only ‘becomes’ holy by cooperating with God’s plan through his grace. Therefore, assuming one has accepted holiness as their primordial vocation, the second layer in God’s vocational plan for each of us involves celibacy versus non-celibacy.
Married life and the love of husbands and wives is the vocational form which God calls most to live out holiness in a non-celibate way. NVAW focuses on the less common call to holiness, which is a call of celibacy through the ordained ministry or through the consecrated life. In ordained ministry, priests and deacons are called to minister in the person of Christ, the high priest and servant. In consecrated life, each member is called to live out Christ’s love through a particular charism. Because this type of vocational call is less common, it is easily misunderstood. As a way to ‘normalize vocations’ and bring awareness to one’s primordial vocation to holiness that may lead itself to an ordained or consecrated life vocation, I ask for you to participate in National Vocation Awareness Week within your church parish and continue to pray for holy vocations.
I recently learned that in the 1980s, which was during my college years, my home parishioners of Golden Meadow began to include a vocations prayer between each decade of the rosary before daily Mass. For years I have been also including that prayer within my rosary. And although the response to the faithful of Golden Meadow’s prayer was not instant, for the first time in history, that little down the bayou parish has two seminarians on the current diocesan vocations poster. Coincidence?!?
What can you do to promote the consideration of holy vocations?
● Through our Blessed Mother and her Son ask, “God our Father, please send us holy priests, all for the Sacred and Eucharistic Heart of Jesus, all for the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, and in union with St. Joseph.”
● Ask God to jump and scream a little louder to those he is calling, but remember we are the arms and legs and mouths of God’s body here on earth. So be prepared that your prayers will be affecting you to ask a youth or anyone who does not seem to have found their meaning in life, “Hey, have you ever thought about being a sister or a nun, or a priest or a deacon?”
● Look for signs of spirituality in others that maybe inklings of a vocational call trying to surface. If you truly love that person, you will want them to find the plan that will make them most joyful in this pilgrim journey to our Lord.
● Financially support the Annual Bishop’s Appeal (ABA) which is the primary funding source for seminarian education and formation. As a local seminarian, I thank you for your prayers and financial support throughout my own discernment. I ask that you continue to persist in your prayers for holy vocations to ordained priesthood, consecrated life, and even holy marriage. God has not stopped calling. Have we stopped asking? Ask and you shall receive, for what good father would give their son a snake if he asked for a fish?
(James Rome is a third year theology student at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans studying to be a priest for the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux. The Golden Meadow native is a parishioner of Our Lady of Prompt Succor in Golden Meadow.)