3 Priorities for Promoting Vocations
July 27th, 2008 by Fr. Pius, OP
Recently, Zenit news sat down for an interview with Sister Catherine Marie Hopkins, OP, of the Congregation of St. Cecilia in Nashville, TN. Sr. Catherine Marie was the longtime vocations director for the Nashville Dominicans and was recently appointed to the U.S. Bishops’ National Advisory Council. In her interview, Sr. Catherine Marie suggests the three highest priorities in fostering vocations: education, sacramental devotion and youth ministry that exposes young people to both prayer and evangelization. A portion of her interview can be found below.
Q: You have three brothers that are priests. Do you think there is a different strategy for discerning and fostering the vocation of young women than for young men? In what ways?
Sister Hopkins: My experience has been that, in general, men take a lot longer in the discernment process, whether it regards marriage or religious life. Once a woman has “conviction” she is usually impatient to begin a process.
I wonder if men tend to intellectualize it in the beginning, whereas most women religious begin intuitively and very privately. They may struggle longer before admitting they are considering the idea, but once they discern, it is very much a matter of the heart and they are propelled past fears and natural ties to offer that gift of self without reserve.
Men need to balance their discernment with devotion and women need to consciously anchor the process with an intellectual understanding of the call.
In guiding women in discernment, the idea of espousal is a considerable attraction since we are all programmed by our feminine nature to love and to nurture in a unique way. I had aspirations of a big family and came to understand that God wasn’t asking me to deny that desire but to expand it!
Both men and women need to know that a desire to enter into the married state is not only good, but is even necessary if one is considering religious life. The absence of such natural desire may signal a problem of selfishness or difficulty in giving or receiving love. Such an emotional handicap would make happiness in the religious life impossible.
Regarding my brothers, each of them was different in his discernment. A discussion about them is a real study in temperaments. I used to hold them up as examples to illustrate that there is no “one type” that God calls, but that each of us with our unique characters can contribute in unique ways. And yes, my brothers are “unique characters.” We weren’t born religious and occasionally have to remind people that we were in the mainstream in our youth and that none of us was voted “Most likely to become a religious” in high school. There is hope in that fact.
The rest of the interview can be found at the Zenit website.
