Living One’s Vocation
One of the challenges of being a Catholic School is helping to foster vocations. However, I mean vocations both in the broad and specific sense. Vocation in the broad sense of helping students to discover the plan and purpose for their life in the specific mission that He has entrusted to them. In a specific sense, the fostering of vocations to the Priesthood and religious life (as supernatural callings these need to be specifically fostered as being beyond our natural desires).
The Catholic Church today both needs to foster the importance of Priesthood and religious life in which one lives out of the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Living out the counsels requires a death to self and taking up of one’s cross. Hence, a vocation is more than just “doing what I want to do”, rather it is a discovering of the will of God for my life in which I am invited to respond to his call. If, as Catholic schools, we only idealize success in getting into the “right” college or only the amount of scholarship money our students acquire, we miss the point. Our goal is to foster lifelong disciples who are willing to carry the cross that is given them and so to become salt and light in the World. May we have the grace this Lenten Season to live out that calling in our schools.
