Religious Life - A Necessary Vocation

A number of years ago, Fr. Richard Butler, O.P., wrote a book called, Religious Vocation: An Unnecessary Mystery. This book has been reprinted and, though written fifty years ago, addresses an issue that is still current regarding the whole idea of priestly and religious vocations. Father Butler’s thesis was a critique of a position which maintains that the call to religious life involves some esoteric experience of God much like a private revelation and that the discernment of this call demands a long and exhausting personal analysis of one’s psychology. Some authors today are “guilty of promoting an unnecessary mystery. The specific crime is that of relegating religious vocation to the realm of Gnosticism, making of it an esoteric private revelation.”1 If this attitude were not a matter of concern before Vatican II, it has certainly become one now when so few people are entering religious life. It seems important to examine the exact nature and practical tools for the discernment of a religious vocation in order to encourage young people to consider entrance as an ordinary expression of the Christian life of grace. Father Butler uses St. Thomas Aquinas’ analysis, which is still perceptive, to encourage people to know that this vocation is not some strange and unique call given to only a very few privileged souls. “Religious life is not an extra, a luxury, not a peculiar path for exceptional souls in pursuit of Christian perfection. It is necessary for the apostolic work of the Church and for the personal salvation of some of its members.”