Laity will 'tell it like it is' about vocations

"Are we communicating inappropriately?" she questioned, noting that "Church folks have developed a language that's only intelligible to other Church folks."

Priests may use a term like "presbyterate" (all the priests of the Diocese) that a layperson probably wouldn't understand, explained Sister Kitty, who serves as parish liaison for the Albany diocesan Vocations Office. She once heard of a teacher in a Catholic school suggesting to another that students write to seminarians (men studying for the priesthood). "What's a seminarian?" the other teacher asked.

Definitions

Laypersons can also tell the people doing vocations work whether the materials they're handing out are "too pious," she said.

After looking at a poster of clergy and women religious encouraging vocations, for example, one layperson told Sister Kitty, "You've got lots of pictures of people smiling at each other and saying prayers. What else do they do?"

Lessons

* "These [young] people believe that priests and religious believe every syllable ever spoken by anyone official in the Church," Sister Kitty said. "They're not aware there are a lot of voices."

* The young adults also said they felt "unworthy" of a vocation to religious life. "Nobody's `worthy' of God's love," the liaison explained.

* Many of the young people in attendance had been involved in sexual relationships and thought that eliminated the possibility of religious life. "They equate celibacy with virginity," Sister Kitty said. The vocations workers needed to explain that "celibacy can be a choice at any point in someone's life."

Generational split

"We missed a couple of generations of catechesis," Sister Kitty admitted. "Not that people weren't working hard [to teach religion], but it really took a while for the teachings of Vatican II to become `user-friendly.'

"The plus of it was that [Vatican II] was how Catholicism divested itself of a God of fear," she added.

Relearning

As an example, she told the story of a layman who said to her, "I would be frightened if my children asked me about being a priest, because I don't know very many happy priests, and I want them to be happy."

"We do have an awful lot of overworked people -- and when you're overworked, it shows," Sister Kitty said. While she doesn't believe people in religious life should "go around smiling all the time," she does hope they listen to the laity's concerns.

"Sometimes, a layperson can say things that are really hard to hear," she remarked, "but they're the ones sitting in the pews every Sunday."

(04-22-99) [[In-content Ad]]