---

We are in the midst of celebrating National Vocation Awareness Week (November 2-8).

Fostering vocations is the duty and mission of every disciple of Jesus Christ. It is a foundational drive of every community of faith to solicit vocations to the priesthood and religious life passionately and strategically.

Parishes can begin to do this most effectively through a proactive Vocations Committee whose leaders encourage initiatives of prayer, witness and a steady solicitation and encouragement of vocations. In our Diocese, aware of the hunger for priests and religious women and men, no parish moving forward that expects even to survive can afford not to have such a committee!

Pope Francis has announced that 2015 will be a year specially dedicated to the promotion of consecrated life, and is asking the Church's religious sisters, brothers and priests to "wake up the world" with their testimony of faith, holiness and hope. The Year of Consecrated Life will officially begin on Nov. 30, 2014, the first Sunday of Advent.

At the heart of consecrated life, chastity, poverty and obedience - the three so-called "evangelical" counsels, because specific reference to each is attributed in the Scriptures to Jesus of Nazareth - are as relevant today as ever for anyone seeking the kingdom of God. Jesus, in fact, persistently raises the issues of sex, money and power - the three worldly antitheses of the evangelical counsels - as obstacles to entering God's kingdom.

Traditionally, it has been maintained that only those seeking the way to perfection must follow these counsels strictly. However, some of the teachings of Christ must give us pause if, in fact, it is easier for a camel to pass through a needle's eye than for the rich in the world's commerce to enter the kingdom of God.

Whether our most prized possessions, our wealth, be defined by powers of sexual, monetary or socio-political influence - the standards by which the world tempts us to measure our personal value - the Gospel message is that these are ultimately worthless as means to salvation, which is another way of saying "finding our true and ultimate identity."

Those religious men and women who have chosen to live the evangelical counsels fully through their public witness testify to the possibility of living joy-filled lives, rich in the treasures of the kingdom. What they give up are certainly good things. The satisfactions of the earthbound pleasures of a mutually-fulfilling love relationship, a well-furnished household or a successful career are what most of us naturally want for our children.

Unfortunately, all too many members of the human family never achieve all three to their satisfaction, if any at all. The lives of religious men and women who exude a joy in living demonstrate that it is possible - and even more rewarding, one might say - to love without the strings attached by the worldly compensations of material gratification.

Historically, religious life has constantly been in need of reform, especially where it wanders from its commitment to the evangelical counsels. The familiar cartoon of the corpulent, red-faced friar, the now well-publicized specter of the sexual abuse of minors and the persistent manifestations and vestiges of ecclesiastical careerism are, in greater or lesser degrees, blights on the image of all those whose lives have been consecrated to what the Lord Himself has counseled as the sure way to holiness of life.

In our time, it is especially challenging to give credible witness that a life can be happy and fulfilling without the passing rewards of what the world promises, but can never really fulfill as a means to true happiness. That is why the lives of those committed to live the evangelical counsels are as relevant as ever.

In fact, it has often been observed - anecdotally, at least - that religious communities which are most firmly adhering to these counsels seem to be eliciting more positive vocational development. If this is so, it may well be due to the clear alternative their way of life offers to what women and men attracted to them have found heretofore in their lives in the world.

The spirit of St. Francis certainly lives on in the Mother Teresas of our time - and there are many among us, though not all are so well-known. We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude for those women and men who have given their lives over to the Lord and to God's people in religious life, perhaps especially those who have done so in quiet ways.

We may never know till, please God, we come into the kingdom how our lives have been changed by the prayers and sacrifices of our religious who live in cloisters and houses of prayer, who are not seen in the world. Generations of faithful have been evangelized and formed by religious women and men who became the living foundation of our Catholic school system and often lived lives not different in their humble simplicity from those in monasteries.

We are all enriched, empowered and blessed because of those who have followed the evangelical counsels, and will only be enriched by all who will respond to the vocation.[[In-content Ad]]

---