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When one reads St. Thomas Aquinas on entrance into the religious life, one realizes the immensity of the gap between the 13th century and our own time. Thomas has a Nike solution to the question… “Just do it.” He basically rejects the opinion that one needs to consider the matter very carefully… It is not so important. And you do not need to be particularly virtuous, either. Religious life is a ministry TO the religious. It contains the healing salve for the three sources of sin (the world, the flesh, and the Devil), and the three movements which come from them (concupiscence of the eyes, concupiscence of the flesh, and the pride of life). Our Lord faced these three temptations in the desert. And His advice to overcome these temptations is poverty, chastity, and obedience. The mortification of the roots of sin will move a soul closer to Him more quickly – one will become more perfect in a safer way. At least this is the general rule, the general arc, the general invitation.

As for the ranks of the clergy, Thomas thinks this requires more consideration, but it chiefly comes down to a question of virtue. “Is this man able to give a credible and inspiring witness to the Gospel by his way of life, and is he competent to rule over the spiritual affairs which are to be entrusted to him prudently?” If the answer is “yes,” then if he possesses a sufficiently good name among men, and he can study sufficiently to acquire what he needs to know to do what will be put in his charge, then why should he be turned away?

Vermeersch (one of the major moral theologians at the turn of the last century) adds a few conditions, in his explanation of ecclesiastical (“priestly”) vocation in the Catholic Encyclopedia. First, that there be no evident problem which the candidate has in relation to the diocese or province – i.e., that his race will cause the people to distrust him, or that his personality, opinions, and background will cause great distress to the local clergy, or some such thing. Second, that the candidate is honestly presenting himself from a firm resolve to serve the Church as an ecclesiastic for the good of souls, rather than for some worldly or selfish motive. It seems Thomas takes this for granted, as it is somehow contained in the quality of “virtue” or “goodness” which he insists upon. Yet Thomas is minimally descriptive – he quotes a lofty description of the character requisite given by Jerome and also Dionysius, and he then explains that this is why it is a mortal sin to be ordained when conscious of mortal sin, which means that one must therefore be holy to be rightly ordained – free of the shackles of any vice. Presumably, he thinks that a good deal of virtue is nonetheless needed for a viable candidate, but he does not explain exactly what that is except in somewhat negative terms.

For them, that’s it. That’s all that is required, other than the actual fact of such a vocation being confirmed in reality by ordination. Obviously, if one is never able to achieve ordination in a moral way, God did not actually want it.

You will notice that neither Thomas, nor Vermeersch (just read the article!), are particularly interested in “having certain feelings about being called,” either on the part of the candidate or the superior/evaluator. They do not really seem to believe in that, or even really in such a thing as “discernment” in the way we now speak of it and hear of it – endlessly hear of it, in every vocations film, book, talk, retreat, and program, and in every seminary in the modern West. It is used so much that it means everything and nothing. The word “discernment” does not appear at all in the Catholic Encyclopedia article. A greater study is necessary to reveal just how the idea of “discernment” entered into such popular usage in the Church – it is a recent phenomenon, with distant roots in the writings of St. Ignatius of Loyola, but it is perhaps far from his own understanding.

Vermeersch pulls no punches. He writes, “A reaction set in against this abuse, and young men were expected, instead of following the choice of their parents, a choice often dictated by purely human considerations, to wait for a special call from God before entering the seminary or the cloister. At the same time, a semi-Quietism in France led people to believe that a man ought to defer his action until he was conscious of a special Divine impulse, a sort of Divine message revealing to him what he ought to do. If a person, in order to practice virtue, was bound to make an inward examination of himself at every moment, how much more necessary to listen for the voice of God before entering upon the sublime path of the priesthood or monastic life? God was supposed to speak by an attraction, which it was dangerous to anticipate: and thus arose the famous theory which identified vocation with Divine attraction; without attraction there was no vocation; with attraction, there was a vocation which was, so to speak, obligatory, as there was so much danger in disobedience. Though theoretically free, the choice of a state was practically necessary: “Those who are not called”, says Scavini (Theol. moral., 14th ed., I, i, n. 473), “cannot enter the religious state: those who are called must enter it; or what would be the use of the call?” Other writers, such as Gury (II, n. 148-50), after having stated that it is a grave fault to enter the religious state when conscious of not having been called, correct themselves in a remarkable manner by adding, “unless they have a firm resolution to fulfill the duties of their state”.”

Gury’s treatment is bizarre… He also introduced, in the same book, the modern and almost completely dominant resolution (and a false resolution, in my opinion) of the “solam voluptatam” debate about marriage which emanated from Innocent XI’s condemnations… It is a kind of weird overextension of the power of the human will to make things good and right, in both cases. Anyway, I digress; I hope to treat the latter point in an upcoming book on marriage.

The fact is that we have strayed quite far from the robust discussion and objectively grounded understanding of priestly vocations from 100 or so years ago. Men today are left with little to go on other than a vague instruction to “figure it out” – some combination of prayer and experience and emotions… And loads of interviews, psychological evaluations, and so on. “Come and see,” “try it out,” and so on. Certainly, many such men who come and see, and try it out, really feel very strongly called to the priesthood, they enter seminary, all is well, and then one day their emotions change because it is a cold and dreary February, they are stressed from schoolwork, there is some trouble in their family, and that pretty girl from the parish back home wrote them a nice text with a heart emoji about how wonderfully spiritual their example is and that they can’t wait to talk to them this summer over coffee. If they’ve not been given an objective and emotionally minimalist framework for understanding what vocation is, and what it is not, how will such men endure? They will likely not. They will “discern out,” as we hear it said. Nonsense. They either never should have been there in the first place, or they should have persevered, despite their feelings, all else being equal.

Maybe it is time we move away from the Scylla of pickiness and human emotion, and yet without going over to the Charybdis of “warm-body syndrome,” where everyone who shows up and perseveres gets ordained – an even worse ill, where the Devil swallows up whole swaths of men, but which is not really a wide-spread problem in the West, thank God. (It is in other places.)

The Devil will get fewer men through pickiness and emotional trustfulness, through an arbitrary and even capricious process of self-evaluation and exterior evaluation wherein a bishop or superior does, in fact, infallibly determine that they do not have a call to enter their diocese or community; even despite a poor process of evaluation, God does not want what is impossible. And yet processes of this kind can leave men seriously jaded, sometimes (even frequently) pushing them into a downward spiral of depression and anger, sometimes even to heresy, apostasy, and atheism. One can say, “See? I told you so. They were bad.” And sometimes that is true. St. Ambrose was able to turn away two men from Holy Orders prudently, just based on how they walked – and they each went off to various kinds of perversity which he had foreseen, the proud, slow walker to heresy and schism, and the quick, feminine walker to all kinds of odd sexual vice, or something similar, if my memory serves. (I will need to find the text of this account later.)

But sometimes a bad experience of the Church makes a good man into a bad one. It’s not clear to me that this is appreciated so well by those with the charge to intake men for formation. Bad evaluations, bad formation, bad dismissals… all in the face of someone’s generosity and vulnerability. It takes real spiritual grit to keep on moving.

But keep on moving such men must.

In the end, perhaps too many bishops and superiors don’t really appreciate that the fact of a man knocking on their door is itself a very good sign already that he has a vocation. So what if he wasn’t what you expected, or doesn’t fit into your idea of what sacerdotal ministry is? Does he meet the objective criteria, or not? Is he going to be a walking scandal in the diocese or province, or not? There is always the risk of a bad outcome – but bishops and superiors are not held to an impossible standard. All that is required is some decent prudence, in addition to trusting that the same God Who presumably moved such a man to present himself has some sensible plan to make good come out of it, even if it isn’t the good the bishop or superior had been expecting or seeking.

Surely, we cannot go back to the days where a man could knock on the door of Santa Sabina and be clothed in the habit of St. Dominic a few hours later. Much less should one rashly administer Holy Orders to anyone who petitions. But it is time that we pick up this discussion again seriously, in the midst of such immense bewailing of a supposed “lack of priestly vocations.” Is that really what is happening, or is it a lack of sound evaluative processes, possibly undergirded by a lack of sound theology about entrance into different states of life?

To my readers thinking about possible dissertation topics -see above. This is a good one. Go check out the “sources” section of the Catholic Encyclopedia article. It is really interesting in its own right.

St. John Vianney, pray for us. St. Ignatius of Loyola, pray for us.