Meagan
O’Rourke, writing in The Atlantic
(11/14), reviews seven recent books by or about physicians. “The very meaning
and structure of care” is in crisis, she concludes. It relates to our
fee-for-service medical economy, concerns about litigation, the pace of patient
encounters, ambivalence about medical technology, doctors’ relationship to
hospital administration, complexities of private and public insurance and more.
According to one survey, 80% of practicing physicians are “somewhat pessimistic
or very pessimistic about the future of the medical profession.” Only 6%
describe their morale as positive.
This
serious situation is not what those in church circles have in mind when they
use the phrase “the vocation crisis.” Editors of religious newspapers often run
a special section on vocations. They feature priests, deacons, seminarians and
vowed religious. Yet they neglect the vocations of manufacturers, financiers,
administrators, appliance repair workers and doctors. Occasionally, a headline
in one of these special sections makes their bias worse. It reads something
like: “Leaving a Career to Do God’s Will.”
Those
who write the Prayers of Intercession for the liturgy sometimes mistake the
part for the whole. One prayer is “for an increase of vocations to the priesthood
and religious life.” But there is no subsequent prayer “for an increase in the
vocation of responsible parenting.”
Every
diocese has a vocation office—either with paid staff or volunteers.
Every religious order has a vocation division. Yet all their posters,
mailings and programs are pointed at vocations to the religious life while they
seemingly ignore the vocation crisis in the wider church; the crisis in some of
the trades, in some professions and in homemaking.
Oh yes,
clergy have a high calling but it is in virtue of their baptism. Oh yes, clergy
have a vocation, but so do fathers who care about their babies. Oh yes, there
is a vocation crisis, but it can be found in social work, some fields of
education and more. A nurse who agrees to stay beyond his or her shift to cover
for someone absent is responding to a calling. That’s the case even if the
nurse does so grudgingly; even though the nurse will get extra pay; even though
the nurse will not have a sense of holiness while completing that evening’s
rounds.
To
highlight baptism is not to suggest an elimination of ordination. Martin Luther
(1483-1546) was a champion of the lay vocation, but his priesthood was valuable
to him and ordination remains vital in Lutheran Christianity.
To
highlight baptism is not to reach back for a two-tiered church where clergy and
laity stay apart. Lay people have a duty to build up the internal or
ministerial church by, for example, serving (paid or volunteer) as catechists,
ministers of care, extraordinary ministers during liturgy and more. This duty,
be reminded, is not because there is a relative shortage of ordained and vowed
religious. Priests and religious have a duty to support and at time critique
external church matters, including areas of business or medical ethics,
policies for the poor, all matters of human dignity. This function though is
more effective when conveyed in general tones. Ordination does not confer any
extra talent or intelligence regarding specific details of business management,
public policy analysis or journalism. A priest or vowed religious who wades
deeper into those areas does so as a citizen and a baptized person. In other
words, every Christian is a member of the church, the people of God.
Obviously in practice the exercise of a clerical
vocation overlaps with the exercise of a lay vocation. That overlap is a clue.
The only way to address the relative shortage of clergy is for the whole
church—its workaday members and its institutions--to foster a vocation culture
among all baptized. With that effort the relative shortage of ordained clergy
and religious will take care of itself.
Droel is editor of
INITIATIVES (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629), a printed newsletter about
faith and work.
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