Vocations

Marriage is a vocation to holiness. From their first days as husband and wife through their golden years, married couples have the awesome task of witnessing to God’s faithful love to each other, their children, and society. No couple does this perfectly, and everyone needs help when love feels strained and the going gets tough. All marriages can grow in knowledge, faith, joy, and love. Whether you are just starting out in marriage or have fifty years under your belt, advice, real life stories, and Church teaching can help strengthen and bless your marriage. Visit the Marriage page to find out more about the sacrament of Marriage.

God calls men of all ages and from all walks of life to become priests, and each one experiences this call in a different way. Perhaps the thought of serving God as a priest is often on your mind. Or you may have even been asked about becoming a priest. God can work through anything – whether it’s people, events, thoughts or desires. God has many different ways of making this call known. 

The call to religious life is always marked by a desire to serve God and God’s people, to care for the needy and to bring people to experience God’s love. But, since ministry is a part of every vocation, service is not the distinguishing characteristic of a call to consecrated life as a member of a religious congregation. The uniqueness of the call to religious life is in living the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience in community. The essential service of the religious men and women is to witness to all the faithful that each of us is called to treat things, persons, and our own self with respect and as ultimately belonging to God. At the heart of the call to religious life is a desire to give oneself to God in a way so total that the pursuit of union with God makes it impossible for anyone or anything to be more central. One becomes unavailable for marriage! 

This is one of the oldest forms of consecrated life for women in the Catholic Church, existing since apostolic times. The consecrated virgin receives the title of the Church, bride of Christ, and she becomes a sacred person, but remains living in the world in the secular state, providing for her own living, and witnessing to God by her virginal life given exclusively to Jesus Christ, whose bride she is. She lives her vocation in her own way according to her discernment as guided by her spiritual director and diocesan bishop. 

Visit the Ordo Virginum website