CONT E NT S 36 Vocation summit
Examining the college
C21 Notes
experience of future priests 39 On not knowing
The intellectual and the mystic can agree
Vocation summit By William Bole
Examining the college experience of future priests
I
n homilies, church media, and other Catholic forums, the word “vocations,” as in priestly ones, is almost inevitably coupled with “crisis.” The Church has been struggling to reverse a decades-long drop in the numbers of priests, nuns, and brothers, holding national days of prayer for vocations, spearheading media campaigns to raise awareness of this need, and taking the message into parishes and parochial schools. Catholic leaders have also turned attention to a place where some young adults grapple with serious thoughts of a religious vocation: the college campus. At Boston College, where any number of spiritual offerings (retreats, faithbased service, and other programs) could conceivably nurture the idea, University President William P. Leahy, SJ, and others have been asking, as he put it in an interview, “What are we doing well? What”— from a vocation perspective—“works?”
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Last year, in search of hard data, the University, together with the U.S. Jesuit Conference, commissioned the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) at Georgetown University to conduct a study of how the college experience contributes to hearing a priestly call. The respondents were mostly younger priests and other men on the ordination track; they were asked about influences ranging from coursework and prayer groups to one-on-one spiritual direction. The results of that study were unveiled at a June 20–21 conference billed as a “Summit on Vocations: Exploring Ways to Promote Vocations to the Priesthood.” The gathering in Chestnut Hill drew together 100 Catholic leaders and academic authorities on vocations. Included were eight bishops and archbishops, five presidents of Catholic universities, and more than two dozen vocation directors of dioceses, archdioceses, and reli-