Elias Aiyako, SVD, from Enga, Papua New Guinea.

The Church throughout the world prays for vocations to the priesthood and the religious life and prayer for vocations is needed because following Christ as a priest, a missionary, or a religious is not something purely human – it is ultimately divine. God is the one who calls. And yet, God, it seems, does nothing for the salvation of humanity without our human cooperation. He does not call, unless we ask him. And so we are encouraged to pray for vocations. Our prayer, though inspired by the Holy Spirit, is nonetheless our prayer, our way of cooperating with God.

I think that, unless we grasp something of the mystery of how God in a sense has, thanks to the Incarnation, tied himself to us and allows himself to be dependent on our human words and actions, we will not understand the nature of the mission of the Church, nor will we appreciate the role of the various ministries and charisms within that mission.

What is the Church’s mission? It is to complete the mission of Christ and the Holy Spirit. (cf. CCC 737), namely “to make men share in the communion between the Father and the Son and their Spirit of love” (CCC 850). How does this happen? Interiorly, by the working of the Holy Spirit in people’s hearts, preparing them to meet Christ. Exteriorly, by enabling people to actually encounter Christ, by making him present in word and deed, in preaching and sacrament, in teaching and healing. To facilitate this exterior encounter with Christ is the task of the Church as a whole, but the task in particular of the missionary, the priest, and the religious.

Our Lord tells us, “The sheep that belong to me listen to my voice; I know them and they know me.” But how can they listen to Jesus’ voice, if there is no one to utter the word of God to them? How can they know Christ, if no one tells them about him or opens up the word of God to them, the word of God in Scripture and in the Church’s teaching?

Acts 13:14, 43-52 continues the story of the dramatic way the Church began to spread and develop after Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit completed the Paschal Mystery by pouring himself out on Our Lady and the Apostles. We read about how Paul and Barnabas went first to the Jewish community in Antioch in Pisidia to tell them the truth about Jesus as the fulfilment of the prophecies. “God wills that the salvation of everyone comes through the knowledge of the truth”, the Catechism teaches (CCC 851).

That truth, however, is not only for the Jews but for all humanity. It is summed up by St John: “God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son so that all who believe in him may not perish but have eternal life” (Jn 3:15). When the Jews refused to accept the truth preached by Paul and Barnabas, they then turned to the pagans, quoting Isaiah who foretold about the Messiah: “I have made you a light for the nations, so that my salvation may reach the ends of the earth.”

“God wills that the salvation of everyone comes through the knowledge of the truth.” The Catechism continues: “Those who obey the promptings of the Spirit of truth are already on the way of salvation. But the Church, to whom this truth has been entrusted, must go out to meet their desire, so as to bring them the truth” (CCC 851).

We are missionaries and it is precisely the missionary congregations in Western Europe and America that have seen the most spectacular fall in vocations. There are evidently many reasons for this, but I want to mention two. One is the popularity after Vatican II of a strange theory first articulated by Karl Rahner, namely that of anonymous Christianity. Rahner reduced Christianity to a kind of consciousness. All people had some inkling of this consciousness, he claimed, but only Christians knew of it expressly or explicitly. Christianity just made explicit what was otherwise implicit in humanity. Non-Christians were really anonymous Christians.

What is wrong with this theory? First of all, Christianity is not just about consciousness. It is about action. It is about encountering Jesus Christ and sharing His Spirit of Love. That encounter takes place through preaching the truth and is perfected in the sacraments, when we are grafted into Christ, nourished by His Spirit. The trouble with Rahner’s theory is that it did away with the need for the Church, the need for missionaries, the need for priests to preach and administer the sacraments.

But it is part of God’s plan for the salvation of humanity that our actions on his behalf are indispensable. He depends on us to make the knowledge of the truth known to those who may indeed be on the way to salvation because they are moved by the Spirit but who will only encounter Christ through hearing about Him and receiving the sacraments.

The second reason for the collapse of vocations in Ireland and Western Europe in the past three decades, it seems to me, is a false notion of God’s love. God’s love has been reduced to an abstraction – God’s love is seen as being such that it does not really matter what we do, we can always rely on his love. In his encyclical, Pope Benedict XVI tries to overcome this false idea of God’s love by showing that God’s love is a kind of eros, the passionate love of a man for a woman – intimate, exclusive, yes, passionate, as the Prophets knew. The encounter with the God who is love is likewise intimate, exclusive and passionate. This encounter is made possible only by those disciples who are enflamed by this love, who want to pass this divine love on, who want others to know that God loves them not in an abstract way but personally.

We need men and women, who are caught up in the love of God and are prepared to leave everything to bring the knowledge of the truth about God’s love revealed in Christ to other people, who are ignorant of it. This brings us back to the Gospel: “The sheep that belong to me listen to my voice; I know them and they know me.” This is an intimate, personal love that draws us into the heart of God, into the heart of the Trinity.

The Book of the Apocalypse (7:9, 14-17) shows us the vision of heaven with countless numbers of people standing before the Throne of God and the Lamb. They are the Christians who have suffered for their faith, thus sharing in the passion of Christ, and now in his glory. The main point is that the Lamb knows each personally. “The Lamb who is at the throne will be their shepherd and will lead them to springs of living water; and God will wipe away all tears from their eyes.” Even though they are countless numbers, the Lamb, because he is God as well as man, knows each personally; God wipes the tears from each one’s eyes.

Quoting the same Book of the Apocalypse, Pope Benedict in his new book on Jesus of Nazareth reminds us that “God addresses each single person by a name that no one else knows” (cf. Apoc 2:17). This personal encounter with Jesus Christ is what the Church makes possible through her various ministries and charisms. God does depend on our cooperation, and we must pray intensely that God will continue to call young men and women to the priesthood, the religious and missionary life. What is at stake is nothing but the true happiness that all people desire and that can only be experienced by those who encounter Christ Jesus and accept him into their hearts. They need us. And strange to say, God needs us.


1 Commenting on the Gospel text Jn 10:27-30 (“The sheep that belong to me listen to my voice; I know them and they know me”), St Gregory the Great poses the question to his hearers: “Ask yourselves if you are his sheep, if you know him, if you recognize the light of truth. What I mean is that you recognize it not simply by faith but by love. I mean, you recognize it not just by belief but by action” (from Hom 14,3-6 as quoted in the Office of Readings.)
2 St Peter Chanel is a typical instant of such love, as is our own St Joseph Freinadametz.

D. Vincent Twomey, SVD, is the author of Pope Benedict XVI: The Conscience of Our Age (Ignatius Press, 2007) and The End of Irish Catholicism? (Veritas, 2003).

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