#religious vocation

[ahopefulbromantic]

I GOT THE PAPERS I HAVE ALL THE CONSECRATION DOCUMENTS NOW THIS IS NOT A DRILL I CAN FINALLY BEGIN THE PROCESS OF BECOMING A CONSECRATED VIRGIN THAT IS MY BIGGEST DREAM RN AND IT'S COMING TRUE AAAAAAAAHHH??!!!! 🤩🤩🤩🥳🥳🥳🤸‍♀️

PRAY FOR ME FRIENDS I THINK I'M GONNA DIE OF JOY!!!

[famuladomini]

Please keep me in your prayers as I make my first contact with a new religious community.

[the-silver-stone]

Honest question: how does one discern one's vocation? Thinking about this especially in terms of the vocation of celibacy.

[cheerfullycatholic]

Only religious community in the world for sisters with Down syndrome seeks American sisters 

A community of religious sisters with Down syndrome faithfully live out their vocation of contemplative prayer in southern France.

Les Petites Sœurs Disciples de l’Agneau, or The Little Sisters Disciples of the Lamb, was founded by the “joining of two vocations,” Mother Line told CNA in a translated interview.

In 1985, a young woman with Down syndrome — Sister Veronica — met Mother Line. Sister Veronica had already received her vocational calling to become a nun but had been turned away by several religious communities.

Mother Line recognized Sister Veronica’s call to become a nun, so the two began living together — hoping that other young women with Down syndrome who felt a call to religious life would join the community.

Mother Line said that at the time, the Church and religious communities did not understand “how a person with Down syndrome could have a call from God” to join religious life.

But Mother Line, who had studied psychology and taught the Catechism for many years, saw that the people she worked with who had Down syndrome were “very spiritually inclined.”

As time went on, more women with Down syndrome joined the community, and the Church saw the need for its existence.

In 1999, the Little Sisters was established as an official religious institute of contemplative life by the archbishop of Bourges, Pierre Plateau.

By 1995, the community moved to Le Blanc, in the Indre region of France, where the sisters reside now. Today, seven sisters with Down syndrome live alongside Mother Line and Sister Florence, where they fulfill their vocations together.

[steshamarycharles]

Lately I’ve been thinking about marriage, discerning for religious life has been hard, prayers are much appreciated❤️

[theraccolta]

Michel Charles Henri - the Life of a Carthusian

[faithofthefountain]

"As soon as I believed there was a God, I understood I could do nothing else but live for him, my religious vocation dates from the same moment as my faith: God is so great. There is such a difference between God and everything that is not.”

– Blessed Charles de Foucauld

[vassaltotheduchess]

How did the sisters in your community deal with their romantic feelings? I don't mean toward each other (necessarily), but more just were they ever longing for marriage or just to be around a man? Did y'all talk about it with each other?

You might think that with all that time spent together we’d eventually talk about everything, but this topic seemed to be particularly taboo. Of course I didn’t do a study of it, but my impression was always that we avoided this talk in large part because it was the trout in the glass of milk.

Longing for a husband and family is perhaps the single most potent feeling that can challenge belief in your religious vocation. On the other hand, some join an order, at least in part, because they do not believe that they will ever have a husband and family – not something one is keen to admit while rhapsodizing about the glory of religious life.

For a while after I left the convent I kept in touch with other women who left, and my impressions in this regard were generally confirmed.

Overall, I would emphasize that we were never given a vocabulary to deal with those feelings. “Give it all to Jesus” felt to me like a goal, not a strategy. Candidly, a stubborn strain of millennialism (which has nothing to do with “Millennials”) in the Church retains a belief that the “purity” of the religious vocations makes them “better” than marriage and family. However poetic this notion, it does not bear up in practice. What it does do is make chastity not just a vow or a method of focusing one’s life but a psychological cage.

In short, we need far better ways to understand and talk about the relationship between the religious vocations and the theology of the body.