With appreciation for the important role that faithful Catholic colleges and universities play in fostering religious vocations, The Cardinal Newman Society (CNS) joins with the nation’s bishops in celebrating National Vocation Awareness Week, January 11-17.
“Priests and other religious are the backbone of the Church,” said Patrick J. Reilly, founder and president of CNS. “We salute those Catholic colleges and universities that, by their sincere commitment to both faith and reason, have helped young men and women prepare for a lifetime of service to God.”
Several of the colleges profiled in CNS’s The Newman Guide to Choosing a Catholic College have had notable success in promoting vocations, whether through formal programs, a robust campus ministry or by creating a faithful learning environment emphasizing the Catholic intellectual tradition. ...
The inverse of this correlation is probably true as well, that the further a Catholic university meanders from orthodoxy, the fewer its vocations. That would seem to be the case with our two local schools, the commitment-challenged Xavier University and the University of Dayton. I am familiar with only one vocation in recent years from either, a young priest who spent some time at XU. The University of Cincinnati appears more frequently on the CVs of our seminarians. (FWIW, Fr. Schnippel recently examined local Catholic high schools and found little correlation between attendance there and discerning a priestly vocation.)
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True orthodox Catholicism fosters vocations whether it is on a Catholic campus or a secular campus. Take a look at the Texas A&M Aggie vocations web page. Last fall 14 Aggies entered formation for the priesthood or religious life.
I think I met two seminarians at the Athenaeum who were XU grads a couple of years ago. Whether both of them were XU grads or only one, the two young men I talked to said they liked the school but they didn't have anything good to say about its Catholicity -- I remember them saying that it was either "very liberal" or "very lax." Or maybe both.
While it's perfectly possible to push boys toward priesthood (one mom I met recently told me that when her son thought he might want to be a priest, so many people at the parish talked to him about it that it turned him off) I think that in general it's silly to expect men to do everything on their own. We don't expect people to choose secular professions without looking into them, being told they were good at something or have a gift for it, etc.
As a 2003 Xavier grad I could probably write a book about this topic. But, to be short, one of the major points of this "book" would be that, at Xavier, Catholicism is by-and-large presented as a political movement with a veneer of "spirituality" to cover it, rather than a religion that is centered on faith in Jesus Christ. That's not to say Catholicism and politics are incompatible--clearly they aren't--but that when young men are shown a Catholicism that is primarily about action in the world (through political or related activity), there really is not much of a reason to be a priest, even when those young men support the worldly goals of the Catholicism that is presented to them.
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