Vocation and Social Context (Religion and the Social Order)

Vocation and Social Context

Religion and the Social Order An Ofcial Publication of the Association for the Sociology of Religion

General Editor

William H. Swatos, Jr.

VOLUME 14

Vocation and Social Context Edited by

Giuseppe Giordan

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2007

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

ISSN 1061-5210 ISBN 978 90 04 16194 8 © Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS Preface ......................................................................................... William H. Swatos, Jr.

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Introduction ................................................................................ Giuseppe Giordan

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1. Vocation ................................................................................. Andrew J. Weigert and Anthony J. Blasi

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2. Italian Youth and Ideas of Vocation ...................................... Franco Garelli

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3. Vocation as a Personal Choice ............................................... Luigi Berzano

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4. Vocation versus Vocational Status in the Lives of Current and Former Vowed American Catholic Religious .................. Anthony J. Blasi

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5. Vocation and Vocational “Crisis”: A Study of Italian Former Priests ........................................................................ Giuseppe Giordan

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6. Civic Engagement and Church Policy in the Making of Religious Vocations: Cross-National Variation in the Evolution of Priestly Ordinations .......................................... Robert M. Fishman and Keely Jones

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7. Women, Religious Agency and the Politics of Vocation ........ Laura M. Leming

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8. Seminarians and Vocation ..................................................... Giovanni Dal Piaz

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9. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Life: Vocation as a Social Movement .............................................................................. Robert C. Butler

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Contributors ................................................................................

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Series List ....................................................................................

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PREFACE William H. Swatos, Jr. Handing a Weber scholar a collection of essays on the subject of vocation seems to me not too far from letting a cat loose in a mice hatchery—or whatever it is in which mice are bred. There is so much that might be explored and exploited from so many angles! I will resist that temptation and instead offer a couple of personal observations—one that will probably prove how old I am and the other on behalf of the continuing relevance of St. Max “in spite of all.” The matter of my age is in itself irrelevant, but one of the few good things I can think of associated with aging is the ability to assess change through personal experience. And in my own experience, vocation has gone around several different ways. For the most part when I was a teenager, “vocational” programs were never associated with “calling”—à la Weber or anyone else. People went to vocational programs who were going to learn a trade rather than a profession. Perhaps this use still persists in some areas and contexts. I’m not sure whether the change I sense in this regard is because of the hypercredentialing of the trades or the increased technologization of the professions. Truck drivers, bakers, and mechanics earn college degrees, while medical doctors unionize and increasingly work with machines rather than bodies. It would be encouraging to think that this is a democratization process, but I’m not sure that the reverse is not in fact more likely. In any case, however, it is gratifying to see in this volume a reconsideration of vocation, both in the religious sense and more generally. As far as Max Weber is concerned, a number of years ago I began a process that I continue with undergraduates in the introductory course especially. Before jumping into the Protestant ethic with both feet, I ask if there are any Catholic students in the class, and there always are. I ask them to tune me out for a minute, and I then ask the rest of the students: “If I had come to your high school and said there would be a vocations conference that you and your parents could attend, what would you think I was talking about?” The answer is always along the line of careers or jobs. I then ask the Catholic students, “If you went to Catholic school or if you worship in a Catholic parish and the principal

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or priest said there was going to be a vocations conference, what would you think that would be about?” Some look blank, but every time so far at least one will say, perhaps a little timidly, “About becoming a priest or a nun.” A hundred years after the publication of the Protestant ethic thesis—and four to ve hundred years after the various reformations— the distinction still holds, though now it is the Catholic ethic of vocation that is unique, while the Protestant ethic has been secularized into the mainstream (at least in the United States). As you read this book, you will see that it moves back and forth somewhat in its coverage, with a good deal of material coming from Italy and the bulk certainly reecting issues that are most immediately germane to the Roman Catholic Church. It would be quite helpful to see a future volume that might look at Protesantism as well, in both its liberal and evangelical variants. I was amazed recently to see the glitz and hype of college and seminary ads now placed in a popular evangelical magazine—a genre that I probably haven’t seen at all in over a decade. Evangelicals are moving “the call” beyond “the preacher”—at least as they are trying to market higher education. The liberal churches continue to attract men and women, both gay and straight, in numbers that likely exceed their capacity to absorb the output. Varieties of vocation within religion continue to emerge, even if it is the case that it is probably harder today than it was a hundred years ago to nd an empirical “Poor Richard” living out Franklin’s transformation of the Protestant ethic.

INTRODUCTION Giuseppe Giordan The concept of vocation has intrigued sociology since Max Weber made it a fundamental element in understanding the relationship between the individual and society. Not that the concept did not exist before Weber. In theological and pastoral circles, God’s call to his people has always been of key importance, especially for the Christian religion and the Catholic church in particular, in relation to the recruitment of “specialized personnel” in the form of priests and nuns. But development of the theme by the German sociologist in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, as well as his assertions during the famous conferences held at the University of Munich in 1919, made the concept less “provincial” and “parochial” and gave it a place in the heart of sociological thought (Weber 1946, 1978, 1998). And it is precisely in Weber’s category of Beruf, a word which underlines both the polarity and at the same time the interpenetration between the subject’s personal profession and vocation in the sense of a call from God, that we can trace the richness and nuances that make this concept useful and fertile also for contemporary sociological study. An extremely simple experience is enough to illustrate the numerous facets of the word “vocation” and the wide range of ideas it stimulates in the mind of, for example, young students. During my sociology course at the University of Aosta, a small city on the slopes of Mont Blanc in Italy’s smallest region in the north east of the country, I proposed a brainstorming on precisely this theme, asking the students to write down what the word “vocation” meant to them in no more than ve lines. For most of them, vocation referred to God’s call to some men and women in connection with a particular mission to be undertaken either inside the church or at the service of the world. In the latter case, missionaries were used as an example. So for this majority of students, the concept of vocation had a direct reference to religion, and they therefore spoke of a priestly, monastic, or missionary vocation. For some of them, however, vocation also had another meaning. It could be interpreted in a much more worldly and less religious way, as an inclination or personal predisposition for a specic profession, type of

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study, or particular artistic activity. In this sense, vocation is an innate tendency within the individual that leads him to prefer certain activities rather than others. For my students, examples of this were doctors, professors, and architects, together with painters or musicians. Finally, two other students drew attention to two very unusual aspects that extend not just the concept of vocation but also illustrate how it can be interpreted in a historical or geographic sense. For one of them, a vocation can also be attributed to a natural territory, a landscape, a general environment. A mountainous region, for example, may have a “vocation for tourism,” while an area with easy access to the road network or a wealth of raw materials may have a “vocation for industry.” The student who wrote this observation was the son of the owner of a hotel bordering directly on the ski runs and also a keen promoter of the valorisation of the scenic and natural assets of the Valle d’Aosta. The other student observed that one can use the word “vocation” when talking about companies able to develop manufacture of a product with particular commitment and creativity. The family of this last student owns a company making the typical lardo di Arnad, a local product (lard) known both inside and outside Italy for its unique avor. Invited to reect further on what it means to interpret one’s activity in terms of vocation, many students referred to the “meaning” the person can attribute to their everyday actions, or, in a more general sense, the thread that runs through someone’s entire existence. Talking about vocation in those terms helps understand all the vicissitudes of everyday life, from the most banal and repetitive to the most important and demanding, as though imbued with a sense which, though not always immediately apparent, is nevertheless ever present and concealed even in those events that my otherwise in themselves seem senseless—such as suffering or death. In short, perceiving life in terms of vocation means lifting it out of the banality of a simple succession of random events and giving them the added value of a framework able to make even the smallest details precious. Related to this is the rediscovery of one’s own intimate self within the everyday “things to do.” It is no coincidence that the word “authenticity” kept coming up during discussions with the students. The events of the world outside the person, ever more complex and overwhelming, are thus given a bearable and tolerable dimension through the criterion “harmony with myself ” which would overcome the sense of being scattered and fragmented by providing a consideration of a unitary and reassuring recomposition. According to this other approach,

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a vocation would thus lead to a rediscovery of the everyday through a process of selection and simplication, giving a sense of self-control that can easily be translated as “personal well-being” or “self-realization” (Giordan 2006). My students’ considerations were clearly strongly inuenced by the social and cultural context in which they live—a country where the Catholic church occupies a position that could still be dened as a relative monopoly (Garelli 2005, 2006; Diotallevi 2001), and a context, the Valle d’Aosta, where the tensions of social change and, more specically, the transition from the traditional world of agriculture and sheep farming to the modern world of industrialization and tourism, as well as the typical migrations of people and cultures of postmodernity, have all produced a marked fragmentation of values that people could use for reference. Finally, this is a context in which the need for meaning is in all probability becoming ever more urgent because it is accompanied by a profound redenition of the ofcial religion, “the Catholic faith,” and by a high level of well-being guaranteed as much by the tourism typical of a mountainous area as by a particularly advantageous system of guarantees provided by the autonomous legal status of the region. Obviously, although stimulating and in some ways surprising, the results of this brainstorming need to be systemised in a wider and more complex theoretical framework. Without doubt, the concept of vocation offers a very interesting point of view for understanding the meaning that individuals give to their own professions, activities, and life more generally—“being in the world.” As Max Weber said, this is responsible for extending the concept of vocation and making it no longer exclusive of religion. Precisely the ambiguity, positive in this case, of the German word Beruf, meaning both vocation and profession, widens the possibility of applying the concept itself in the secular material world of the professions. As is well known, Weber’s reasoning starts from a Protestant, and more precisely, a Calvinist perspective according to which the role of the Christian in the world is to act ad maiorem Dei gloriam, in other words, for the glory of God. From this derives an unremitting commitment to live one’s professional life with responsibility and sacrice, in a context of complete abnegation of the self and the pleasures of life. This “inner-worldly asceticism” is the only element able to conrm the state of grace that reassures people about their election to eternal salvation. This is an asceticism that leads to ever higher nancial earnings, but at

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the same time avoids all material and earthly pleasures. For Weber, this is therefore the true vocation: performing professional duties according to a rigid inner-worldly morality that has nothing to do with monastic asceticism bent on escaping from earthly realities considered dangerous for the salvation of the soul. In Weber’s own words, the Puritan professional takes ascetism from the connement of the monastic cell to the concreteness of business life. The dimension of ascetism is therefore closely bound to that of vocation (Giordan 2007). And this is true both from a secularized Perspective and a Catholic religious one. The concept of ascetism is associated with the idea of exertion, struggle and exercise, practised with method (rationality) and rigour (sacrice), with a view to an improvement that may be moral, religious, or even professional. The Catholic approach to the concept of vocation, which as we have already seen refers to priestly ordination or commitment to the religious life, links a call by God to the willingness of a man or woman to respond in the afrmative. But precisely this willingness to accept the call of God to a special consecration is born, grows, and is developed by practising ascetic exercises. It is through the concentration of meditation, constant prayer, “mortication” of the body, and meticulous control of one’s own senses and sentiments that a call by God can be perceived and followed. This is the origin of the long tradition of vigil, abstinence, and fasting that, particularly in medieval times, could sometimes lead to excesses. In the Calvinist Puritan mentality, this ascetic exercise is developed in an absolutely earthly and worldly manner, but this does not make it less difcult or demanding. In both cases, it involves a dynamic of rationalization that, from Weber’s perspective, is typical of the process of modernization. Enzo Pace (1983) interprets the political commitment of many Italian Catholics inside (and above all outside) the Christian Democratic party, in power in Italy uninterruptedly for almost 50 years, in this specic sense of inner-worldly ascetic commitment as a response to the “Christian vocation.” Contrary to the ofcial indications of the Catholic church which insistently invited Catholics to “vote united” for the “Christian party,” many Italians committed on both the front of faith and the front of social and political militancy did not obey the religious institution’s instructions in order, as explained above, to be faithful to their “Christian vocation.” According to these Catholics, it was precisely to remain faithful to their call from God that they were obliged to denounce on one hand the compromises ever more evident

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between the institutional Church and the majority political party and, on the other, the Catholic hierarchy’s failure to address the situations of poverty, marginality and suffering that characterised certain areas of the country. Over and above the particularities of the Italian case, what Pace describes suggests that it is possible to interpret a political commitment as a call coming directly from God in the Catholic context as well, and it does not require any legitimation by the ecclesiastical institutions. Quite the contrary, it is precisely the inner-worldly asceticism of political commitment that makes it possible to interpret one’s own actions as directly related to the evangelical message of equality, justice, and solidarity, giving one the right to criticize one’s own ofcial church. The maximum expression of the interpretation of vocation in ascetic terms is without doubt the martyr, both in the traditional sense of the Christian martyrs and also in the sense found in the modern Muslim world. In both cases, it means sacricing one’s own life, demonstrating profound dedication to an ideal (religious or political or both bound together). What is interesting is the logic that supports martyrdom. The martyrs’ lives are worth less than the call (vocation) to sacrice themselves for a greater ideal. This logic is closely bound to the idea of vocation, which leads the individual to transcend the self to answer a call coming from outside and above: God, religion, nation (Pace 2007). It is evident from the case of the Muslim martyrs that the call by God to sacrice one’s own life is not only of a religious nature, but also responds to needs specically related to politics and identity. Perhaps never so much as in this case has personal vocation had a social value and has the interpretation of this vocation, taken to the extreme, merged (and becomes confused) with the interests and values of a given social and cultural context. In this sense, it can be said that the religious vocation of the martyr is the last resource available for a political system unable to legitimize the right or duty to kill others in any other way. Coming back to Weber’s approach to Beruf, as well as vocation interpreted in terms of ascetism, there is also the other meaning, that of profession, which as we have seen is particularly important in a Calvinist perspective. The aspiration to economic success is a source of security not only in this life, but above all in the next life—and in any case closely links the private and individual dimension to the public and collective dimension. One’s own profession is not identied so much with “making money,” or at least not exclusively, but also offers the possibility of a more deeply rooted and vital place in the social

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fabric. As Robert Bellah and his colleagues (1985) observe, a profession in the sense of vocation can never be reduced to the purely economic dimension of the maximisation of prot, or exclusively to the private aspect of personal well being. This dimension of work, which integrates the individual and society, without doubt emerged with greatest clarity in the context of relatively small towns and cities in the nineteenth century, where the success of one’s work commitment contributed almost naturally to the good of the whole community. The major transformations affecting the way of interpreting work in the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and now the new millennium) very probably also make it necessary to review the close connection between profession and vocation and therefore between individual and society. From Bellah’s perspective, work is no longer seen as a vocation, but simply as a means of obtaining a satisfactory private life, codied according to a “lifestyle” that is no longer common to the community in general, but only to those people considered to have a similar sensibility, wealth, and culture. No longer, therefore, rooted in the fabric of small local communities, but a network of relationships with a much looser mesh and lifestyle enclaves. The challenge to rise to the top of the bureaucratic and corporate pyramid therefore brings with it a loosening of bonds both in a unitary sense within one’s own life, in terms not just of prot but also of relationships, affections and amusement, and within the reference society. Interpreting Beruf in terms of profession also means opening up another eld of study, namely the relationship between profession and employment (Tousijn 1997). While generically speaking, profession can be used to indicate any sort of employment, it sometimes has a more restricted and limited meaning, making it stand out from generic “jobs” and in particular the trades. This exclusive meaning of the word profession dates back to the Middle Ages, in particular to the birth and development of the universities, where, with courses lasting a number of years, the faculties of theology, philosophy, medicine and law trained those professions held at the time to be most prestigious—the theologian, the philosopher, the physician, and the jurist. As modernity advances, the word profession, although including new jobs, continues to maintain an elitist and in some ways exclusive meaning, and the important sociological (and also historical) question is to understand how some types of job become “professions” while others

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are never attributed this elite status. For us, the matter is particularly important since, for the “man in the street” (as conrmed by my Aosta students), the concept of vocation in the sense of profession is reserved for only certain types of job and not others. But why does this happen? What qualities must a job have to become a profession-vocation? What added value must it have? Or, seen from another point of view and widening the perspective, what added value is there in perceiving one’s own work in terms of a vocation? As already mentioned, interpreting one’s job as a vocation means attributing a special meaning to it, perceiving in what one does in the work a particular expression of one’s own abilities and gifts and, above all, seeing in it a unied meaning. This means lifting one’s everyday activities out of the monotonous and sometimes banal continuation of days to make them part of a wider project that is full of signicance. And it is precisely the signicance one attributes to one’s own actions that enables one to produce change, both at individual and collective level. Once again, the idea of vocation requires one to go beyond the self, to discover a wider plan, usually with positive connotations. In a time such as the present, when certainties seem ever more fragile and the only certainty that remains seems to be doubt, the need to gather together and unify the fragments of belonging and employment, together with those of relationships and emotions, accentuates the need for a unied vision to give existence a framework of signicance (Bauman 1999). While the idea of progress in a general sense has lost the attraction it had until a few years ago (Rossi 1997), today there is still at least the possibility of carving out small areas of signicance that enable one to go beyond the provisional nature of the present moment and escape the logic of carpe diem. The perspective of life interpreted in terms of vocation seems to represent an Ariadne’s thread to prevent one from losing one’s way in the multiplicity and sometimes inconsistency of everyday events. Implicit in this idea of vocation is without doubt the vision (utopia?) of the perfectibility of humans and their nature, even though for contemporary people this immediately translates into fragility and the reversibility of everyday decisions (Michel 1994). What I have described above are just some of the themes that emerge when talking about Beruf. The chapters that follow demonstrate how the vocation-profession can be studied from various perspectives and with very different scientic sensibilities. The rst chapter by Andrew J. Weigert and Anthony J. Blasi is the key contribution (not just for this

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volume) and offers a reliable point of reference for those wanting to study the theme of vocation in depth. By creating interaction between the sociological and psychological dimensions, Andy and Tony isolate the particular social form, “vocation,” interpreting it in relation to personal identity, status and role. Starting from these categories, they examine the meanings usually attributed to that concept, both inside and outside religious circles. This is truly rich and instructive work that opens up new areas of study. The two subsequent chapters originate from recent research on the theme of vocation carried out among a representative sample of young Italians aged between 16 and 29. What Weigert and Blasi explained previously from a theoretical point of view is conrmed empirically by the contributions of Franco Garelli and Luigi Berzano. In the second chapter, Franco explains the results of the survey showing that the concept of vocation is not distant from the life of young Italians and that it is understood by them in both a religious and non-religious sense. Among the interesting results, I will limit myself to highlighting just two aspects: the different levels of vocation attributed to various types of profession and, a particularly surprising nding, the relatively high percentage of young people who have considered a specic religious consecration, even if they then did not go on to realize it. Taking the results of the same research as his starting point, Luigi develops a number of specic aspects relating the theme of vocation to the most recurrent cultural aspects of the world of young Italians, starting with the uncertainty of employment and the difculty of nding one’s way in a context in which theoretically all choices are possible, but in practice, only a few are realisable. The contributions that follow, one by Anthony J. Blasi and one by myself, shift the reection to a phenomenon that necessitates considering vocation from another perspective, namely that of change. As discussed in the rst chapter, this means not necessarily passing from one vocation to another as much as changing the way the same vocation is expressed. Reinterpreting the data from a previous survey carried out with Zimmerman on the “transition from vowed to lay ministry in American Catholicism” (Blasi with Zimmerman 2004), Tony goes back to Weber’s concept of the “routinization of a charisma,” placing the vocation as calling and vocation as status in a dialectical relationship. Studying two samples of current and former members of Catholic religious communities in the United States, he analyses their commitment

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to working class issues in relation to their vow of poverty. My chapter, starting from 25 in-depth interviews with the same number of former Italian priests, sets out rst to describe how the Italian social and cultural context reacts to those who decide to “leave the priesthood” and then to examine how the concept of vocation in the sense of the “will of God” is transformed in those who make this choice. Through an extensive and systematic cross-national analysis performed in seventeen countries covering the period from 1945 and 1995, the rich and full study by Robert M. Fishman and Keely S. Jones describes the evolution (and not always the decline) of priestly ordination in the Catholic church. According to the authors’ hypothesis, this evolution is not due mainly (or solely) to the changes introduced by the Second Vatican Council or the issue of the law on the celibacy of priests, nor is it exclusively related to religious devotion. It seems, on the other hand, to be more fully explained by political regime transitions and specically by a “socially solidaristic (or also civic) set of commitments.” The seventh chapter focuses our attention on the efforts made by women for recognition of their specic identity in the Catholic church. This means, according to the passionate comparison Laura M. Leming draws from her concrete teaching experience in the United States and India, not just analysing their attempts to appropriate their own religious tradition autonomously, but also those made to inuence the distribution of power within their own religious institution. This is precisely what Laura denes as the “politics” of vocation and can be seen as a form of “religious agency.” The last two chapters talk of religious vocation from another two different points of view. Giovanni Dal Piaz illustrates how the training to become Catholic priests in seminaries is based not just on theological but also psychological and sociological presuppositions that are today in deep crisis. Whether vocation is interpreted in the sense of a “small seed” which can grow inside the adolescent only if cultivated with patience and dedication, or whether it is considered as a process of conversion that can only be tackled by mature people, it requires radical rethinking in relation to the role which the priest will be required to occupy in contemporary, secular and pluralist times. As Robert Butler explains, the difculty of redening the role of religious vocation within our society was positively overcome by Martin Luther King Jr. The family experience of Dr King, his deep roots in the Black Church,

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and the sense of responsibility and dignity which he animated in his community and in his education transformed his “traditional vocation” into a worldwide social movement. Finally, before handing the discussion over to the various authors, I would like to thank Tony Blasi for having involved me in this project right from the start and Bill Swatos for having supported and backed me with invaluable advice. Without their friendship and wisdom, this book would never have seen the light. I am obviously grateful to all the friends who have taken part in this book, for their punctuality and their competence in adding signicant pieces to the mosaic of scientic study of vocation. A particular thanks to my wife Patrizia who patiently waited “just one minute more” when the pasta was getting cold on the table and a special thought for Francesco, my four-month old son, in the hopes he will never lack a vocation for an ever more inspired and luminous life. References Bauman, Zygmunt. 1999. La società dell’incertezza [The Society of Uncertainty]. Bologna: Il Mulino. Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven M. Tipton. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Blasi, Anthony J., with Joseph F. Zimmerman. 2004. Transition from Vowed to Lay Ministry in American Catholicism. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Diotallevi, Luca. 2001. Il rompicapo della secolarizzazione italiana: Caso italiano, teorie americane e revisione del paradigma della secolarizzazione [The Puzzle of Italian Secularization: The Italian Case, American Theories, and a Revision of the Secularization Paradigm]. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino. Garelli, Franco. 2005. “Il pluralismo religioso in Italia” [“Religious Pluralism in Italy”]. Rassegna italiana di sociologia 4: 585–604. ———. 2006. L’Italia cattolica nell’epoca del pluralismo [Catholic Italy in the Age of Pluralism]. Bologna: Il Mulino. Giordan, Giuseppe, ed. 2006. Tra religione e spiritualità: Il rapporto con il sacro nell’epoca del pluralismo [Between Religion and Spirituality: Relating to the Sacred in the Age of Pluralism]. Milano: FrancoAngeli. ———. 2007. “Asceticism.” Pp. 185–89, in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, vol. 1. Oxford: Blackwell. Michel, Patrick. 1994. Politique et religion: La grande mutation [Politics and Religion: The Great Change]. Paris: Editions Albin Michel. Pace, Enzo. 1983. Asceti e mistici in una società secolarizzata [Ascetics and Mystics in a Secularized Society]. Venezia: Marsilio. ———. 2007. “Martyrdom.” Pp. 799–802, in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, edited by George Ritzer, vol. 6. Oxford: Blackwell. Rossi, Pietro. 1997. “Progresso.” [“Progress.”] Pp. 76–88, in Enciclopedia delle Scienze Sociali, vol. 7. Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana.

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Tousijn, Willem. 1997. “Professioni.” [“Professions.”] Pp. 48–57, in Enciclopedia delle Scienze Sociali, vol. 7. Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana. Weber, Max. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1998 [1904–05]. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Roxbury.

CHAPTER ONE

VOCATION Andrew J. Weigert and Anthony J. Blasi We write this chapter out of the conviction that the social world is affected in important ways by the phenomenon of the “vocation.” Much of the change and resistance to change in social life takes the form of the long-term commitments that people have and which they experience as transcending callings. Vocations are not the total explanation for history—i.e., for change and resistance to change; one can cite alienation, disaffection, greed, lethargy, and conventionality as well. But vocations surely ll out a major part of the picture. As will be seen below, vocations reside in social as well as psychological dimensions. Thus in calling attention to the importance of vocation as a sociological concept, we are not promoting a “great man” theory of history, but rather a theory that recognizes that men and women are called to be great often enough that the proceeding to live by a greater than everyday calling is an important kind of event in the social structuration process. The Meaning of Vocation Vocation and analogous terms are found in various religious traditions and secular approaches to “the meaning of human biography” (Haughey 2004). William Placher (2005) offers a fourfold historical periodization from a religious perspective: klesis for early Christian adults called out of pagan society; vocatio for medieval Christians called to the higher statuses of religious or clergy; Beruf for Reformation Lutherans called to seek God in worldly pursuits; and a pluralism of options within or outside of “work” as job, career, lifestyle, or activism in the contemporary Post-Christian world. Such terms can be taken as metaphors for a subjective experience that is described in the authoritative religious

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narratives as hearing and answering a call from the Divinity.1 Perhaps the best known call and answer in the Judeo-Christian tradition are the calls of YHWH to Moses from the Burning Bush and God the Father to Saul, who was on the way to Damascus to combat the new Christians there. In the latter case, the experience occasioned a transformation that was reected in a change of name from Saul to Paul. That kind of subjective experience can be taken as real as an experience. In this essay we are seeking analytical commonalities and interpretive dimensions of the phenomenon of that kind of vocation, using a sociological social psychology, while bracketing the religious narratives. By “bracketing,” we simply mean what we are focusing on could occur in non-religious as well as religious narratives. Thus we are seeking to isolate a particular social form, vocation, which is not itself peculiar to any one tradition and may not even be essentially religious in nature. This is not to explain away the phenomenon of vocation but to identify it; indeed to make it ancillary to a particular religion or even to religion in general would be to explain it away, albeit in a non-scientic procedure. By sociological social psychology, we mean neither the positing of innate behavioral impulses that work themselves out in social patterns nor the positing of external social “structures” that leave their imprints on impressionable human psyches. Rather, we look to the pragmatist, or symbolic interactionist, tradition of scholarship that refuses to posit a human psychology apart from society or a human society apart from psychological processes. In sociological social psychology one recognizes characteristically human consciousness as emergent in nature, a kind of occurrence that comes into being because of humans being or having been wide awake to other human beings (see the topical overviews in Reynolds and Herman-Kenney 2003).

1 Weiss et al. take the biblical parable of the annoying friend (Luke 11:5–8) as the Christian paradigm of vocation. This is the parable in which a friend comes knocking at the door at midnight asking for loaves of bread for a visitor: “I tell you, if he does not get up to give him the loaves because of their friendship, he will get up to give him whatever he needs because of his persistence.” They suggest that Luke erred in placing the tradition in a section about prayer. “The parable takes on a different and more logical sense if we do not assume that it is about prayer but rather about calling. Then the story is not about us needing to badger God, but about God needing to badger us” (2004: 186–87).

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A vocation will be a particular pattern in which individuals are related to the other people around them. The fact that particular cultural traditions, such as received religious discourses, are what necessarily provide the intellectual materials with which the individuals conceptualize their own vocation simply means that vocations will evince variety. The followers of YHWH, Jesus, Allah, the Buddha, and so forth may be comparably but not identically situated to others in their social worlds even if the sacred texts or revealed scriptures in each tradition give different substance to the content of vocations in the context of each tradition. The “universalizing” of vocation does not deprive it, as a concept, of meaning but rather distinguishes that meaning from the varying traditional contents with which it is usually associated in the received discourses. Poetry may be lost by such making of distinctions, but not meaning. More specically, we approach the culturally available meaning of vocation from a pragmatic social constructionist perspective, a type of analysis within the broader tradition of symbolic interactionist sociological inquiry, which does not presuppose particular mental states or attitudes but rather allows the observed “back and forth” exchanges among people to indicate what social psychological phenomena are relevant in particular contexts. In the interactions among people we can observe them presenting and recognizing typical situated “selves,” or identities (Weigert et al. 1986). We study the vocation as a specic kind of identity. We therefore have, in order of breadth of inclusion of the relevant “others,” three terms that refer to the individual in society: self, identity, and vocation. Following the terminology used by George Herbert Mead, a self is “that which can be an object to itself ” (1934: 140). Taken as a structure, such a statement would be circular. But the core of the conceptualization is the act of someone imagining oneself as one would appear from the standpoint of another person; the self happens, comes into view imaginatively, when one “takes” the standpoint or role of the other. Because individuals base their actions and consequently give a foundation to history on such imaginative selves, they are no less real for being hypothetical. Moreover, selves are no less social for being individual, for an awareness of others must be involved in one’s taking the role of the other. “If the self-form is an essential form of all our consciousness, it necessarily carries with it the other-form. Whatever may be the meta-physical impossibilities or possibilities of solipsism,

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psychologically it is nonexistent. There must be other selves if one’s own is to exist” (Mead 2001: 16).2 “Identity is a typied self at a stage in the life course situated in a context of organized social relationships” (Weigert et al. 1986: 53; see Blasi 1972: 456). An identity is typical; it implies expectations or a pattern of activity that persists through the owing sequence of moments and transcends immediate circumstances. Thus it is typical of the person, capable of inspiring resistance to “temptations” to participate in on-going activities that would be inconsistent with the expectation or pattern. It is capable of change however, so long as that change is a development, a change of the self-understanding of the very person. Thus the biography of an identity takes the form more of a career and a sequence of uctuations. But of course an identity is not solipsistic; it is continuous, if even by opposition, with the organized social relationships found in the individual’s social world. More will be said about identity below. We understand vocation as adding a self-aware sense of identity as linked to what we shall term a transcendent aspect of human existence (see Taylor 1992, for a discussion of self as open to “hyper-goods”). Within our perspective, transcendent refers to phenomenologically and empirically evaluated experiences or possibilites within the mundane world of each person’s culture. We say phenomenologically and empirically because the sensed value is in the experience itself and not contingent upon some extrinsic conceptualization. It is analogous to an aesthetic experience, not to an idea of an aesthetic principle. Again, it is analogous to the idea of a million, without having counted to a million. Vocation, then, answers the three core self-motives of esteem, worth, and authenticity, especially the latter, the linchpin of self-as-authentic. Within a pragmatic social constructionist perspective, “good” is a meaning for self and others that is relative to the situation and context within which it is experienced, expressed, responded to, and validated. A sociological perspective brackets the issue of objective, universalist, a priori, genetic, or revealed renditions of the good. It is important to continue this bracketing of ontological aspects of good and the ethical, for interpreting the discussion of vocation. It is assumed, for instance, that vocation carries an explicit or implicit positive evaluation and cathexis in everyday and institutional usages. In religious contexts, this posi-

2 Given the discovery of Mead’s book manuscript, published in 2001, we have access to his own formulation of his sociological psychology.

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tive cathexis is clear in prayers for “an increase in vocations” that are issued, for example, in Roman Catholic churches that are undergoing an historical drop in priestly and religious “vocations,” i.e., members who decide to join the clergy or religious orders of men and women, monks, brothers, sisters, and nuns (see Schoenherr 2002). In the secular realm, an analogous positive evaluation follows, for example, from the German understanding of a professional as someone who follows a Beruf, an occupation, profession, or career (ScholzeStubenrecht et al. 2001: 158), or again, “profession, calling, vocation, occupation, pursuit, business, trade, employ, walk of life” (Betteridge et al. 1965: 70). Similar nuances arise within English from the cognates of professing one’s faith, one’s love for another, or one’s commitment to a cause. Such professing is supposedly a feature of age-old institutional arrangements of autonomously competent, self-regulating, and duciary experts who are marked by an ethical obligation to work for the good of a client or of society in general.3 Frequently an obligation to keep consultations with a client condential exists so that people needing help can be free to bring all relevant facts and considerations to the professional so that the latter’s judgment will be as informed as possible. Where the good of society rather than of a client is in question, as for example in the case of journalists, many states have laws protecting the condentiality of reporters’ sources, so that people privy to what should be public information would be able to “leak” insider information to the press without being discovered and retaliated against. Max Weber found the vocation or Beruf to be an important theme for his sociology of religion. The peculiar idea that making money can be an expression of virtue, he writes (1998: 54; cf. 1978: 556), is what is most characteristic of the social ethic of capitalistic culture, and is in a sense the fundamental basis of it. It is an obligation which the individual is supposed to feel and does feel towards the content of his professional activity, no matter in what it consists, in particular no matter whether it appears on the surface as a utilization of his personal powers, or only of his material possessions (as capital).

Weber’s controversial thesis was that the Reformation made the vocation in this sense “the highest form which the moral activity of the individual 3 See the two opening paragraphs of the “1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,” formulated by the American Association of University Professors and the Association of American Colleges and Universities (in American Association of University Professors 1995: 3).

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could assume” (1998: 80). He describes an inner-worldly asceticism in which “the order of the world in which the ascetic is situated becomes for him a vocation which he must fulll rationally” (1978: 543). Even the other-worldly mystic has a vocation requiring “the maintenance of a state of grace against every pressure of the mundane order” (Weber 1978: 548). Weber also spoke of vocations quite apart from religious contexts. He implicitly described what he saw as his own two vocations in the celebrated essays, “Politics as a Vocation” (1946: 77ff.) and “Science as a Vocation” (1946: 129ff.). He speaks of “politicians by virtue of a ‘calling’” (1946: 80), who receive charisma from a following and exercise leadership. There are also “professional politicians” who serve a dominant ruler as underlings. Thus there are politicians who live for politics and functionaries who live off of politics (1946: 83–84).4 Three qualities, according to Weber, are decisive for the former, the politicians—passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion (1946: 115). He goes on to describe these qualities, in what is tantamount to a social psychology of the politician. The scholar, quite in contrast to the politician, is not interested in being in the public eye and gaining a personal following. He participates in the discourse of a small community of specialists and strains to achieve something that is of little concern to most people. Only by strict specialization can the scientific worker become fully conscious, for once and perhaps never again in his lifetime, that he has achieved something that will endure. A really denitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized accomplishment. And whoever lacks the capacity to put on blinders, so to speak, and to come up to the idea that the fate of his soul depends upon whether or not he makes the correct conjecture at this passage of this manuscript may as well stay away from science. (Weber 1946: 135)

An enthusiasm for such work, according to Weber, is essential to the scientic vocation. The professions range historically from Medieval theologians, philosophers, and lawyers to today’s proliferation of so-called “profession-

4 Giuseppe Garibaldi was a personage who brought living for politics to such an extreme that he declined to live off of politics at all. His calling was to oppose authoritarian government and establish representative government (see Trevelyan 1907).

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als” as pest exterminators, insurance brokers, and hair stylists—a sign that the autonomous duciary status of professions is now part of a wide-ranging service sector in a global market economy. C. Wright Mills described the paradox of the “salaried professional,” that is, a supposedly autonomous self-regulating body of duciary experts who are now employed in a bureaucracy to serve the prot-making logic of employing institutions (1956: 113–15). Thus lawyers join stables of legal rms and physicians work for health maintenance organizations. The historical paradox to which this brief delineation of professionas-vocation points is the institutional situation of secular vocations as co-opted within the prot logic of hierarchical bureaucracies, even as the privileged young and value-oriented adults seek to discern the sources of their sense of vocation—i.e., of a call to an identity that denes self as good. From its etymological and historical origin as a call from Divinity, a transcendental vocation, in contrast to a job, is in essence a call to be a self-as-good. A mundane vocation would be a subjectively experienced call to be a self-as-good. Included in a mundane vocation is a sense that following it in pursuit of the goals it implies is putting the self on track toward some kind of self-fulllment. This sense of self-fulllment follows in part for the dening feature of vocation as a call from a greater reality to live in pursuit of self-as-good. Mundane and secular vocations, then, are subjective goods that inform the three core self values of esteem, worth, and authenticity. Vocation should be contrasted with the sociological terms of status, identity, and role. Status refers to individuals’ locations within social structures and institutional organizations. The classic sociological dimensions are power, wealth, and prestige (Weber 1978: 926ff.), and an individual’s access to these dimensions locates that individual within the structures of generalizable resources for evaluating self and others and providing a range of action in the context of one’s interactions with others. Note that from a social psychological perspective, status refers to the individual-as-located within social structures, not to the locations themselves or the structural categories or components themselves. Thus, status in this sense refers to social categories as referenced to the individual who is placed within them, not to the structures or institutions themselves. Within sociological discourse, status is sometimes used to refer to individual characteristics and sometimes to structural positions. Here it simply refers to the individual dened according to placements within structures (see Linton 1936: 113). The individual, then, carries,

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akin to Weber’s sense of a “cultural carrier,” the status placements as individually dening features attributed to one as a social self. Identity as a construct also applies directly to the embodied individual who is perceived as placed within overlapping statuses. Thus, identity takes the social references derived from an individual’s statuses and adds their aggregation and particular placement as those of a single embodied individual. An identity includes the total social realities of the statuses with the, as it were, applied social realities of a particular individual. Thus identity connotes a particular biographical experience that status does not bring to mind. The embodied individual adds remembered biographical particularities, affective experiences, recognition, and acknowledgement in the memories of signicant others. Thus it can be seen that personal identities are related to the actual motives involved in people’s actions, motives that may actually depart from public typied ones commonly associated with statuses. Such personal identities are different from what are sometimes termed social identities. A personal identity derives from the unique aspects of the individual—i.e., unique aggregations typical of the individual only, aggregations of such standard dimensions as age, gender, ethnicity, size, beauty, eloquence, etc. Social identities derive from attributing group membership to individuals and then interpreting them from the meanings that the viewer attributes to the group as such. A role is a construct that directs attention to the modalities of enactment of status and identity in relation to the expectations.5 A role is a package of regularized, routinized patterns of precedented and expected action. As with identity, role carries two interpretations with reference to structure and personal agency. Structurally, role refers to hierarchically organized expectations for action typically institutionalized and formal, as in a bureaucracy. Interactionally, role refers to situationally relevant expectations for action emerging from the expectations of self and other and their mutual and ongoing adjustments, as in a conversation or in informal teamwork. Linking vocation with each of these sociological constructs generates an ordering of the principal meanings attributed to the term. A religious vocation refers to a placement within a status in a directly religious institution, for example a member of the clergy or of a reli-

5

“A rôle represents the dynamic aspect of a status.” (Linton 1936: 114).

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gious order of monks or nuns.6 Entering any such religious status may or may not involve a tendency toward leaving what are now dened as “secular” statuses, depending on the degree of formalization and differentiation between the secular or “lay” statuses and the religious or clerical statuses. It is a matter of a “tendency” rather than an actual leaving, since some religious specialists can only pursue their vocations part-time, given economic constraints. Religious institutions differ on the degree of formalization and differentiation among statuses, and members’ sense of vocation will differ accordingly. For example, there are lay preachers or ministers who perform religiously institutionalized functions without entering a different status or leaving their familiar or occupational statuses. Sometimes there is a differentiation from occupational but not familial statuses, as with the married and parental oriental rite Catholic priests found, for example, in the Ukranian and Maronite sectors of the Roman Church. Many religious vocations are interpreted as allowing occupational careers in compatible statuses, such as therapists, professors, and occasionally physicians and politicians; Fichter (1974: 37ff.) refers to these as “hyphenated clergy.” In a different but relevant sense, vocation relates to role as a modality of performance, as with the person who becomes a bus driver and strives to be the best bus driver one can be. Echoing the stoicism of Epictetus, it is up to others to tell us which roles to play and if we wish to be happy and free within those roles, we should perform them to the best of our abilities. If one were a slave, Epictetus would have one be the best slave one can possibly be. Given the limitations of embodied life, such as time, space, energy, resources, and place, role demands in complex contexts and plural identities and statuses are a central source of tension both for prioritizing, deciding and acting out one’s relationships (Absalom 1971; Blizzard 1956). Living a vocation implicates a self in the acting resolution of these tensions, and always and only “for the time being.” Since the tensions are socially real and structurally generated, no “mental health” or “personal life plan” ever eliminates them.

6 Referring to the “call” to ordained ministry in the Free Churches of Great Britain, Carlton (1968: 108) notes that some “described it as an inner restraint, a mounting and inescapable conviction that their future lies with the Church.” He goes on to note that some people struggle with the idea for some time and try to resist it before responding favorably to a call.

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Vocation, furthermore, may refer to another identity enactment that is nested within “vocation” as a category of work. Everyday English takes the original Latinate roots and has a construct that denies vocationas-work in order to refer to an aspect of one’s life that is meaningful, perhaps more meaningful than work, as a source of one’s authentic identity. What a person yearns for, then, is time free from work, even named “free time,” in order to spend it at one’s “avocation.” An avocation is a valued identity enacted in time freed from one’s work vocation. Within one’s vocation, a person may live for that time which is not spent at it but fullled through it. Time is “spent” at a work vocation. Time is fullled at one’s avocation. This relationship of utilitarian work vocation to one’s person-fullling avocation is illustrated by the response of a college woman to the question about her academic major: “I’m majoring in accounting, but I’m a dancer.” Considering relationships between vocation and avocation claries further the subjective distinctions among such self-identifying discourses reecting perceptions of self as capability, skills, desires, envies, commitments, conformities, or whatever core cognitive-affective motivation drives the self through daily life. Consider such formulae as: I want to do what I’m good at. I want to do what I like to do. I want what I have to do to earn the money that I want. I want to do what will make me famous and further my career. I want to do what will make me powerful. I want to do what will make my family and neighbors envious of me. I want to live riotously! Any of these self-indications may underwrite a vocation and allow resources for pursuing an avocational self as well. In a word, a person may pursue a vocation in order to have the desired avocation. Each of these choices indicates a pursuit of self-authenticity, a central self motive, once the prior material needs are satised. Avocation itself, then, indicates that the self has a work vocation that underwrites leisure, options, or resources for pursuing a second, non-work vocation. Vocation as avocation is a perk for those who have met subsistence needs and thus free the self for additional identity quests. Differences between vocation and avocation highlight the rst relationship in developing a conceptual framework for describing and codifying identity-as-vocation, namely: cui bono. The rst round of responses to this question is self or other, the latter taken in the widest sense of signicant others, reference groups or relationships, institutional statuses, or the transcendent Other or mythical states such as the afterlife or national or ethnic historical fulllment. Vocation for

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self includes directly self-referenced goals and rewards, such as wealth, power, prestige, pride, being envied. Vocation for self motivates a life in pursuit of self-interests. Vocation for other, by contrast, includes directly other-referenced goals, rewards, and existential, institutional, or group statuses and conditions. Most directly, vocation for other is altruism and the action-for-the-good-of-others that altruistic perspectives motivate. Indirectly, of course, vocation for other includes a motivational interactional arc that is not reex but which provides the self with derived goods such as the self-satisfaction that follows from seeking the good as self sees it for the direct good of others. Motivational analysis may strive to locate the primacy of motive in the direct good for others or in the indirect arc of satisfaction informing self-understanding. In other words, I do not reduce all vocation for other to a selsh motive informed by the indirect good-for-self that emerges from doing goodfor-other. From a pragmatic perspective, the foundation of good lies in the empirical good done for other, whatever the intentional purpose or subjective payoff from doing good-for-other. Vocation implies action in response to a “call” from a larger social reality than a personal life qua individual, i.e., action for a “public,” group, or institutional, national, or ethnic/racial service. Such service always goes beyond personal interests aligned with self ’s gain qua individual gain, always goes beyond “what’s in it for ME.” Public service requires the self to undergo a process of discernment: read the signs of the times as in the Christian tradition; rise to the level of the times, as Ortega y Gasset urged (inter alia 1963: 23; see Weigert 1983); be engaged as existentialists stated;7 or simply commit to something greater than oneself as an individual (see Weiss et al. 2004: 195ff.). A self who believes that the source of the call is God thereby receives an invitation to a divinely initiated vocation. For such a believer, a call from God is the highest invitation to fulll oneself and serve one’s God and thus do what is best for one’s fellow believers and in so doing fulll one’s personal destiny. Responding to such an invitation answers the key question Max Weber (see 1978: 540) posited as the core of at least Christian religious virtuosity, namely a certain answer to the question, Am I saved? For a believer, answering God’s call is the royal road to salvation.

7 Sartre (1956: 536) speaks of experiencing one’s self “engaged” in a “we” when, along with a number of others, one observes an accident taking place on the street.

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Vocation as an experience points to the historical tension between the individual and society. A person who experiences a call to universalize a social value or formulate new social values that should then apply to all humans runs afoul of the institutional arrangements that dene the contemporaneous institutional order. Powerful historical exemplars of following vocations attributed to transcendent sources—e.g., Socrates and Jesus—have elicited the opposition of those who prot from and operate within the empirically given social arrangements. Such transcendent vocations, when turned into motives for social change, are utopian8 and hence revolutionary; they threaten the status quo. G.H. Mead (1934: 217–18) notes that Jesus generalized the simple idea of “neighbor” in the parable of the Good Samaritan and thus fueled the opposition of those who refused to include Samaritans in the same identity category as themselves. Mead goes on to note that the great charismatic persons in history are those who grasp an essential value of their society and take it to a deeper understanding and extend it to include all human persons. Indeed, Mead’s notion of moral action is that which is accepting of all those whom it affects, not to some a priori narrowed compass based on the contingencies of social life. Of course, the social meaning of such charismatic vocations, as for all social meanings, lies in the responses of selves and others that fashion the future that emerges from their acting upon their vocational sense. The Transcending Self and Vocation Identities give a mundane denition to selves. They answer the momentby-moment question, “Who am I in this world?” While identities tend toward mundaneity, the self tends to transcend its experiences of multiple social worlds and to form a general coherence for itself. The power of a vocation comes from its social psychological fusion of multiple identities into a transcending self. We might distinguish between a short-term but ultimate fusion of the self into one identity—for example, the soldier engaged in a suicide mission—and a long-term commitment around which many other identities are structured—e.g., the life-time

8 “The concept of utopian thinking reects the . . . discovery of the political struggle, namely that certain oppressed groups are intellectually so strongly interested in the destruction and transformation of a given condition of society that they unwittingly see only those elements in the situation which tend to negate it” (Mannheim 1936: 40).

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peace activist. In the former case, the individual is immersed in a set of immediate pressing activities; the horizon of consciousness is not unlike the loss of self in intensive athletic activity. Should death come, a life will have been torn out of the fabric of everyday life; the reciprocities out of which the social world is woven lose their two-way character and create a sense of loss. In the latter case, the individual sets out on a long-term course of action that may put off some people but attract others to an insight or cause, to the point where they appreciate if not engage it. A web of reciprocities accommodates the individual’s eccentricities so that the individual’s vocation has endearing ramications in the wider world. The calling to a suicide mission presents one with a grim necessity. The kamikaze pilot must come to terms with what is demanded of him, even amidst the Shinto and technical rituals of his airplane’s take off. The bomber crew setting out for one of seven prescribed missions, knowing that there is only about a 60% return rate for any one mission, appreciate the possibility that the accustomed going through time together with friends and family will be stopped; photographs and keepsakes are taken aboard as tokens for the times together that may well no longer be. Rituals and tokens mark what is absent or about to be absent; they are presences of absence that are symptomatic of impending social ruptures. They are part of “coming to terms” with the situation—i.e., they are concessions to social realities, and hence selfrealities, that need to be acknowledged but not dwelt upon too much. After all, the grim business must proceed. The individual may even allow an immediate authority to take over the function altogether, leaving to the individual only the responsibility of obeying unquestioningly. The calling to a life-time vocation, in contrast, needs to be dwelt upon. An inspiration that is to be “taken to its logical conclusion” presents the prospect of affecting every aspect of one’s social engagement, and hence every aspect of one’s social self. Is it a matter of rejecting the shallow and even numbing “enjoyment” of material gratications? What is involved in that? Does it entail taking up an occupation more marked by purpose than prot? Does it mean living off of others’ generosity?9 Does it mean seeking out materially marginalized people to live and 9 A college classmate of one of the authors comes to mind; he abandoned a career as a college professor in order to found a community of Catholic religious who live the primitive Franciscan lifestyle and beg on the streets of Mexico City, while deliberately living with the poor whom they catechize.

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work with? Must one forego having dependents, and hence a spouse? Would relatives and friends be disappointed? Are there other incipient identities—e.g., those associated with possible professional careers or expensive expressive pursuits—that would have to be abandoned? Such considerations require protracted discernment rather than rituals and tokens. The locus of control remains within the individual, who acts in pursuit of inclusivist and universalist values that have as an object the good of the other. In this sense a vocational identity is a spiritual quest that transcends institutional hierarchies and particularist group boundaries and social identities. Taking a vocational value seriously provides the associated identity with a vector or “mission.”10 A life-time campaigner for peace, such as Dorothy Day, does not simply inhabit the world but seeks to affect all other people. She may avoid excessive income in time of war in order to avoid paying taxes that support the war. She runs the risk of being labeled unpatriotic. She may be something of an embarrassment to a parent who served honorably in the military. She may make those who enjoy being around her reluctant to meet the usual social expectations that one earns as much as possible, “thinks patriotically,” and honors those serving in the military. So there are issues at the point of the vector. She may try to inspire her friends to work at what is intrinsically worth doing rather than at what provides an ample taxable income. Those who know and appreciate her may be reluctant to entertain nationalistic jingoism because of her. The parent must cultivate a more complicated psychological landscape; what one had done in one’s youth cannot be unthinkingly idealized as the highpoint of one’s life, when one’s own child in her youth chooses something inconsistent with what one did oneself. Such things require discernment. One needs to think it over before one sets out on a course that not only transforms oneself but also transforms either others or one’s relationships with those others. One of the features that a vocation adds to identities is a sense that the vocation is a call to a “good.” It is not just any good, but one that takes the form of self-authenticity. One would be doing what one wishes to do in a quest for personal fulllment. This complex of identity and

10 “Out of the call experience has grown a sense of mission or rather we might say that the ‘call’ experience is the culmination of his growing sense of mission. This ‘call’ experience is such a highly emotional one that often the persons future is dominated by it” (Kincheloe 1929: 225).

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vocation generates tensions across many dimensions, but primarily across the inherent tension within the self between an identity that ows from oneself as an embodied individual or person (personal identity) and one that ows onto an individual as a member of a social group or participant in an institution (social identity). Individuals feel, know of, and enact tensions between self-as-individual and self-as-member, between “I” and “we.” Vocation, then, is an expanded kind of identity. It is a call that one attributes to a superior source. A moral demand is made on the self by that superior source, but precisely because that source is “superior” it is not straightforwardly at hand. The only clue to the authenticity of the call is to be found in a sense of the authenticity of the moral demand on the self to which one must respond in order to maintain or enhance one’s self worth. One’s sense of self-esteem becomes tied up with such a call. Using an identity perspective for purposes of analysis leads one to understand vocation as a mode of experiencing identity as simultaneously a social and personal placement informed with socially relevant and powerful motivational narratives. It is a mode of authentic social identity that transforms the individual identity through a participation in a larger social reality. In a word, a vocation locates the individual as a social self in tune with what one believes are the powers moving the world, akin to Peter Berger’s depiction of religion as “sacred cosmization” (1967: 25). The person living out a sense of authentic vocation experiences the individual, social, and species identities as one, with all levels of identity fused into one sense of identity. Such fusion generates the strongest kind of commitment and motivational force that social psychological dynamics can elicit. To be called is to have one’s identity activated, and the called must then respond, and thereby maintain, enhance, or demean the activated identity. A dening aspect of a call is that the identity of the called is put into jeopardy. Even not responding takes on a signicance; not acting may be as meaningful as any course of action. Indeed, some municipalities have “good Samaritan” laws that legally dene someone else’s need as a challenge, a “call,” a demand on oneself to come to the needy person’s aid. One’s identity will be affected in some way by the response or failure to respond.

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andrew j. weigert and anthony j. blasi Receptiveness to Vocation

Being called is an experience and attribute of the self. It is an experience in the sense that it is directed to oneself; it cannot be thought of as a call unless there is one to receive it. One has the understanding that there is an intent of some kind that one be a recipient of the call. The grasp of such an intent and hence the interpretation of the circumstances of one’s life as a call is something that is subject-dependent—i.e. it depends to some extent on one’s own perspective. Just as the blue of a blue sky is not to be found “up” in the sky at all but is dependent on one looking at it, the experience of being called is to a great extent an experience. But the fact that it is subject-dependent does not make it a gment or an arbitrary conclusion; after all a host of other people can also see the blue of a blue sky; it is an objective circumstance. The subjective is aware of itself as subjective when engaging the objective, and the objective is known as an object by a subject. The dialogue of subject and object constitutes both in the human consciousness; each of the two is thereby intertwined with the other. In the case of a vocation, the awareness that one’s self comprises a dimension of objective circumstances is more thematic than in other aspects of the self, since one feels that one is most authentic in living out the vocation, that one is more fully actualized in it than in activities peripheral to it. That is why it can be said that being called is an attribute of the self. Vocation as a self-meaning is a function and shaper of self-forming institutional narratives. One’s self-story is intermingled into the narratives of social movements and group narratives. “Institutional narratives” may include group- or collective-based narratives, even culturally mythic and historically past or futuristically projected or dream-based ones—as long as the narrative is shared. Vocations have a “with” dimension; they involve others in some way. This is to be expected since the sense of self emerges as an aspect of one’s involvement with others, as Mead (1934) argues so persuasively; “I” become aware of myself when doing a, as it were, lm-maker’s “take” on myself from the perspective or vantage point of the other, when I “take the role of the other.” The collective narrative of the group from whose perspective I gain a consciousness of myself is in some sense my story too. I can grow beyond it, transcend it, even criticize and reject it, but it remains a dimension of my self-experience. As with all social meanings, vocation is distributed, validated, imposed, threatened, or denied in the course of social dynamics, group

vocation

29

memberships, and stratied structures of power, property, and prestige, weakness, want, and marginality. Analytically, the moral standing of any vocation derives from its social contextualization: the good or bad evaluation accorded it is an empirical question related to the social context in which one lives it out. To the person receiving the call, the context leads toward expanding beyond the connes of the small collectivity in which one rst becomes aware of oneself. The process of transcending the narrow collectivity and reaching out to embrace a wider one may involve a shifting of reference groups. Referential relationships are thus elements that inhere in the very processes of the vocational vector. They derive from the socio-mental communities that ground what we take to be real, the socio-mental communities that constitute the world in which we believe we live (Zerubavel 1997). The existence of differing socio-mental worlds is not a literary or semantic conceit but the actual material of what we take to be important and actual. We “frame”11 information as occurring within our world or between our world and another one that is in some way thought to be “outside.” The trajectory of a vocation is to expand what is in the “within” world and reduce what is deemed “outside”; it is a reframing process. Various social and personal identities populate positions “within” and “without,” so that such reframing involves a resituating not only of oneself but also of others. It is in this sense that one can pose the question, Who is my neighbor? Social and personal identities are lived out in role performances, and it is these that often elicit responses from one’s immediate others. Living out a vocation may well elicit resistance and even violence on the part of some, as history shows. A call may entail a “call to” a particular social status, such as that of a religious functionary; there would thus be two calls—one broad and one occupationally specic (see Fichter 1961: 3–8). Alternatively, it may involve a call to a mode of interaction within a status that one already occupies—e.g., to commit oneself totally to be the best in one’s occupation or to emphasize a particular theme such as peace or poverty within the role performances that one takes up. All this takes place within the framework of what George H. Mead identied as a foundational triadic 11 “I assume that denitions of a situation are built up in accordance with principles of organization which govern events—at least social ones—and our subjective involvement in them; frame is the word I use to refer to such of these basic elements as I am able to identify” (Goffman 1974: 10–11).

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framework in which meaning emerges for humans—gesture or initiating action, response by the other, and one’s own response to the other’s response. A vocation is a particular response to others’ responses. The power of human symbol-making leads to organizing these experiences into a caller, the called, and the relationship between those two—the vocation. The rst question, then, is the identity of the caller. The individual employs cultural resources to create an ideal source, which one may well personify as a deity or more mundanely as the better part of one’s self. A vocation is always a call from a social reality that is deemed greater than the mere individual self. Classical religious understandings of vocation related the call to service to the Mystical Body of the community of believers by entering a religious status, such as clergy or membership in a religious order, or removing oneself from secular society and living as an anchorite or holy hermit away from the temptations and eshpots of the secular world. Alternatively, a call may be to a course of action in a struggle for an inclusive social good, as in variants of the “activist” life. The call is to participate in social movements working to reconstruct society in a way that better serves its members. Or again, the call may be to a mode of daily life that enriches otherwise mundane activities. Discernment More needs to be said about the discernment process. People try to discern what they are about because they seek to understand what things in general “are about.” In their existence as social beings they come early in life to place value on taking over an objective view of things—i.e., a view from the perspective of the other. Such views are judged to “make sense” in terms of informal but nevertheless objective criteria. One’s self is an element of that which should make sense, and hence people engage in quests for “meaning.” Discerning one’s (and for that matter, others’) vocations is a particularly important case of that kind of quest. It is stimulated by ruptures in the everydayness of the life world, in breaks in routine. A sense of vocation begins when some rupture provokes an analysis of one’s society and one’s own place in that society. As Haughey (2004: 1, 3–4) suggests, a vocation begins with an intellectual conversion to seeing and comprehending the world in its own terms as well as possible.

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The content of the vocation does not consist of willful impulse but of taking in perspectives from the standpoint of the other. Consequently, in an age of philosophical non-foundationalism, perspectivism, and pluralism, the individual needs to begin by deciding whom to believe and trust in questions that concern the state of the world, particularly where one encounters ruptures, where personal, scientic, philosophical, psychological and social afrmations cease to be adequate. An implicit guide or compass in deciding whom to believe and trust is an underlying sense of truth-happiness. Following the insights of Plato and Aristotle, only the just person, the person who knows and embraces justice and then acts justly, is truly happy—i.e., fullled as a person. And to fulll one’s self in this sense, one must follow the call to be as fully human as one’s statuses and resources allow.12 Discernment may refer to others’ narratives as well as one’s own. A comparison of the respective narratives of self and other enters into all social judgments and highlights the plurality of meanings that cluster around any vocation. The goods that serve as intra-narrative justication of the vocation are not necessarily interpreted as good from the perspective of another narrative. One nds criteria for judging the legitimacy of one’s vocational discernment both within one’s own social world with its cultural apparatus and others’ social worlds with their cultural apparatus. This natural expansion of the universe from which criteria are sought itself promotes the individual’s vector toward more inclusive frameworks for the living out of one’s vocation. The adjudication of opposing interpretations leads to an examination of the internal claims of each narrative, compares them to the opposing claims of the competing narratives, and develops emergent criteria that can be reasonably applied to both. A key aspect of a call, in addition to the content of its challenge, is who else knows of the call.13 The degree of social announcement

12

“Plato articulated a myth at the end of . . . The Republic. The myth of ER is not as famous as Plato’s cave allegory, but in many ways it is more important. . . . In this myth Plato envisaged or intuited that each human being before being born is endowed with a daimon, a quintessential self, so to speak, that contains the image or pattern we are to lie out and function from in our days on earth” (Weiss et al. 2004: 191). 13 The prophet “has such a keen sense of his mission that nothing can swerve him from his goal. He may become disappointed and disheartened but usually says nothing to men about it. He may spend much time in prayer and brooding from which he comes with reassurance. When he emerges from these periods it is usually with a message” (Kincheloe 1929: 19).

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denes a range of calls from the personal awareness of someone who believes one has received a call, for example, from a transcendent source such as a deity or sense of absolute duty or subjectively sensed challenge that may even be a call or challenge by oneself to oneself. Rachel Carson’s vocation illustrates the latter kind of challenge; upon reading a letter telling of widespread bird deaths following a spraying of DDT in Connecticut, she realized that she must write the book about pesticides herself (Carson 1994: xiii). The very act of publishing on the subject broadened the conversation about her vocation as well as about pesticides. Recognizing a call, which involves what Haughey (2004) termed, as mentioned above, an intellectual conversion, is only the beginning of a vocation. It leads to a “moral conversion” of the self to live meaningfully, especially in meaningful communities. That in turn leads to an “affective conversion” to a process of seeking ever more goodness, to live a life affectively reveling in others. These latter two conversions also involve discernment; one needs to detect and recognize meaningfulness and affective fulllment. Change within Vocation Human consciousness, including the consciousness of vocation, occurs in the lived present (Mead 1932). Consequently as one lives through a stretch of time the past does not remain the same, nor does the anticipated future. For that matter, what had been experienced as “present” at some time in the past is no longer in the present. The content of a vocation—both the call perceived and the particular character, endowments, and position of the self receiving that call—change as the individual’s temporally-dened horizons change. The particulars of one’s course of daily life will thus change as one engages in discernment at different temporal points in one’s life. The experience is analogous to revisiting an aesthetic experience from the distant past. Maybe one comes across an old once favorite recording of a once favorite piece of music, but from a more developed aesthetic sensitivity one may nd it certainly good but not so sweepingly alluring any more. Or one may re-read a book that had changed one’s consciousness and life, and nd it not as powerful as it once was. This is not limited to the aesthetic; the book need not be a work of literature but of history or science. It can also occur that one renews an acquaintance with someone who

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was once a close friend and nds that, while still someone worthy of being a friend, is not the person one greatly enjoys being with any more. By analogy, the examined life, marked by discernment, will know of change in vocation. It is not necessarily a change from one vocation to another, though that can happen. More likely, it is a change in the modalities of a vocation. What does remain constant throughout the course of life is the “I”; what happened to one in the past happened to the person to whom things happen today. There is a continuity linking memories, present consciousness, and future possibilities together. “I” make promises, commitments, contracts. These bind me though the environing world while my relation to it changes. It is not surprising, then, that attempts at institutionalizing vocations involve promises, commitments, and contracts. One’s calling may be a teacher, and a school district tenders a contract for teaching under stipulated conditions. One’s calling may be religious, and a church requires vows, the details of which are contained in the rule of an order as implemented through by-laws (chapter legislation). Consequently vocations are typically characterized by tensions among various dimensions of temporality as the individual discovers fresh insights in discernment and yet lives within a more or less crystallized institutional world. References Absalom, Francis. 1971. “The Anglo-Catholic Priest: Aspects of Role Conict.” A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain 4: 46–61. American Association of University Professors. 1995. Policy Documentations & Reports. Washington, DC: American Association of University Professors [the “Red Book”]. Berger, Peter L. 1967. The Sacred Canopy. Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Betteridge, Harold T., ed. 1965. The New Cassell’s German Dictionary. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. Blasi, Anthony J. 1972. “Symbolic Interactionism as Theory.” Sociology and Social Research 56: 453–65. Blizaard, Samuel W. 1956. “Role Conicts of the Urban Minister.” City Church 7(4): 13–15. Carlton, Eric. 1968. “ ‘The Call’: The Concept of Vocation in the Free Church Ministry.” A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain 1: 106–14. Carson, Rachel. 1994 [1962]. Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifin. Fichter, Joseph H. 1961. Religion as an Occupation. A Study in the Sociology of Professions. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. ———. 1974. Organization Man in the Church. Cambridge, MA: Schenckman.

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Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Haughey, John C. 2004. “The Three Conversions Embedded in Personal Calling.” Pp. 1–23 in Revisiting the Idea of Vocation: Theological Explorations, edited by John C. Haughey. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Kincheloe, Samuel Clarence. 1929. The Prophet: A Study in the Sociology of Leadership. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago. Linton, Ralph. 1936. The Study of Man. An Introduction. New York: Appleton-Century. Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia. An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Mead, George Herbert. 1932. The Philosophy of the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2001. Essays in Social Psychology. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction. Mills, C. Wright. 1956. White Collar: The American Middle Class. New York: Oxford University Press. Ortega y Gasset, José. 1963. Man and People. New York: Norton. Placher, William C., ed. 2005. Callings: Twenty Centuries of Christian Wisdom on Vocation. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Reynolds, Larry T. and Nancy J. Herman-Kinney, eds. 2003. Handbook of Symbolic Interactionism. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and Nothingness. New York: Washington Square. Schoenherr, Richard A. 2002. Goodbye Father: The Celibate Priesthood and the Future of the Catholic Church. New York: Oxford University Press. Scholze-Stubenrecht, Werner, et al. 2001. Oxford-Duden German Dictionary, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1992. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Trevelyan, George Macaulay. 1907. Garibaldi’s Defense of the Roman Republic 1848–9. London: Longman’s, Green. Weber, Max. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1978. Economy and Society. An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1998 [1904–05]. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 2nd ed. Los Angeles: Roxbury. Weigert, Andrew J. 1983. Life and Society: A Meditation on the Social Thought of Jose Ortega y Gasset. New York: Irvington Publishers. Weigert, Andrew J., J. Smith Teitge, and Dennis W. Teitge. 1986. Society and Identity: Toward a Sociological Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weiss, Joseph W., Michael F. Skelley, John C. Haughey, and Douglas Hall. 2004. Spiritual Intelligence at Work: Meaning, Metaphor, and Morals. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1997. Social Mindscapes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER TWO

ITALIAN YOUTH AND IDEAS OF VOCATION Franco Garelli What evokes in today’s young people the idea of “vocation”? How do they react to it and how do they interpret it? Is it a concept far away from their life, recalling ancient meanings hardly compatible with the emerging culture, or rather is it a term that can be used in new forms close to that “culture of the self ” that characterizes the present time? Is the idea that each individual has a vocation to accomplish widespread, or does a limited conception of vocation prevail, applying only to particular choices and life routes? Finally, what has happened to the religious vocation? How do the young evaluate this type of choice in relation to the many opportunities for self-realization that are available today? Which types of religious vocation do they appreciate most? Does the idea of a consecrated life appeal to today’s young people, and if so, with what conditions and in what circumstances? Around questions such as these—generally not considered in the many projects carried out about the younger generation—a survey has been recently planned and carried out on a representative sample of young Italian people between 16 and 29, chosen in order to mirror the distribution of the national population of that age according to the main sociodemographic, environmental and cultural variables.1 As for the theme and the associated questions, it is an utterly innovative research in the panorama of inquiries oriented toward monitoring the knowledge of the world of the young. In this case, the focus is to

1 The survey, translated as The Young and Vocation, has been carried out on a sample of 1,017 cases, by means of telephone interviews under the direction of Eurisko, the public opinion institute of Milan, on the basis of a closed-answer questionnaire expressly prepared for this research initiative. The inquiry has been developed in the rst months of 2006, and the main results and the information on the methodology employed are included in Garelli 2006a: 170. All phases of the research (planning, data processing and analysis, nal editing) are the product of team work in which the following scholars and researchers from the Department of Social Sciences of Torino University—coordinated by Franco Garelli—took part: Raffaella Ferrero Camoletto, Roberta Ricucci, Luigi Berzano, Stefania Palmisano, and Roberto Scalon.

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pick up the cultural traits emerging in the new generations, making use for this purpose of a new entry point that has not yet been investigated, that is just the way in which the young put themselves in relation to the idea of vocation. Even if it can lend itself to new and more accommodating interpretations, this idea maintains in itself a high ethic and normative appeal for the individuals, exploring the mental disposition that induces humans to making certain choices in the range of possible life styles. The idea of vocation is then closely connected with people’s aptitude to live their lives with some discernment, acknowledging the importance of a project, keeping their commitments or the missions they undertake over time; all these aspects seem to be particularly lacking in the new generations, who appear to be more oriented toward living intensely the opportunities of realization that are offered to them in everyday life rather than harmonizing their experiences around a distant project. In many respects the young experience a precarious way of living that prevents them from aiming at great goals, while it urges them to seek more immediate gratications. Do praxis and experience prevail far more than ideals and projects? Comparing the outcomes of the present survey with those predominating in the research concerning the young, many similarities emerge, but also not a few novelties. “To be Called” and “to Choose”: Two Dimensions of ‘Vocation’ A rst novelty tells us that the new generations do not appear to be refractory toward the vocation idea, meaning by it a project or a stronghold for anchoring one’s existence. When they think of vocation many young people most of all (52.9%) refer to an inclination, a natural quality, that characterizes a person and facilitates his or her success in a given profession or art or in the study of a particular discipline. But beside this, to these young people the idea of vocation at the same time recalls other meanings among non-mutually exclusive options, such as the commitment to an ideal or to a cause (51%), or to a project to realize (41%), or as “the call to the religious life” (41.9%). Among the young the majority (52%) believe that each individual has a vocation, while minorities believe that the term is applicable only to particular life choices in the professional or religious or social engagement eld (22%) or deny that people’s lives can be interpreted as a vocation, preferring to consider them as the summation of individual choices (26%).

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italian youth and ideas of vocation Table 2.1. What does the term “vocation” mostly recall to your mind? (two ranked responses; 1,017 cases – % values)

An inclination or a personal talent A project to realize The commitment to an ideal, to a cause A call to the religious life Not mentioned

First choice

Second choice

Total (sum)

31.8 16.8 24.5

21.1 24.2 26.5

52.9 41.0 51.0

26.9 — 100.0

15.0 13.2 100.0

41.9

Figure 2.1. Comparing different ideas of vocation (1,017 cases – % values). Only he who makes particularly demanding choice has a vocation 22%

Only individual life choices exist 27%

Each individual has his/her own vocation 51%

Furthermore, analysing a range of professional and life choices, most young people acknowledge they involve different levels of vocation. Thus, a higher level of vocational intensity is ascribed to those entering upon priesthood (this position is stated by 92% of the sample) and a lesser level to those choosing the professions of social workers (81%) or of writers (81%); while a mean level of “call” seems to be involved for an entrepreneur (50%), up to the point that the great majority of

38

franco garelli Figure 2.2. A vocation is needed in order to be . . . (1,017 cases – % values).

… a priest

92

… a welfare worker

81

… a writer

81

… an entrepreneur

50

… an employee

26

0

20

40

60

80

100

the young (74%) believe that it is not necessary to use the grand term “vocation” to account for the choice (or the necessity) to hold a whitecollar position in the society. In their understandings of different professions the young seem to point out the main criterion underlying the idea of vocation: to be called to undertake a certain life course (instead of being there by chance) and the possibility to choose a certain itinerary (that in the reported examples concerns the professional eld) for social and self-expressive aims compared to adopting an instrumental attitude (such as a routine job may be, in which one does not commit anything of one’s “self ” as such in the job). To be called and to choose: the two dimensions meet in the conviction that vocation responds to the deepest nature of the individual, to what allows one to be oneself to the greatest extent and to be able to offer a social contribution of some relevance. A Persisting “High” and Demanding Idea of Vocation More generally, then, we observe that the concept of vocation evokes in many young people positive feelings and evaluations. Contrary to what is commonly believed, the term vocation evokes in most young people more of the idea of realization than that of imposition (respectively 79% against 8%, with a 13% placed in an intermediate position). It evokes more the image of satisfaction than that of renunciation (71% against 13%), and this happens notwithstanding the fact that to many

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39

young people this idea is linked more to a denitive rather than to a temporary choice (58% vs. 21%) and more to a sacral than to a profane dimension (58% vs. 17%). That is to say that—at least in abstract and ideal terms—the young acknowledge the realizing and satisfying value that may be implied in vocations characterized by great commitment and strong orientation, things that may well seem to be difcult to realize in ordinary life. Most young people thus have no doubts in associating the term vocation rst of all with the ideas of satisfaction and realization, and secondly in associating it with the traits of the sacred and of denitive commitment. The former orientation is conrmed by the great prominence the new generations give to the values of authenticity, of free self-expression, and of the search for self-realization in their own biographies: these are all aspects making up that culture of self-realization that turns out to be typical of the post-materialistic society, within which, as Beck says (2000), each individual is pushed toward giving form and full meaning to his or her own life course. In addition, the call to the dimension of the sacred seems to point out that even for the new generations the idea of vocation is associated with a “religious call”—interpreted, however, not as a choice of the religious life associated with traditional institutions (mostly characterized by renunciation and imposition), but as a personal option that makes it possible to aim at a satisfactory self-realization. We may ask ourselves as well if the young do not extend the idea of the sacred to the search for an authentic existence that does not express itself only through a religious vocation; if this is true, we would face a kind of “sacralization” of our life choices, in as much as it is the expression of a request for meaning and fullment, of a humanly rich and stimulating life. Finally, there is a prevailing tendency among the young to attach to the term vocation more the character of a denitive choice than that of a temporary one. Although precariousness is a typical component of the present condition of our lives, many young people do not abandon the high idea of vocation, whose denitive options and lasting commitment are constitutive elements. A Minimal or “Working” Idea of Vocation These hints are sufcient to understand how the meaning horizon of the new generations is not closed to great perspectives with respect to

40

franco garelli Table 2.2. What are your reactions to the term “vocation”? What do you mostly associate it with? (1,017 cases – % values) 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Far

10 Close

34

28

38

34

27

39

17

25

58

13

16

71

8

13

79

21

20

58

Ancient

Modern

Profane

Sacred

Renunciation

Satisfaction

Imposition

Realization

Temporary

Denitive

commitment and realization, even if the possibility of implementing them in everyday life seem to be scarce and difcult. This is because, as is well known and as emerges from other research data (see Table 2.3), the young express themselves with a culture that assigns great importance to experimentation, which does not favor demanding options, being refractory to making denitive choices. The great majority of the young on the one hand acknowledge that it is important to have objectives and aims in life (85.3%), but on the other hand they believe that it is better to keep many possibilities and many roads open (75.6%). Moreover, many young people acknowledge that “success” in the different elds of existence depends on serious and constant commitment (64.8%), but at the same time they are convinced that even the most important choices are never “forever” but can be revised at any moment (57%). The young generations widely share the awareness that great projects are often mirages or utopias, since they do not have adequate resources and favorable conditions to be able to realize them. The society of uncertainty (Bauman 1999) clips the wings before any ights to great goals. It faces a culture that emphasizes experimentation to the utmost and that tends toward delaying one’s life choices over time. All these aspects are hardly compatible with demanding and constraining vocations.

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italian youth and ideas of vocation

Table 2.3. To which of the two statements do you feel closer? Confronting surveys. ( % values)2 Survey “Young and Vocation” 2006 (16–29)

Survey Iard 2002 (15–29)

Full of opportunities and surprises

67.6

66.1

Full of risks and unknown factors

32.4

33.9

It is important to have objects and goals

85.3

83.5

It is useless to make many plans because always something happens that prevents you from realizing them

14.7

16.5

Success depends on hard work and fortune counts little

64.8

67.7

It is not wise to plan one’s future because much depends on fortune

35.2

32.3

It is difcult to succeed if we don’t make precise choices as soon as possible

24.4

21.4

It is always better to keep many ways open

75.6

78.6

The most important choices are never made “forever,” they may be always corrected

57.0

62.7

The moment always comes when decisive choices cannot be “avoided”

43.0

37.3

1,017

2,297

When I think of my future I see it . . .

In life . . .

Valid cases

2 In this table are to found the opinions of the young about their future and their life plans, such as they emerge both in the research analysed in the present work and in a national survey about the young developed in 2002 by the Iard Institute (Buzzi et al. 2002). In both cases the same set of question has been used.

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Hence there is the tendency on part of many young people to cultivate a minimal idea of “vocation,” capable of providing meaning to the little choices of everyday life, from relations with friends to affective dynamics, from widening one’s expressive possibilities to recreation, from cultivating one’s human potential to researching distinctive lifestyles. In brief, a working idea of vocation is popular among the young, as an inventory of meanings aimed at ennobling the ordinary choices of their lives; but in addition to this orientation, a clear inclination can be perceived toward acknowledging the importance of the most demanding vocations, like a sort of longing for great horizons that occurs even in those who are obliged to live in the (involving but limiting) immense sea of daily life. At this point, one question arises: For the young, does vocation concern more the dimension of meaning or that of project? In other words, does acknowledging a vocational valence to the different existential choices (in the scholastic, professional, affective, relational elds, etc.) mean that the young interpret these different options in a project-like logic—that is, planning and building up their lives, or rather does it highlight their aspiration toward the global meaning of their biographies that, however, do not necessarily imply adopting a clearcut life project? Differences Among Young People What has emerged so far reects the expectations of the majority of the young interviewed on the theme of vocation, mirroring the prevailing cultural models among the new generations. Not all the young, however, express the same orientations about the matter since the situations they actually live in may condition their own way of considering vocation. The young who are most gifted with cultural and social resources are those who most support the idea that each one has one’s own vocation, that each individual has a life that allows one to express oneself. It is this group of people who most interpret vocation as a project to accomplish or as a commitment to a cause or to an ideal. It is the same subject group who most acknowledge an idea of vocation as satisfaction, as it suits those who perceive that they are facing not only more opportunities but also better conditions to make them their own and carry them out.

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By contrast, the young who belong to lower social classes and with a not very high educational level tend—more than the others—to think that life is mostly the result of individual choices, without a logic transcending the decisional power of the individual. They have more difculty looking at vocation in ideal terms or as a project to realize. They express an idea of vocation that is more conditioned, halfway between satisfaction and renunciation, between realization and imposition. It is easily predictable, then, a greater cultural endowment favors a more optimistic and more project-like vision of vocation, and this is the reason why life chances seem to prevail over the idea of sacrice, of renunciation, of “obligatory routes,” or of links that certain life conditions may impose on the individuals. Another discriminating factor is the religious orientation, insofar as the young whose faith is more active and strong are those who most interpret life as a vocation and who most believe that each individual has one, whereas among those “with no religion” the idea is more widespread that life is the summation of individual decisions, not necessarily connected to one another. A strongly project-like conception of existence is particularly voiced by young people participating in religious associations (and in those who are active at this level in voluntary social services), whose solid formative commitment appears then to be sustained by an ideal reference or by a project to realize, capable of ascribing meaning to existence. The young who attach more value to religious faith are also those who mostly associate the term vocation with the sphere of the sacred. This orientation appears to be even more widespread among young women than among their male contemporaries, among the young living in the South of Italy compared to those living in the Center or in the North, and among those living in small towns compared to those living in middling size or large towns. On the basis of this information we can then assert that ascribing sacrality to the concept of vocation is part of a more traditional vision of life, linked to contexts or to people who are less exposed to the modernization process, whose religious culture appears to be still very deeply rooted.

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franco garelli The Lack of Reference Figures Helping to Carry Out Life Choices

In this survey we also paid attention to the travelling companions of the young, as it were, in order to check the possible presence of relevant people at their side, capable of accompanying them in their process toward maturity and of representing a reference point as far as their life choices are concerned. Most young people have difculty in identifying gures around themselves who can evoke in them a high interpretation of vocation, whose lifestyles testify to a mission or a plan to accomplish. As a matter of fact a little less than 40% of the subjects state they have never met anybody whose life might be considered as an example of vocation, while 32% say they have met few of them; these are in contrast to 28% of the cases of people who, in this respect, boast of greater abundance of reference people. In addition, not few individuals (37%) state they have never been helped by anybody to understand their own aspirations or follow them better, even if most of them acknowledge the positive role developed at this level by their families (41%) or by their closest friends (14%). The picture that emerges concerning the reference gures of the new generations is not particularly reassuring. The gures who provide most support at this level are those belonging to the circle of friends and parents, who however often privilege relations more oriented toward support and reassurance than to stimulation and dialectical confrontation. Nevertheless, there are not a few among the young who cannot nd even in the ambit of closest socialization (inside the families and with friends) that basic support that may help them to orientate themselves better in the real world. More generally, the lack of reference points is very evident in the wider society because of the difculty on part of Table 2.4. Is there anybody who, in the course of your life, has helped you understand what were your aspirations encouraging you to follow them? (more answers are possible; 1,017 cases – % values) Parents Friends Relatives Teachers One’s partner Other people (religious people, psychologists, etc.)

41 14 7 7 6 3

Nobody

37

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the young to identify signicant “vocational” gures in the ordinary places where they spend their lives (at school, in work places, in association initiatives, etc.). A human and social picture emerges which is not particularly stimulating and engaging for young people who, only confronted with vocations for “success,” can hardly nd reasons for enriching their experiences and their life horizons. Among those who say they have received greater stimuli at this level there are in particular the young who take part in groups and associations in which formative activities are developed and/or offer social and humanitarian commitment (such as religious groups, charitable groups, or political groups). These seem to be the associative initiatives that can most expose the young to models of vocation successfully realized. The most “committed” forms of association, both because they are dedicated to the human and religious training of their members and because they are involved in services addressed to the weakest subjects or to society as a whole, prove themselves to be a mine of examples of vocation; they are then an ambience that can direct the young toward a conception of life devoted to personal realization not disjointed from social commitment. The Young and Religious Vocation Another unexpected outcome of the present research is the number of young people who declare that they have thought, in the course of their short lives, of embracing religious life, in one of the forms in which it is accomplished in the Italian society, where Catholicism, as everybody knows, is still the religion of the great majority of the population. Catholic feelings remain largely popular in the country, even in the postmodern era in which traditional faith is challenged by individualism in belief and in which religious pluralism is constantly growing.3 The idea of becoming a priest or a member of an order or of a religious congregation (of active or contemplative life) has involved around 11% of the young people interviewed, a very wide population share, that does not seem to conrm the position utterly prevailing in “public opinion” (both social and ecclesiastical) that the new generations are

3 On these themes see the monographic issue “The Church and Catholicism in Contemporary Italy” of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies (2007); in particular, Garelli 2007a, 2007b. See also Garelli 2006b and Garelli et al. 2003.

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franco garelli Figure 2.3. In your life, have you ever thought you had a religious vocation? (1,017 cases – % values) yes (10,7%)

no (89,3%)

indifferent to a call to religious life or that a cultural crisis is occurring with regard to this prospect. Or better, the crisis seems to be connected more to the response to this call than to its birth. Analysing the individuals included in the age range considered in the present survey taken as a whole, the data that have emerged suggest that about one million Italian young people whose age ranges between 16 and 29 have manifested during their lives at least a eeting idea of becoming priests or entering a religious order, whether male or female. If we take into account that today in Italy the young who are training for priesthood or for religious life are a few thousand, a great gap existing in this eld appears evident between the diffusion of an initial aspiration and the possibility of cultivating this choice or orientation in the course of time. For many of them it seems that this has been a passing intention, as something nurtured during childhood or in the pre-adolescent age, mostly reecting their narrow life surroundings when intentions have not yet been weighed up through a variety of experiences. Thus, many of these young people (about 40%) assert they had this idea in the catechism years or while associating with ecclesiastical groups, or that they had cherished this choice for less than a year (63%). But beside these cases there are others who have delayed acting on this intention. Almost 20% of the young who had been interested in this prospect reected on it more than ve years. Projecting these data to the whole of the Italian young population, we derive a sign of great relevance: to about 200,000 young people the option of a consecrated life seems

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to have been not just a eeting dream, a toccata and fugue with weak consequences on their own horizons of sense. The idea of religious vocation thus appears to be still quite widespread in the contemporary world of the young, even if then it is difcult to maintain it in time and to actualize it, because of the demanding and selective character of this type of choice. The surroundings and the religious gures still somehow fascinate a not insignicant share of youngsters and adolescents, while they have much more difculty in accompanying them through their process of growth and maturation. Who are the young who have considered, even if for a short time and without being able to carry it out, the idea of embracing religious life and priesthood? Contrary to many expectations, this call does not seem to have great appeal to girls (in the case of religious life) compared to boys, neither to subjects of lower social and education level as compared to those living in more favorable life conditions. The variables that appear to be more inuential on this respect instead are the geographic areas of residence and most of all—as is to be expected—the rm belief and the religious education of the subjects. The percentage of young people who in some period of their lives have conceived the idea of consecrating their existence to God is almost double among those who regularly attend religious rites compared to those who presently declare they do not belong to any religion or that they are not churchgoers. In the same way, the young who associate with religious groups and organizations are much more likely to feel the call compared to those who do not take part in them, and the same happens with the young who have constant relations with religious gures compared to the young of their age who have no familiarity with or proximity to consecrated people. Intensive religious socialization is then an important factor to enhance the presence in the young og the idea of dedicating their lives to God and to their fellow human beings through the modalities mostly in use in a country still strongly marked by Catholic culture. The Vocation of the Others A certain interest of the young for the condition of consecrated life is traceable even in the answers they give to the question of how the interviewees would react if a friend or a near relation chose to become a priest or a religious man/woman. Fully 95% of the subjects assert that they would accept this decision, but while 63% declare they are

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happy for the choice, 32% say they conne themselves to accepting it out of respect, although they do not approve of it. This is an answer that at rst sight would seem to point out the diffuse consent attributed by today’s young people to religious vocations, considered as objects of general acceptance and positive evaluation. Nevertheless, as we go deeper into the matter, it seems plausible to propose a different interpretation of this orientation, that it is due more to the atmosphere of consideration and respect that today surrounds everybody’s life choices than to sharing this specic vocational choice. Previously we have already observed how widespread among the young the idea is that each individual has a vocation “of one’s own,” a basic project to which to anchor one’s existence. In line with this conviction, many young people may evaluate positively a possible religious choice made by other people of their age not so much for the specic journey they have started but for the general acceptance and respect due to the decisions belonging to individual lives. In other words, respect for the options of individual people prevails over any other consideration about the validity or non-validity of the particular choices made by each person. It is an attitude that is conrmed by other data in the research. The greatest part of the young who react positively (claiming their happiness) for the possible choice of a friend of embracing consecrated life are subjects who do not assign a particular primacy to religious vocation, equalizing it to the commitment that may be undertaken by secular believers living in the world. The happiness reaction thus does not seem to show the acknowledgment of the superiority of this choice compared to other choices, but only “friendly” participation in a free life option that the friend has made or is going to make. In brief, a general acceptance of religious and consecrated life is widely shared by the young and is considered as one of the highest manifestations of vocation. However, this evaluation is to be seen in relation to a certain cultural sensitivity that adds value to all individual choices as manifestations of the right to self-assertion. Besides, we witness a growing equalization of the religious vocation to forms of secular vocation, as they can be interpreted by people living in the world. Among the young who show a more marked religious orientation, the possibility that someone in their circle of friends opts for a consecrated life is considered positively, but at the same time the conviction is widespread that an existential prole of high commitment is equally possible for a layman as it is for a vowed religious.

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Figure 2.4. If your best friend chose the priestly or religious life, how would you react? (1,017 cases – % values) I wouldn’t approve of it and I wouldn’t accept it 5% Although I wouldn’t approve of it I would accept it 32%

I would be happy for his choice 63%

In some way, then, the young testify to a silent cultural change in favor of the democratization of life choices: what marks an existence devoted to a call, to a cause, or to developing one’s talent is not the goal to which it is addressed (sacred or profane), but rather the intensity and the quality of the commitment it requires, its nature of radical and demanding choice. A priest and a social worker, a missionary nun and a doctor, live lives of equal value in terms of vocational level. Vocational Preferences as a Thermometer of our Times What kind of vocation attracts the young who have felt the call to religious life? A little less than half of them (40%) were oriented to an active consecrated life, joining one of the many orders or congregations, for men or for women, committed to giving witness of a particular charisma in the society (as Jesuits, Franciscans, Salesians, Dominicans, Benedictines etc.); while little less than 30% meant to become diocesan priests. Besides these people, 11.9% cultivated the idea of entering a monastery, showing an inclination for a consecrated contemplative life. In line with the results of previous research, even this survey seems to conrm the greater interest of the young for religious vocations to be realized in the world, to be spent in “normal” social relations, while particular consecrated conditions (concerning lives that are “separate from the world”) draw the attention of a narrower public. Obviously gender inuences the vocational choice, most of all because women are

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not allowed access to the priesthood in force in the Catholic Church. Among the males interested in an idea of vocation, the majority are attracted by a sacerdotal commitment in the dioceses and in the parishes, while the remaining ones are divided into those who wish to become members of a religious institute of active life and those who would like to enter a monastery. Among the girls, few—proportionate to the males of their age—are those who feel the call of the monastery; therefore a large majority are oriented toward making the proposal of life commitment coming from the women’s orders and religious congregations their own. Strangely enough, we see that a small share of young women (less than 10%) state that in the course of their lives they have thought of entering the priesthood, giving us a glimpse at that condition having a certain fascination for the new generations of women. Finally, we also see that a minority of the young people who have cultivated the idea of a vocation have been pushed toward it by their wish to be ministers of denominations and religious traditions different from the Catholic tradition. The presence of these subjects is then a sign of how the religious eld is differentiating in Italy (notwithstanding the prevalence of Catholic belonging) and a sign of the call in vocational terms that even the religious minorities are capable of making in a country in which Catholicism still represents the diffuse culture. Among the trends here exposed, one nding deserves deeper investigation. It is the weak appeal made by contemplative life, which emerges as a result with the active religious life having a greater attraction for the young who have thought at some time that they had a religious vocation. This different evaluation, however, is not typical of a specialized young public (that is to say sensitive to the idea of religious vocation), but it appears to be widely spread among the young as a whole and appears to be an emerging cultural trait. When asked a question about the condition of religious men and women living in cloisters, most young people seem not to be able to understand the reasons for a choice of the contemplative life. In particular, 49% believe it is better for religious people to live among ordinary people, while 14% believe that by now it is an obsolete or a meaningless form of life. On the other hand, the idea that “contemplative religious life is the highest religious evidence” is expressed by no more than 12.6% of the young, while another 25% consider it a form of the religious phenomenon in the same way as any other. The meaning of contemplative religious vocations is thus fading in the contemporary era, facing a culture that is disconnecting from life options that separate the subjects from the world and that is for the

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most part prone to value the religious people who commit themselves in society, especially in favor of the most marginalized groups. Understanding the contemplative life is a difculty that not only involves the young who are far away from the religious circles or whose religious socialization has been interrupted in the course of time. Even those who appear to be active and convinced from the religious point of view and who express their orientation through participating in the parish life and in the ecclesiastical associations, in their constant presence at the religious rites, in deepening questions of faith, etc.—the most religiously committed young people—have difculty in acknowledging the particular charisma of contemplative religious vocations, while they ascribe great importance to consecrated persons who spend their lives in broader social elds. Comparing Religious Vocations An echo of this cultural orientation emerges from the analysis of the choices of sacerdotal and religious life mostly appreciated by the young, which allows us to highlight better the reference points of the new generations. There are many ways of interpreting the sacerdotal ofce or the consecrated religious life, reecting the plurality of the charismas and the vocations that are recorded in the religious eld (Catholic and non-Catholic). The majority of the priests and of the consecrated religious people appear to be engaged in ordinary pastoral activities in the dioceses and in the parishes, but others are active in particular sectors (educating the young, assisting the sick in hospitals, supporting the most marginalized, teaching, communicating faith, etc.), or they set out for a mission in a Third World country, both for humanitarian reasons and to evangelize. Which of these different commitments and religious vocations are most considered and esteemed by the young? Contrary to some expectations, the religious gures the young hold in the highest esteem, for whom they feel the greatest admiration and sympathy, are those who operate in missions in the Third World, which is a condition that implies, for those who have chosen it, a downright detachment from their environment and from their own cultures of origin and a marked disposition to adapting to new contexts and new experiences. Indeed 73% of the young say that this is the choice of religious life that they appreciate most.

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franco garelli Figure 2.5. Which types of religious vocation do you like most? (1,017 cases – % values) who joins a mission in a poor country who commits oneself in favour of the young on the fringe of society who takes care of the sick

who commits oneself in parishes and in quarters who is engaged in teaching who commits oneself in communicating faith who lives in a monastery

0

10

20

30

favourable

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

contrary

Very high consideration, but a little less than the previous one, is attributed to sacerdotal and religious gures who spend their lives in the elds of charity and solidarity with the needy. About 60% of the young have a preference for the priests and the nuns who take care of the young in difculty or on the fringe of society (minors without a family and with problematic lives, young people exposed to various forms of addiction, subjects with no xed abode, immigrants with integration problems, etc.). In this case the appeal comes from people opting for a voluntary “marginalization” that is realized through struggles for legality and social justice and in the deeds aimed at coping with both the old and the new forms of poverty and hardship. In this perspective also the percentage of the young (57%) holding in great esteem the priests and the religious people who take care of the sick in hospitals and in nursing homes appears to be high, because they try to support people grappling with particular health problems. In general then it appears that the religious gures who are most valued by the young are those committed in particular social missions, requiring strong involvement and great motivation and that are not directly oriented toward conveying faith. The religious vocations that strike the young most favorably, as well as other people on the whole, are not those dedicated to the ordinary tasks of church life, but rather those offering a particular humanitarian and Christian witness in our society. Keeping this general background in mind, we see nevertheless that there are not a few subjects (49.8%) who acknowledge the

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importance of the commitment of the priests and of the religious people in the ordinary life of the parishes and of the neighborhoods of the towns, especially when they take care of the entertainment and the education of the young. Not few young people, then, hold in due consideration the educative action developed by the religious milieu and by religious gures in the contemporary society, even though it is already characterized by a great variety of formative opportunities and occasions for socialization. Minor importance, instead, is given to the religious gures who are dedicated to particular professions, such as teaching (30%) or who commit themselves in communicating faith or to their presence in the publishing eld or in newer media (21%). In line with the aforementioned scarce appeal of vocations to contemplative life, only 10% of the young have identied in the consecrated people who live in monasteries the type of religious vocation in which they recognize themselves the most. A More Profane than Religious Idea of Vocation? A last fundamental reection: We have seen that the young consider the demanding vocations valuable, but at the same time they are in search of “minimal” or “working” ideas to anchor their own experience of life. Advanced modernity seems to favor an idea of vocation or of call that is still around the corner, that reects the emerging cultural traits, that is to say the imperative of building up one’s biography, of avoiding barring one’s own chances and experiences, of moving in open spaces that are exible and not predetermined. In this picture, the young seem to recognize themselves in a “secularized” conception of vocation, not characterized by great calls and tensions, closer to the conditions of ordinary life, more compatible and consistent with one’s own personal aspirations and with one’s own meanings autonomously ascribed. In particular, what emerges is the distance of the majority of young people from a “religious” conception of vocation, meaning by that the acknowledgment that one’s project of life forms part of a wider design witnessed by the religious faith. Vocation to many young people rst of all means the need of asking oneself who one is and what one wants from life, what one is inclined to do or what one feels to be called to do. But the fading away of a “religious” horizon underneath the idea of vocation seems to deprive most young people of that basic trust that religious faith offers: the idea that

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one is not alone in building one’s life project, that one’s choices have a meaning that, even if it may escape us at the moment, is present in the background and refers to a global design. The most traditional idea of vocation was reassuring in many respects, because, as is the case of the pilgrim (Hervieu-Léger 1999), it tted existence inside a global horizon of meaning, characterizing it as a journey divided into stages but turned toward a certain and recognizable goal. In the present work, instead, it seems that a vision of vocation is prevailing mostly recalling the attitude of the researchers of meaning quoted by Bauman (1999): vocation is taking on a shape of continuous re-construction and re-negotiation of one’s biographical route, without the possibility of anchoring oneself to a universal meaning that is ultimate and transcendent. This is how the young now nd themselves grappling with the labor of having not only to shape the courses of their lives, but also to give global meaning to their actions. Perhaps one of the most innovative aspects of the whole research derives from the fact that inside the idea of vocation prevailing among the young of today two orientations coexist: on the one hand toward self-determination and self-building and on the other hand toward the reversibility of one’s choices. The conception of vocation of the young seems to express more a serial logic than a cumulative logic: if one doesn’t anchor oneself to a global horizon of meaning, such as that offered by the religious “sacred canopy,” then life becomes a question of choices producing an existential itinerary modiable each time. To be called to something does not mean to provide a univocal answer, once for all: the answers may be many, variable and revisable, according to the contexts and the opportunities that life offers to us. References Bauman, Zygmunt. 1999. La società dell’incertezza [The Society of Uncertainty]. Bologna: Il Mulino. Beck, Ulrich. 2000. I rischi della libertà [The Risks of Freedom]. Bologna: Il Mulino. Buzzi, Carlo, Alessandro Cavalli, and Antonio de Lillo, eds. 2002. Giovani del nuovo secolo [Youth in the New Century]. Bologna: Il Mulino. Garelli, Franco. 2006a. Chiamati a scegliere: I giovani italiani di fronte alla vocazione [Called to Choose: Italian Youth Facing Vocation]. Milano: San Paolo. ———. 2006b. L’Italia cattolica nell’epoca del pluralismo [Catholic Italy in the Age of Pluralism]. Bologna: Il Mulino. ———. 2007a. “Introduction.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 12: 2–7. ———. 2007b. “The Public Relevance of the Church and Catholicism in Italy.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 12: 8–36.

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———, Gustavo Guizzardi, and Enzo Pace, eds. 2003. Un singolare pluralismo: Indagine sul pluralismo morale e religioso degli italiani [A Peculiar Pluralism: Research on the Moral and Religious Pluralism of Italian People]. Bologna: Il Mulino. Hervieu-Léger, Danièle. 1999. La religion en mouvement: Le pèlerin et le converti [Religion in Motion: Pilgrims and Converts]. Paris: Flammarion.

CHAPTER THREE

VOCATION AS A PERSONAL CHOICE Luigi Berzano The relation between the young and their biographic choices is today a particularly complex phenomenon, and even more complex is the relation between the young and religious vocations. In such elds all the elements of the world of the young, at times contradictory, intertwine, elements that, in these last decades, have fragmented and recomposed the religious eld too. All the most recent research carried out in Italy on the young and religion has stressed the existence of seemingly contrasting elements: dependence and autonomy, strong Catholic identity and feeble identication with the Catholic Church, continuity and discontinuity in religious duties, acknowledgement of the Church as a source of moral values and freedom in one’s own ethical choices. Therefore even in the Italian religious eld and in that of the choices of a religious life, the deep-seated complexity of our society in general is to be found. Among the signs of this new complexity there is also the dramatic recent decline of religious vocations in Italy, among both men and women. Concerning the sociological analysis of vocations, Rodney Stark and Roger Finke (2000), applying the theory of rational choice, have interpreted the decline of religious vocations in six countries (the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands) for the period 1965–1995.1 Their theory asserts that even religious choices, such as vocations, do not elude the normal dynamics of the estimate that the individual makes of the relation between costs and benets. In the context of contemporary societies the costs of the Catholic sacerdotal and religious choice have diminished in a marginal way, while the sacerdotal and religious choice benets have diminished in a sudden and dramatic way. As a matter of fact, while the discipline to which the religious people are subject has slackened, the fundamental

1 More sociological analysis about vocations are to be found in: Dilanni (1987, 1993) and Falk (1980).

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structure of the religious life marked with chastity, poverty and obedience has remained unchanged. Finke and Stark therefore conclude that the vocations decline is a consequence of this swift modication of the advantages and of the opportunities that religious life brought to religious people, both men and women. They conclude that, from the perspective of rational choice theory, Churches might get out of vocation crises in two ways: either lowering costs or bringing the traditional benets back.2 This chapter on “vocation as a personal choice” intends to analyse the problem of religious vocations in Italy and of their dramatic recent decline on the basis of recent research about the young and religious vocations carried out in January 2006, described in the preceding chapter (cf. Garelli 2006). Starting from the research ndings obtained there, we may identify three critical situations in which making religious choices is a puzzling problem, and a fourth situation in which, on the contrary, making religious choices appears to be easier. Young People and Religion in the Italian Context Before analysing the data from the survey, it is useful to present the general picture of the relations between religion and the young in Italy, as it emerges out of the main sociological investigations. As a matter of fact even the analysis of “vocation as a personal choice” nds numerous references in research carried out about the world of the young in general.3 An inquiry carried out in 2005 on Italian young people between the age of 25 and 39 highlighted three kinds of attitude toward the Catholic religion: active adaptation, passive adaptation, and estrangement.4 Under the appearance of a substantial stability of the attitudes in the majority of the young toward the Catholic religion, the research outlines a highly differentiated landscape: relatively stable links persist with the Catholic identity received since infancy, but at the

2 The two researchers cite, for example, the case of the Episcopal Church that has granted to its clergy “good salaries” and “virtually no restrictions” (open doors to divorced people, to practising homosexuals, ordination of women and so on). 3 The Italian sociological literature on these themes is abundant (cf. Garelli 1991; Cesareo et al. 1995; Pace 1997; Cipolla and Cipriani 2002; Garelli et al. 2003). 4 Cesareo (2005): the research was carried out by eight Italian universities in the Spring of 2003 on a sample of 3,500 individuals between the age of 25 and 39.

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same time the individuals develop manifold interests and identications with non-Catholic religious forms and traditions. Active adaptation is present in 18.4% of Italian young people. It is the adaptation of those who not only declare themselves to be Catholic but also strongly identify with the system of beliefs, moral duties, and rituals requested by their Church. These are the Catholics who are strongly involved in their own religious communities, who acknowledge themselves as belonging uniquely to a place or to a community. These believers adapt themselves actively, although actually they have to lead their lives without the traditional support of the community and family links that once tied the believers to the Church to which they belonged. As is easily noted, this great capacity for holding the Catholic identity is not, according to many, a sign of “choice” but rather of conforming oneself to a national age-old cultural tradition. The erosion of the religious world caused by modernity in these last decades seems to have had a greater and more lasting inuence on the identication of the individuals with Catholicism, rather than with the Catholic identity.5 Passive adaptation relates to 71.9% of Italian young people. It is just that kind of adaptation typical of those who declare themselves to be Catholic, but whose identication with the Catholic Church is feeble. This forms the majority of the Catholics who, although they recognize themselves in the national religious tradition, but do not develop the consequent identication processes. The religious prole of these young people is what might be dened with the wording “I am Catholic, but in my own way.” These are young people who participate in particular “passage rites” of the Church or who claim their belonging to the cultural-historical identity of Italian Catholicism, but who in their everyday life follow different life models, secular and free from the Church’s precepts. Passive adaptation is what best typies the new generations. These are the generations who have the long historical period of the centrality of Roman Catholicism behind their back and now witness the start of a culturally new phase, without any more great and unique ideological references. Being believers and participating in a Catholic

5 Here I employ the concept of “identity” in the meaning of the denition that the one gives of oneself referring to a collective identity in which one recognizes oneself and on the basis of which one establishes a noticeable difference between oneself and the others: “identication,” instead, is the inuence that this recognition has on one’s choices and behaviors.

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parish becomes a subjective choice for them. On the other hand, all the contexts of political and social life have similarly segmented, and even the world of work is becoming much more ephemeral than it was for the past generations. Among these young Catholics belonging to the passive adaptation area, representing the majority of the world of the young, the traditional religious links fade away. Their adhesion to the beliefs of the Catholic creed becomes more and more uncertain, their participation in the rites more and more discontinuous, selective and aimed only at celebrating the most important moments of life (rst Communions, weddings, funerals, etc.). Seldom is religion acknowledged as an “ethical guide” for everyday life, even if it is still acknowledged as a fundamental component of Italian culture and as a resource for allowing one to “live well with the others.” Finally, 8.9% of Italian young people are estranged from Catholicism. This estrangement is to be found among those who neither have a Catholic identity nor an identication with the Catholic Church.6 This share of the respondents includes rst of all the atheists, for whom the “atheist” identity seems to emerge as the result of a personal choice. Of these young people, about 25% consists of young people who were born and brought up inside a still Catholic family context. Second, this type of estrangement attitude includes “religious people without religion,” characterized by growing autonomy in their spiritual life: “believing without belonging and without participating.” This process of “autonomizing one’s own religious feelings” in practice and in the attitude emerges all over the whole sample of young respondents, both for what concerns passive adaptation and estrangement from religion. This process conrms the debated “religious identity crisis,” in reference to which it is not always possible to distinguish between identity as a dimension of religious belonging and identication as a whole set of attitudes, roles and consistent lifestyles (Dubar 2000). Religious identity, that is to say the denition that the individual gives of himself, is the result on the one hand of a readiness to acknowledge oneself as part of a collective entity, and on the other hand of an ability to establish a distinction between oneself and others. The choices and actions of the individual will then be inuenced in that way as much by the identication processes that one has developed, hence by one’s memberships, as by a desire to become autonomous from such

6

About this typology of relations with religion, see Hirschman (1982).

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memberships. What we want to evoke with the wording identity crisis is the weakening of the capacity of the young to nd their own stable and meaningful location within the main spheres of existence (family, school, work, religion, politics). If however the normative aspect of religion does not seem to be signicant to most young people, a diffuse “religious feeling” appears to still be present: the religion that helps us to live, to live well with other people, to give the individuals the sensation of being culturally united. The ties lose their ideological or ethic-formative function and acquire a new function as life supports, preguring a religion perceived as a beautiful, good, strong, safe, calm and pleasant experience, as a help to live well with others and look at the future with condence. All these issues seem to be particularly strong in the youngest band of the interviewees between the ages of 25 and 29. It seems then that a general weakening process is forming in the “ascribed reproduction” of the Catholic identication. For example, 86% of the interviewees present Catholic identities, but among these only 16.6% present a strong Catholic identication. In conclusion, the number is rising of those who, although they keep their Catholic identity, present feeble identication with the other dimensions of the Catholic Church, such as participation in the rites, with the ethical norms, and the acceptance of revealed truth. These results from past research, summarized above, are also conrmed by the research on vocation in Italy, which this chapter principally reports. In general we nd the same religious proles: 84.3% declare themselves to be Catholic; 22% can be considered to be believers with an active adaptation; 2.6% belong to a religion different from the Catholic one; and 13.1% declare they are without a religion. As to their attending religious rites, we have the following data (see Table 3.1): weekly attendance (20%), a few times a month (18%), a few times a year (41%), never (21%). Therefore, even the young of this research on vocation are by a large majority “believers in progress”: that is, believers in search of a religiousness that may recompose both the issues of the received Catholic education and the principle of the autonomy of believing. In harmony with recent national inquiries, even the present one points out that within a prevailing Catholic frame of reference, a plurality of ways exists of both feeling Catholic and of following its rules. Roman Catholicism, to which 84.3% of the respondents relate, is the religious universe from which they all originate: a system of sociolinguistic evidences on whose

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Table 3.1. Excluding weddings and funerals, how often do you take part in mass or, if you are not Catholic, in other religious rite? (1,017 cases – % values) Never 1–2 times a year Several times a year About once a month 2–3 times a month Every week Several times a week Total

20.9 24.5 16.2 10.4 7.5 18.9 1.6 100.0

basis the aspects of life that have to do with religion are classied. The other religions, still minority ones (together they reach 2.6%), remain in the background, either because their presence is not perceived (with the exception of Islam) or because they do not take part in the actual experience of life of the majority of the interviewees. In this context even the religious choices made by the young appear to be more and more personal and autonomous. Among these we nd vocation as a personal choice for one’s own life. The research reported below, concerning Italian young people facing vocation, has dwelt on these themes, and in particular upon that choice that so far is the greatest form of acceptance of and reliance on religion. Choosing is a Problem when Choices are Obligatory The rst situation in which choosing is a problem and an effort occurs when the chances of taking one’s choice are practically unlimited and hence one is unceasingly compelled to choose. Instead of being called to choosing, the young appear to be more and more compelled to choose out of too wide a range of choices. In advanced modern societies almost nothing has been predetermined since birth: work, identity, political and religious belonging, even identity of kind. In traditional societies, when a baby was born it was possible to guess what type of work, career, wedding, religious belonging, lifestyle and patterns of consumptions it would undertake. In the traditional societies ethnic, cultural and religious identity allowed also for the identication of the whole individual with a nation, a cultural community, and a religious group. Identity and identication then moved

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side by side: the former simultaneously produced the latter. For this reason the traditional societies were rich in strong connections, but poor in choices and options. They were relational systems without choices. The connections had the function of giving meaning to the position that the individual occupied in the society, of anchoring and safeguarding the individual from swift changes and the uctuations of history. The individual was at the center of a plurality of belongings, all deriving from a primary belonging: belonging to a territorial community simultaneously reproduced also the cultural, social, and religious belonging. And these belongings were often teeming with emotional connotations.7 Wherever identity and identication remain strong they still are important guides for individuals. Today social origin does not make choices for us any more. This is a trend not devoid of risks. As a matter of fact, if up to a certain point it has been necessary to loosen some connections in order to enable people to avail themselves of options and personal choices, reducing the connections has then proved to be a relentless process. It is a process that seems to refer, in its most extreme effects, to the idea of anomie crafted by Emile Durkheim (1999); that is to say, a situation in which every system of rules and ties shared by the members of a society vanishes. In this context, the identication of an individual in a society or in a religion or in a political party is no longer the mechanical result of a collective belonging of a social, religious or political nature. The ways through which individuals identify with their own communities of belonging are no longer dened by the social structure but by the convictions and the choices that each individual has autonomously developed. In this way the modern individual comes into being, who cannot choose any more, not even in the religious eld. As a matter of fact, identication with one religion is no longer the mechanical outcome of collective belonging but of a totality of continuous choices. Even in the religious eld the options, as chances of choice, have multiplied, while in parallel the intense connections held by one’s Church has diminished. But it is when the choices are more necessary and constraining that the individual perceives all the labor and the uncertainty. Actually, not always 7 According to Dahrendorf (1989), from whom the concepts of connection and option derive, religion is placed among the options offered by a wealthy life. In this perspective, religious choices are occasions for individual growth and for realizing capabilities. They are wishes and hopes made available by the social conditions that state to what extent the individuals can develop as members of society.

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and not for everybody do options also increase when the realizable choices increase. In other words, in the world of the young the choices are difcult when the ties that the young have do not go together with equally real options. But, more precisely, what are connections and options in the religious eld? Religious connections are structurally predetermined religious belongings and elds of religious acting. They are the strongest bonds anchoring people to their Church. If religious connections are important for individual choices, especially for the meaning and the anchoring they offer, religious options are important especially because they offer the individual real opportunities for making choices. However both connections and options have ambivalent implications: the religious connections certainly are values that “give meaning” to choices, but they can even become constraints and chains. So in the same way options offer possibilities for freedom and autonomy, but they may also weaken the ideal references of an individual. In Italy, the most relevant form of religious connection is the identity and identication with the Catholic Church. A Catholic has a situation on his back in which religion represented a quasi-monopoly over all that concerned morals, behaviors, and beliefs. Each individual conformed to this situation. Today, instead, the individual is found living in a context in which religion represents only one among many other sources of inspiration. And even in the cases in which the individuals accept principles, beliefs, and moral rules from their religion, they usually do so while modifying them and disputing their absolute validity. They seldom adopt them rigidly to orient their actions and judgments. In particular, the new generations nd it very difcult to rely on only one religious system for moral principles and values since, to be able to apply it effectively to the different contexts of everyday life, it would be necessary to know it in depth. It is much easier to place one’s trust in any secular thought proposing solutions and behavioral models immediately feasible in every single situation. This is the condition of the “religious market,” meant as a multiplication of offers and options in the religious environment. Actually, even within Italian Catholicism, the contemporary religious market has multiplied the chances of religious choices, at the cost of lacerating preexisting connections. Facing the multiplication of the options offered by religious markets we may outline different answers: on one side we may propagate a feeling of great freedom of religious choice, on the other the risk of an impasse may come about caused by the continuous necessity of

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making one’s choices among different alternatives. The results of all inquiries, however, point out that these modernization effects, favoring serial behaviors—that is to say consecutive and discontinuous—affect more identication than identity, as if the imprinting of primary socialization had a greater and more lasting inuence on the latter. The context itself of growing “religious offerings” in which the individual is situated does nothing but increase the solicitations to experiment with consecutive identications, and it is in that context that socialization processes have begun anticipating other religious universes, with all possible elements in tension. The results of our research on vocations also suggest that in most cases we face a tendency toward the enfeeblement of the identication processes with Roman Catholicism. In the present religious context of abundance of choices and possible alternatives our interviewees are divided into a minority of people totally involved in the Catholic Church and a majority who, although they are Catholic, seem instead to consider strong identication with the Catholic Church as a luxury they cannot afford unless they pay the excessive cost of abandoning their autonomy. Fading traditional religious connections and widening personal choices also affect vocations. As a matter of fact the latter are formed by the reciprocal relation between options and ties, and require autonomous individuals capable of facing more and more differentiated choices. The recent dramatic decline of vocations in the Catholic Church points out that it is not to be taken for granted that if the available alternatives increase vocations too increase in parallel. A rst factor strongly inuencing the choices that today’s young people have to make is the obligatory feature of such choices. Compulsion derives from the fading away of traditional predetermined “life routes” and from the unpredictability of the future and of the present, in relation to which new “life courses” should develop. Signicant factors emerge if we consider rst of all the present occupational statuses of the interviewees (see Table 3.2): 31.3% work; 49.9% are students; 7.7% combine study and work; 11.1% state they are both outside the school world and the work world. On the whole, then, it is a fact that 67.7% of the young are presently in an uncertain position from the occupational point of view. If actually being a student is a temporary and quite ordinary situation, all the same if combined with that of the student workers and of the unemployed, this situation shows great uncertainty both as regards one’s present and one’s future.

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luigi berzano Table 3.2. What are you doing at present? (1,017 cases – % values)

I only study I study and work I work I neither study nor work Total

49.9 7.7 31.3 11.1 100.0

With reference to the work situation an intersecting datum is appearing concerning the fact that the uncertainties of the present are closely connected with the uncertainties for the future. On the whole, as a matter of fact, among those who because of their older age nd themselves outside secondary school, one young individual out of two has not yet achieved a clear work position, and inside this sector of young people over 70% have no precise idea of the kind of work they will happen to have. The overall percentage of “uncertain young people” who are not working and have not completed a study cycle amounts to 79.8%. In this case the uncertainty of the present seems to turn into even greater uncertainty for the future. Equally signicant appear to be the data concerning the family situations, particularly referring to the families of choice that the young mean to set up.8 Among the “most grown-up” young people (25 to 29 years old), 73.3% still live with their parents, while only 22.9% live with their own partners. Only 11.9% have already married, and only 7.6% already have children. Thus the great majority of these young people, although they might have already started stable couple relationships, as a matter of fact are still far away from building their own autonomous and stable families. This condition appears to be still more widespread if we consider the younger age bands; it is not surprising then that on the whole among the young between the age of 16 and 29 only 4.6% are already married, and only 3.2% already have children. The most signicant element concerns the perspective for their future: 39% of these same young people see themselves surely married before the age of thirty, and 67.2% believe that this will probably happen. Similarly 55.6% are sure they will have children sooner or later, and this percentage reaches 82.1% if we consider also those who 8

The following data on the national context are taken from Cesareo 2005.

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deem it probable. At rst sight it looks as if we have found ourselves in front of young people with very clear ideas about their own family life future. However, if we compare their certainties about the future with the data concerning their present we cannot but perceive a sense of dissonance, considering how at the threshold of their thirties only one young individual out of ten is actually already married. We might then say that for these young people their certainties for their future family life are seldom accomplished in the present. Choosing is a Problem when the Future is Unpredictable A second context that does not facilitate vocation as a personal choice is the context in which both the socially predetermined “life courses” and the attitudes of great condence in the future fade away. Vocations develop with difculty if these two conditions are absent. On one hand there are the options, that is to say the different routes and alternatives to choose, on the other there are the connections, that is the supports, starting from which a choice is taken. In this sense the difculties and the supports one has in following one’s vocation are somehow connected with the way in which the different links combine with the available options. The research on vocations, besides asking what the young expect to realize in the different sectors of their affective, school and work lives, also sought to explore their vision of the future. Among the young 68% look at their future with optimism, considering it full of chances and surprises. The young reveal they have interiorized that typical trait of modern culture that Anthony Giddens (1999) calls “colonization of the future”: that is to say, to consider the future as plastic material that the individual is called to shape. The optimism of 68% of the interviewees, together with the conviction that in life one must have goals (85% of the interviewees) are foundational attitudes; one’s own life takes on the shape of a project to build up, making one’s choices, setting one’s objectives, and dening the strategies suitable to pursue them. Generally speaking, the prole that the interviewees have of their future is differentiated at the level of the objectives and at the level of the means. At the level of the objectives, the traits are strong and neatly cut: 67.6% of the young describe their own future as full of chances and surprises rather than full of risks and unknown factors. A rst factor characterizing the prole, then, is optimism. However, it is a kind of optimism closely connected with

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condence in one’s capabilities, with the conviction that the commitment of the individual will have great weight on the construction of that future. Thus, 85.3% of these same young people believe that in life it is important to have objectives and goals, apart from the difculties that may arise on the way. Accordingly 64.8% believe that success rst of all depends on one’s work, and that luck, in contrast, has lesser weight. A second characterizing factor, then, is a very self-directed image of one’s life, in which it is the individual entrepreneurial capability that plays the most important role. If instead we shift to the level of the means by which one can achieve one’s goals, and hence construct the future, the features are much vaguer and leave room for an explicit pragmatism. Hence, 75.6% of the young assert that in life it is better to keep many options and doors open, rather than taking early well-dened choices to which one then has constantly to refer. And even for what concerns the most important choices, 57% maintain that anyhow they must be temporary, subject to revision at any time. Here we see that, on the whole, the denition of the objectives, the condence in one’s capabilities, and the optimism regarding the future do not involve substantial certainties at the level of the tools and the strategies necessary to achieve one’s future goals. Yet there is a precise datum that differentiates the world of the young from the inside: that is the real capacity of pursuing one’s projects, of developing a vocation as a choice. If we consider together: (a) the importance or non-importance of having objectives and goals for the future (self-direction or fatalism); (b) the necessity of making precise choices to be successful, or to keep many doors (structuring or being exible), we obtain a typology of attitudes toward the future that we may identify in the following four types of young people (see Figure 3.1): selfdirected-structured, selfdirected-exible, fatalist-structured, fatalist-exible. The selfdirected-structured type includes 15% of the interviewees. It is the minority type who look at the future having a precise plan in mind and a unitary idea of life, with aspirations to carry out through a likewise precise route. In this share of self-structured young people their condence of fullling their vocation remains strong in spite of the fact that they know too well and experience all the components of the society of uncertainty and risk. To this type of people building their future is based both on the present, on their strong personal identity, and on their past experiences. But it is certain that any vocation they plan cannot but be carried out on the basis of the “denition of the situation” that these subjects give of the present. It is the present situ-

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Figure 3.1. The young interviewees divided according to their attitudes toward the future (1,017 cases – % values) Fatalist and structured 9% Self-directed Self-directedand and flexible exible 43% 43%

Self-directed and structured 15%

Fatalist and flexible 33%

ation that has a stimulating and initiating function for the realization of the future vocation. The selfdirected-exible type concerns 43% of the interviewees. It represents the plurality who have a precise project and precise aspirations, but know that to full them not only one route exists and that therefore it is necessary to realize them through different experiences, but always with commitment and determination. This is the young person who has precise objectives, but who is also signicantly open for what concerns the possible means to achieve them. The fatalist-structured type includes 9% of the interviewees. It is the type who face the future letting themselves be guided by chance both in identifying one only objective to make their own and in choosing a precise route to achieve it. This fatalist vision of the present and of the future is very much in tune with the fragmentation of contemporary society, analysed for a long time by Zygmunt Bauman (1999, 2000a, 2000b). The society in which social relations and common expectations have fragmented and in which conicts between groups and between individuals have increased, cannot but promote both the individual and the collective planning of the future. In turn individual and collective planning capacity is a relevant force when it comes to activating recomposition processes. Individual and collective projects form a “protective network” under which it is possible to recompose the relations between the individuals and the individual biographies themselves.

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The fatalist-exible type includes 33% of the interviewees. It is the most confused and disarmed type facing the future; for this reason they trust chance both as to what they will do in life and as to how they will do it. The girls are more numerous than the boys (respectively 35% and 29%) and look at the future with the sensation of being able to exert scarce inuence on it. Generally speaking this fatalist sensation shows that even a surplus of possibilities may generate the particular discomfort of feeling divided between the exigency of assuming the reins of one’s life and the awareness of the complexity of existence and of the many factors difcult to control. This fatalistic vision of the future promotes projects that are too exible, interchangeable, and partial as are the experiences of text messaging and the presence of the young in the chat rooms. Generally speaking, the new generations for the most part face the future with a “consciously supple” attitude, being aware of the fact that they cannot always anticipate rigid and precise rules and, for this reason, they always leave some “doors open” for their biographies. In all four analysed types we nd the two tendencies typical of advanced modernity: plasticity and self-construction. Most young people try hard to make themselves up together in order to be, as Bauman says (1999: 95ff.), “at the same time clay and sculptor.” This however requires that the idea of life as a predetermined and xed itinerary is refused in favor of an orientation toward experimentation and toward the continuous revision of one’s projects. Only the minority of selfdirected-structured ones (15%) try their best, at least ideally, to anchor themselves to great choices that direct their life courses. One might conclude that the labor of choosing one’s vocation is very similar to the discomfort of living within a society strongly connected by uncertainty. Whenever individuals nd themselves in front of many roads, they cannot orient themselves, hence neither decide whether to choose a road “for ever” or rather assume the attitude of the explorer who changes course continuously to discover new ones. Choosing is a Problem when Choices are Never Final Choices What seems to contrast most with the duration of choices, such as religious choices, is the “paradigm of precariousness.” Today precariousness, temporariness, and “making choices till further notice” are everywhere. Uncertainty seems to be the essence of everything, as

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was duration in traditional societies. Uncertainty and temporariness permeate the social, cultural, and religious life—and even biographies. When this precariousness paradigm dominates, the end of the value of the “duration of things” appears to be inevitable to the individuals. In this context, hardly propitious times begin for what concerns all the choices that are “denitive and for a lifetime” for all faiths and, more in general, for all far-reaching projects, such as religious vocations. Everything becomes a choice “until further notice,” susceptible to cancellation when it no longer seems to be interesting and pleasant, or when it is no longer useful for one’s individual growth, for success, or for self-improvement. Three contexts of temporariness are here perceived affecting individuals’ life (Bauman 2002). The rst context of temporariness is that of individual subsistence at work, economic, assistance level. Nobody feels assured forever. Temporariness and structural exibility reduce the attraction of delayed satisfaction and urge present experience. Life, perceived as fragmented biography, tends to be lived as a sequence of events and consecutive phases. The second context of temporariness is that of the perception of the world seen as a whole of replaceable and substitutable elements: belongings and social links, institutions, alliances, and public and private identities. Even art and its works do not evade the law of insignicant duration, when the preferred form of visual art is happening or installations organized as unique events lasting only for the time of the exhibition and bound to be dismantled that very night, after the conclusion of the artistic event. A third context of temporariness concerns the individual life in which connections also weaken nal choices. Everything is “a probationary period,” even that related to the project of one’s life. Nomadic lifestyles are shaped, in which the possible routes multiply and the individuals keep other alternatives always open. As to the dynamics of the success of choices, today the distinction is no longer clear between what is the cause and what is the effect; that is to say, whether the social atmosphere weakens the choices or whether the provisional choices contribute toward creating the social atmosphere. A world saturated with uncertainty and with lives fragmented in many ephemeral episodes cannot but strengthen the search for instant gratications. A typical feature of any faith, in contrast, consists in ascribing value to something that lasts longer than individual life, something sound, resisting the corrosive action of time, perhaps even immortal and eternal.

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In the perspective of deepening the difculty of developing a vocation as the nal choice for a life, we may consider the following statistical data: 10.7% of the interviewees state they have thought of becoming priests or nuns. It is a substantial datum, if we consider the dramatic decline of vocations in the Catholic Church. Which are the elements that intervene taking the young away from the actual choice of becoming priests or nuns? A rst factor is the problem of abandoning personal projects. The religious life choice implies distancing oneself from one’s current life (27.5%), as it also may imply breaking with one’s family and network of friends and the passage toward a more solitary life (16.5%). On the other side there is the problem of responsibilities: taking this choice means putting on oneself the responsibility of carrying it out and of enduring all the consequences (29.4%), and sometimes doing so against the expectations of the members of one’s family and friends (19.3%). Lastly there are the difculties deriving from living one’s life within a collective route, with the constraints of obedience (12.8%) and of community life (5.5%). A second discouraging element concerns the irrevocability of choosing religious life. 39.4% of the young believe that taking a choice for life is too costly. This attitude is homogeneous with the “elastic” vision that the majority of these young people have of their future. Thus, 61.5% say that even the most important choices of one’s life are never “forever” but can be revised at any moment, and 76.1% believe that in life it is always better to keep many doors open. If it is believed that any choice can be revisable so as to adapt it to the evolution of one’s existence, the idea of having to undertake a journey lasting “a lifetime” seems too demanding. A third element taking away from the choice of becoming a priest or a nun is the totalizing dimension. Here three types of vocation are identied, according to their more or less totalizing feature. (a) The rst type of vocations concerns those activities requiring the sacrice of some personal exigencies of the individual. According to 92.4%, a vocation is needed to be a priest; to 80.8% a vocation is needed to be a social worker; to 80.6% a vocation is needed to be a writer. It is evident that the greatest approval as regards the necessity of putting a vocation at their basis is then obtained by those activities in which the accomplishment of some individual exigencies is somehow sacriced. (b) Another type of vocation concerns those activities in which the fullment of one’s personal expectations and personal sacrices are balanced. For example, 63.0% of the interviewees believe that vocation is needed to be a parent, 53.5% to get married, and 49.8% to be an

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entrepreneur. In these choices, notwithstanding their differences, there seems to be a kind of balance between the required commitment and the satisfactions that one may derive from them. (c) One last type of vocation concerns the secretarial activities which, although they do not provide great economic gratications, nevertheless do not take away much space from one’s private existence. Only 26.0% of the interviewees think that a vocation is needed to undertake such activities. On the whole it emerges that the idea of vocation is mainly connected with those activities in which apparently a greater personal sacrice is required to accomplish the noblest tasks and missions, both at an individual and at a collective level. However, to get deep into this aspect of the balance between costs and benets related to the idea of vocation it may be useful to go back to the analysis of religious vocation explicitly and, in particular, to the analysis of that 10.7% of interviewees who said they had thought for a long time that they had a religious vocation and of that 62.7% who said they would be happy if a friend of theirs decided to become a priest or a nun. Choosing is Not a Problem When one has a Unitary Sense of Life Let us now analyse more closely how many in our sample of interviewees have thought of religious vocation as a possible choice for their own life. In the analytic model of the research this was the context that presumably would favor the personal choices of the individuals most. Life choices are no problem when individuals are aware of the fact that they have a personal project, that is to say when they consider their life a biography. This is the condition of the individual who, beside the many daily meanings, partial and temporary, also owns a unitary meaning for the future. In the research on vocations this condition is represented by the interviewees who have an image of vocation closer to the typical sensitivity of postmodernity: vocation as self-realization, as an enablement of one’s self, as a call to “make of one’s life a masterpiece.” The research points out that one interviewee out of two (51.5%) believes that all individuals have a vocation that unies their whole life. Only 26% believe that life does not have a unitary vocation, but that it is only a combination of partial and individual choices. The research moreover points out that the word vocation is not an extraneous term in the vocabulary of today’s young people: 58% believe that the term is associated with “sacred,” 71% with “satisfaction,” 79%

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luigi berzano Table 3.3. Vocation’s proles: religious, social, secular, personal. Vocation is . . . . . . for everybody

Vocation . . . inclination 18.9% as . . . or personal talent . . . project to 8.6% realize . . . commit12.7% ment to an ideal or a cause . . . religious 11.2% call

. . . only for some people

. . . non-inuential, there are only each one’s choices

5.9%

6.9%

2.9%

5.4%

5.2%

6.5%

8.1%

7.7%

with “accomplishment,” 58% with “denitive,” 39% with “modern.” Vocation is a propensity or a natural datum for 31.8%; it is a call to religious life for 26.9%; it is a commitment to an ideal or to a social cause for 24.5%; it is a project to realize in life for 16.8%. (see Table 3.3). These data conrm that the concept of vocation is getting secularized in the Catholic environment, both including all the spheres of social life and including, among the religious vocations, also the laymen’s religious vocations. Moreover, those young people who had for some time the idea of becoming priests or religious women or men belong to the category of those who have a unitary sense of life. One young individual out of ten, that is theoretically about one million of young Italians between the age 16 and 29, have conceived the idea of entering religious life and, among them, 43.1% have retained this thought from one to ve years. All these last percentages point out that religion still appears to be an organizing principle of social life and of morals, even to a great part of the young generations. To these young people, even if they are socialized in contexts of high social differentiation, having always to choose from a growing spectrum of alternatives does not necessarily produce particular discomfort (see Simmel 1995). Also the long-term Catholic identity, considered in a very personal sense, is a great factor of stability and continuity. It grants coherence to the manifold experiences,

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even to those interviewees who are characterized by strong Catholic identity and feeble Catholic identication. We noted above that 10.7% of the young interviewees have declared they perceived a religious vocation in themselves. However it was an idea that in 61.3% of those cases was developed for less than a year. Here there are two main questions we must now answer: What affects the fact that a young individual develops this type of sensitivity? And what then on the contrary affects the fact that this sensitivity is not developed? The elements which mostly affect the rise of religious vocation are those connected with faith and with religious experiences. Among those who have felt a religious vocation a more convinced and active adhesion to one’s faith prevails: 32.7% declare they accept it because of personal conviction and in an active way (compared with an overall average of 23.1%), while only 18.8% say they accept it because of tradition or education (compared with a overall average of 28.2%). It is not surprising then that, while attendance at religious rites weekly or even more frequently concerns 20.5% out of the total number of the interviewed young people, this percentage rises up to 39.5% among those who have felt such a vocation; and accordingly if among the young overall only 23.8% have participated in groups or religious movements and only 14.8% have participated in charity associations of religious inspiration, these percentages rise up to 37.6% and to 25.7% among the young who are closer to religious vocation. Beside this, some meetings and particular events seem to have had special inuence on the development of vocations (see Table 3.4). For example, 25.7% of the young who have perceived a religious vocation have declared they had a friend who chose to undertake a religious life course (compared to 16.7% among the young considered as a whole), while 22.0% have said that they knew very well the person who made that choice (compared to 11.2% out of the total number of young people). This means that while among the young as a whole only 27.9% have had the chance of confronting the choice of a person close to them of becoming a priest or a religious person, this percentage rises up to 47.7% among the young who have thought they had a religious vocation. In the same way if among the young in general 45.2% say they have met one or more religious gures who have been particularly signicant for their existence, this percentage rises up to 67% among the young who are close to religious vocation, and if among the former only 16.2% state they have met a religious gure who from their point of view was living an authentic vocation and was realizing himself

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Table 3.4. The young close to religious vocation and their friends of the same age.

Belonging to a religion Active adhesion to one’s religion Attending religious rites regularly Consecrated friend/ acquaintance Signicant religious gure

Total sample

The young close to vocation (10.7%)

86.9% 23.1%

92.7% 32.7%

20.5%

39.5%

27.0 %

47.7%

45.2%

67.0%

through a real mission, this experience instead is shared by 29.7% of those young people who have thought of undertaking a religious life route. We notice then in the world of the young that the rise of any religious vocation is always strongly inuenced by previous religious experiences or by meeting other people who are realizing themselves through an authentic religious vocation. The inuence of social factors, in contrast, appears to be less direct. Referring to the geographic context of residence it is possible to notice that the young who are closer to the religious vocation are more present in the South and in the Islands; and this strongly presents once again a nding that characterizes young Italian religiousness altogether. In conclusion, we may ask ourselves why even in this fourth situation in which “choosing is not a problem when one has a unitary sense of life” none of the interviewees have realized it, not even those who had perceived a religious vocation in themselves. Is it a sign of the decline of vocations or of the transformation that is taking place in the concept of vocation? Some of the results point out that a share of the interviewees who have felt the religious vocation in themselves, have not abandoned this vocation, but rather have realized it in secular ways. This conclusion can be accepted only considering a further element. Asking the interviewees which are the most appreciated religious vocations, we nd that the most appreciated forms are those characterized by strong and explicit commitment in the society. It is very clear then that the most highly esteemed forms of religious life are those closely linked to commitment and to social involvement. But when these same interviewees are asked whether a life committed to the others, to the

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Table 3.5. Vocation modes and commitment toward the others (data referred to young people close to vocation: 10.7%). A life of high commitment toward the others is . . .

Preference for a vocation . . .

. . . better as religious people . . . social . . . contemplative or communicative . . . balanced

. . . better as . . . equivalent secular people

16.5% 0.9%

22.0% 1.8%

52.4% 2.8%

0.9%

0.9%

1.8%

society, can be accomplished better by religious people or by secular people, 57.0% believe that the two routes are equivalent, and only 18.3% assert that an intervention performed by religious people is to be preferred (Table 3.5). This is the signicant transformation that is taking place in the Catholic vocation. From Table 3.5 we also infer that the interviewees on the one hand mostly appreciate the religious vocations characterized by direct commitment in the society, on the other hand they believe that a life of commitment in the society can be lived better, or at most with equal results (81.7%), “by laymen,” that is by individuals who do not make the choice of a religious life. The “costs” linked to a choice of religious kind appear to be on the whole too high. Following a religious vocation thoroughly seems then to the interviewees too difcult a choice because of the renunciations and the personal costs, especially if we consider that other forms of commitment in the society and in the Church are equally useful. Conclusions On the basis of the factors pointed out so far, it seems possible to put forward some conclusions related to the different contexts that, as indicated in the introductory part of this chapter, may favor or discourage the rise and most of all the implementation of religious vocations. A rst conclusion: the whole research points out that most young people are not refractory to the idea of vocation. As a matter of fact, the idea of vocation evokes positive evaluation, as if life, set in order by a vocation, turned from a vague indenite time into a biography endowed

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with sense. We nd then in the interviewees an admirable idea of vocation as a form of self-realization. To the interviewees the concept of “vocation” is richer that that of “project.” A project means “throwing intentions and ideas for the future forward.” Vocation means planning on the basis of an important value, on the basis of a religious conviction. The force of vocation for the future consists in basing oneself on signicant current situations on which the future is built. This is what Erik H. Erikson writes (1969: 309): “identication implies anticipating the future.” The idea that an individual has of the future is central to conceive his vocation, as if he identied more with his projects than with his nature. A share of the interviewees keep this idea of vocation unifying their own lives, even when they adapt themselves to everyday projects, that is to minimal vocations, temporary and partial. In this case the idea of vocation is more within reach, keeping other choices and future opportunities open. A wide range of vocations results from this: religious, social, cultural, artistic, entrepreneurial. It is as if vocation became secular, being no longer characterized only by religious calls and tensions, but embracing also secular professions and equalizing the religious vocation to the various forms of secular vocations. In this sense we said that the two concepts useful to describe what is happening in the Italian Catholic Church are, beside that of the religious vocations decline, also that of the revival of secular vocations. A second conclusion concerns the discouraging factors that induce the young who have perceived a religious vocation in themselves to fail actually to realize it. Although 84.3% of the young acknowledge themselves in the Catholic religion, and although among the young Catholic people 22.6% declare they accept their religion out of personal conviction and in an active way, only 10.7% of these young people have thought of turning this belonging into a religious life course; among these only 8.6% have cherished this idea for more than four years, but nobody, in the end, has decided to realize his or her vocation in the institutional Catholic Church. The specic costs that detract from religious life are those already pointed out by other researches: the complete renunciation of establishing one’s own family, the relinquishment of one’s own present life, the irrevocability of the choice, the responsibility implied in life as a priest or a as a religious. This is valid also for 57.8% of those young people who have felt a religious vocation in themselves. It is an understandable outcome if we consider that 66.1% of these same young people give

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as probable or certain the fact that they will get married before the age of thirty and even 81.7% consider probable or certain the fact of having children sooner or later. It is clear that the celibacy constraints presently connected with the religious life course within the Catholic Church cannot but appear highly problematical to them. On the one hand, then, the vocational choice is appreciated when it is considered in abstract terms, but on the other hand the choice is removed when its feasibility in the present context of Roman Catholicism is directly taken into account. These are the two characterizing traits—two traits seemingly in contrast, between which 10.7% of the interviewees who have had the vocation to a religious life, seem to have found some form establishing a balance. If for one reason the religious life choice actually appears to be an admirable route to these young people, it becomes most popular when it is implemented in routes of actual social interventions. But since the same interviewees believe that this type of intervention may be developed as effectively even remaining secular, that’s why the costs connected with a consecrated life as a priest or a nun are not sufciently balanced for what regards the outcomes that the choice seems liable to offer. A last conclusion concerns the religious vocation meant in restricted terms. Among the factors affecting the rise of the religious vocation there are those connected with one’s own Catholic identity and the religious experiences. In particular, the interviewees who have continued for some time in this phase of religious vocational statu nascenti, assert they have met other “important persons” who, in turn, have followed a religious vocation during their lives.9 Notwithstanding the inuence that these “important persons” have had, the actual valuations that the respondents give of the “other signicant factors” are less positive. When asked whether someone in the course of their lives has helped them pursuing their vocations, especially the religious ones, over one third of the respondents (36.6%) cannot identify any relevant gure in such sense. And even among those who can identify some signicant gures from this point of view, 41.2% indicate their parents as reference points and 14.5% indicate their friends, limiting then the context of

9 The concept of “signicant others” or of “important persons” derives from George Herbert Mead and then from Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966). The developing human being not only interacts with a particular natural environment, but also with a specic cultural and social order, mediated by the persons who are signicant and important for him, who condition him.

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the other “signicant elements” to the most restricted group of one’s social circles. This share of the interviewees who complain of having hardly signicant people around them, for the fact that they can offer reassurance rather than stimuli and positive challenge, outlines a type of society and of Church lacking in fathers and mentors. All through this quest and realization process of one’s vocation, the young have difculty in identifying gures and “other signicant elements” around them, capable both of guiding them and of giving evidence of accomplished forms of vocation. The men of the Church themselves today would be excessively cautious in proposing to the young in an explicit way such demanding goals as those of consecrated life, being intimidated by the prevailing culture and by the countercultural character of the religious vocation. In this research the “other signicant elements” are the most important forms of connections, because they are the junction point between the objective and subjective worlds of the young and, as such, they are the main agents of the preservation of subjective reality, i.e., the identity of the individuals. This substantial insignicance of the “other signicant elements” in the life of the young generally speaking recalls the high social differentiation of the contemporary societies and its effects on the individuals too. Charles Taylor (1993: 131) describes this phenomenon in this way: The true danger is that of being in front of a population less and less capable of identifying a common goal and of achieving it. Fragmentation takes place when human beings go so far as to see themselves in more and more atomistic terms, in other words when they see themselves as individuals less and less connected to their fellow citizens through a community of projects and allegiance.

References Bauman, Zygmunt. 1999. La società dell’incertezza [The Society of Uncertainty]. Bologna: Il Mulino. ———. 2000a. La solitudine del cittadino globale [The Solitude of the Global Citizen]. Milano: Feltrinelli. ———. 2000b. La società del rischio [The Risk Society]. Roma: Carocci. ———. 2002. La società individualizzata [The Individualized Society]. Bologna: Il Mulino. Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann. 1966. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Cesareo, Vincenzo, ed. 2005. Ricomporre la vita. Gli adulti giovani in Italia [Remaking One’s Life: Young Adults in Italy]. Roma: Carocci. Cesareo, Vincenzo, Roberto Cipriani, Franco Garelli, Clemente Lanzetti, and Giancarlo Rovati. 1995. La religiosità in Italia [Religiosity in Italy]. Milano: Mondadori.

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Cipolla, Costantino and Roberto Cipriani, eds. 2002. Pellegrini del giubileo [Pilgrims of the Jubilee]. Milano: Franco Angeli. Dahrendorf, Ralf. 1989. Il conitto sociale nella modernità [Social Conict in Modernity]. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Dilanni, Albert. 1987. “Vocations and the Laicization of Religious Life.” America 14: 207–11. ———. 1993. “Religious Vocations: A New Sign of the Times.” Review for Religious 52: 745–63. Dubar, Claude. 2000. La crise des identités [The Crisis of Identities]. Paris: PUF. Durkheim, Emile. 1999. La divisione del lavoro sociale [The Division of Labor in Society]. Milano: Comunità. Erikson, Erik H. 1969. “Memorandum sulla gioventù” [“A Memorandum about Youth”]. Pp. 305–23 in Prospettive del XXI secolo, edited by Daniel Bell. Milano: Mondadori. Falk, M. Marcelline. 1980. “Vocations: Identity and Commitment.” Review for Religious 39: 357–65. Garelli, Franco. 1991. Religione e chiesa in Italia [Religion and Church in Italy]. Bologna: Il Mulino. ———, ed. 2006. Chiamati a scegliere: I giovani italiani di fronte alla vocazione [Called to Choose: Italian Youth Face Vocation]. Milano: San Paolo. Garelli, Franco, Gustavo Guizzardi, and Enzo Pace. 2003. Un singolare pluralismo [A Peculiar Pluralism: Research on the Moral and Religious Pluralism of Italian People]. Bologna: Il Mulino. Giddens, Anthony. 1999. Identità e società moderna [Identity and Modern Society]. Napoli: Ipemedium libri. Hirschman, Albert O. 1982. Lealtà, defezione, protesta: Rimedi alla crisi delle imprese, dei partiti e dello Stato [Loyalty, Defection, Protest: Remedies to the Crises of Business, Political Parties, and the State]. Milano: Bompiani. Pace, Enzo. 1997. Credere nel relativo [Believing in the Relative]. Torino: UTET. Simmel, Georg. 1995. La differenziazione sociale [Social Differentiation]. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Stark, Rodney and Roger Finke. 2000. “Catholic Religious Vocation: Decline and Revival.” Review of Religious Research 42: 125–45. Taylor, Charles. 1993. Le radici dell’io. [The Roots of the Self ]. Milano: Feltrinelli.

CHAPTER FOUR

VOCATION VERSUS VOCATIONAL STATUS IN THE LIVES OF CURRENT AND FORMER VOWED AMERICAN CATHOLIC RELIGIOUS Anthony J. Blasi As indicated in a Chapter 1, a vocation in the strict sense drives and lends character to a life trajectory.1 There are also statuses, “vocations” in a different sense of the word, which are institutionalized attempts to give form and recognition to a person’s responses to a sensed vocation. Avoiding a terminological tangle, Joseph Fichter (1961) referred to Religion as an Occupation in his study of vocations in the second sense; he was interested in systematizing the available information on occupational vocations in mid-twentieth century American Roman Catholicism. The intent in the present chapter is to trace the dialectic between vocation and vocational status in two American samples of current and former Roman Catholic members of religious communities (technically termed “orders” and “congregations” in the parlance of that church).2 There has been a tendency in the history of the sociology of religion to place vocation in the strict sense and vocation as a status in a historical relationship to one another, with the vocation as calling emerging at the beginning of a religious tradition and the vocation as status developing over time. Both are thus part of the routinization of a charisma, a devleopment around which a group forms. Thus Joachim Wach (1944: 139) spoke of a “circle” that develops around a prophet-founder, and upon the death of the prophet a “brotherhood” is left. [W]e may safely say that the condition for membership in the brotherhood is usually originally more spiritual than organizational. The tendency

1 In Max Weber’s terminology (1978: 440) it is a matter of the “calling” of a particular kind of religious virtuoso, the prophet. 2 The difference between an order and a congregation rests on a distinction in church regulations (“canon law”) between solemn and simple vows. Members of orders take solemn vows, which if violated render actions such as marriages not only illicit but invalid (null and void) while members of religious congregations take simple vows, which if violated render such actions simply illicit.

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anthony j. blasi toward organization, however, is never absent, being apparent to a certain degree, even in the “circles.” The brotherhood is similar to the circle in its spiritual and charismatic constitutions. The “protests” of reform groups frequently aim . . . at the restoration of this primitive state.

This, of course, is an extension of the line of thought with which Max Weber was preoccupied. Ouédraogo (2006: 91) notes that two implicit theses dominated Weber’s analyses: The rst emphasized the existence of a correlation between the process of routinizing the religious culture with a modication of its relationship with the world in general; the second emphasized that religious compromise is the expression of that correlation. Vocation as status is routinized, simultaneously preserving and circumscribing the effects of inspiration. “Charisma” would be an outside interpretation of inspiration; there is less of a “compromised” nature about it. Simmel noted a similar tension between religiosity and religion (Remy 2006: 153ff.). Apart from such a historical sequence, a vocation that operates more or less autonomously can be a threat to the stability of an organizational apparatus, and of course it is the latter that provides the stable context for the vocation as a status. As Simmel noted in his essay on the self-preservation of the group, autonomy on the part of the individual can co-exist only with a loose contextual organization (1908: 529). Gurvitch similarly speaks of tensions between different levels of society, such as organizational apparatus, the network of social roles, and creative collective activity (1958). For purposes of clarity, it is useful to distinguish between vocations and statuses on the one hand and the inspirations that are embodied in them on the other. Inspiration tends to reside in one’s sense of interiority and to engender external consequences. When those consequences comprise a trajectory of public social interventions by which others in a society or community typify the individual, the individual too may well tend to accept a self-characterization that gives form and presence to that inspiration. However, the fact that such a calling becomes an aspect of one’s self does not mean that it can simply be willed or be “turned on or off ” as desired, like a light switch. Kincheloe (1929: 59) likens it to the semi-autonomy of thought processes that work themselves out semi-consciously before dawning upon the individual: The process by which the prophet gets his message is called inspiration. A great many efforts have been made to analyze and describe this process in psychological terms. The welling up into the focus of attention (the personal consciousness) from the “general consciousness,” or the

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coming into the conscious from the subconscious, is the same problem. It is recognized that these experiences are not limited to prophets but that inspiration is a term which artists of many kinds, composers of music and poetry, inventers and thinkers, have used to describe the suddenness, completeness and the freshness with which their thoughts come.

Every vocation is unique and hence cannot be captured with thoroughness and adequacy by means of one or more questionnaire items. Such completeness is not necessary in the present study, however. Present purposes will be served adequately by tapping into one dimension common to a number of people’s personal vocations and examining the associations between that dimension and the institutional features of occupational vocations. The dimension of personal vocation that will be scrutinized here is a commitment to take up working class issues. As with dimensions of any kind of personal vocation, that is not something uniquely religious; avowed socialists, for example, may have such a commitment with or without religion. There is some overlap between that commitment and the commitment represented by the vow of poverty taken by members of Roman Catholic religious orders and congregations. The vow originated in circumstances that were quite different from those of the modern world with its class structure, but beginning with the medieval mendicant movement it took on the signicance of a distantiation of the individual from the business class and an identication with the working people of the medieval towns (Stark 1967: 280ff.). In the last century, with its full owering of capitalism and other forms of materialism, the social signicance of the vow of poverty came to be ofcially highlighted. According to the Second Vatican Council (1975), members of religious orders and congregations “should, each in his own assigned task, consider themselves bound by the common law of labor” (Decree on the Up-to-date Renewal of Religious Life, #13). Whereas beforehand members of congregations could neither use nor renounce inheritances but only bequeath them, the Council allowed congregations to change their rules so that their members could renounce inheritances. Moreover, members were not to be individually poor while collectively as organizations adopting a lifestyle of the rich: “The institutes themselves should endeavor, taking local conditions into account, to bear a quasi-collective witness to poverty . . . While institutes have the right, provided this is allowed by their rules and constitutions, to possess whatever they need for their temporal life and work, they should avoid any semblance of luxury, excessive wealth and accumulation

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of property” (#13). An “Apostolic Exhortation” by the Vatican ofce responsible for religious communities (the Sacred Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes) discouraged religious from participating in violent revolution, but it highlighted the class implications of the religious life with its vow of poverty: How then will the cry of the poor nd an echo in your lives? That cry must, rst of all, bar you from whatever would be a compromise with any form of social injustice. It obliges you also to awaken consciences to the drama of misery and to the demands of social justice made by the gospel and the Church. (Sacred Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes 1975, #18).

This dimension of a vocation to poverty would be shared under one form or another among those who in response to such a call take vows of poverty or prepare to do so in religious orders and congregations. It is not limited to members of religious communities; the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Pontical Council for Justice and Peace 2005) sees work not as something odious but honorable (¶ 265), a share in the divine art and wisdom (¶ 266); and, citing the 1891 encyclical of Pope Leo XIII Rerum Novarum, it teaches that Christians are called to honor the dignity to which workers are entitled (¶ 268). An important operative term is “under one form or another.” The vow of poverty could be taken simply as a means of “leaving the world.” Such an approach to it would be more characteristic of monasticism than of the orders and congregations that carry on ministries in society. “Leaving the world” would also be more characteristic of the spirituality prevalent before the Second Vatican Council than after.3 In this study, the focus will be on two active orders rather than monastic ones, but the question of an earlier twentieth-century versus a later twentiethcentury spirituality remains a relevant one. It will be necessary to use an indicator of that earlier/later continuum in some way. It was also noted in Chapter 1 that the living out of a vocation is not automatic; the individual must engage in discernment. One way to engage in such discernment is to dwell upon religious and church issues through reading. Reading brings the external world into consciousness for consideration. By focusing on reading about religious and church issues, the reading in question is motivated reading, reading that is focused and bears some contextual relevance to the religious individual’s 3 In Weber’s terminology (1978: 541ff.) it is a matter of world-rejecting asceticism vs. inner-worldly asceticism.

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vocation. Reading about religious matters can be and usually is a behavioral manifestation of the cognitive dimension of religiosity. Religion is bound up with the satisfying of cognitive needs in childhood, but by adolescence it becomes a part of the subject’s comprehending the environing world (Elkind 1970: 41–42). Formal religious education and the cognitive perspectives related to it may (see Bibby and Brinkerhoff 1974) or may not further religious observance, but it does further a religious identity (Cohen 1974). Religious intellectuality is often a theme in personal conversion from one religious tradition to another (Loand and Skonovd 1981). Sometimes occupants of vocational statuses gain a cynical knowledge about religious organizations and the people who staff them (Goldner et al. 1977), and that fact may lead them to vacate a vocational status and seek to live out a vocation-as-calling in another way. Religious knowledge in general religiously-identied populations tends to correlate with scholastic aptitude and achievement, and thus is not unrelated to other kinds of knowledge (see Kosa and Schommer 1961). The actual dialectic between personal vocation and occupational vocations can be readily indicated in its temporal dimension by the number of years spent under vows in a religious order or congregation. The dialectic occurs between an external context in which the individual lives and the inner sensitivity and commitment on the part of that individual. A similar dialectic between the external and the internal occurs in education; education too is a motivated inquiry related to occupational vocations. Data and Methodology The data used in this inquiry are more fully reported, albeit in a nontechnical manner, in Blasi with Zimmerman (2004). Two sets of data used in that study, along with some others, are drawn from survey questionnaires completed by current and former members of two American Catholic religious communities—the Racine, Wisconsin, Dominican Sisters in 2003 and the Sacred Hart (central U.S.A.) Province of Franciscan friars (mostly priests, some brothers) in 2002.4

4 The reason for the selection of these two communities was that they both maintained contact with their former members in good numbers and that they were both large enough to allow for multivariate statistical analysis.

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Some 269 current (142) and former (127) Racine Dominican sisters returned usable questionnaires, from some 177 sent to current members and 200 to former members, for response rates of 80.2% and 63.5% respectively. The religious community formally known as the “Congregation of St. Catherine of Siena,” headquartered in Racine, Wisconsin, trace their spiritual origins to the medieval mendicant movement inspired by Saint Dominic and to the famous spiritual writer St. Catherine of Siena. In 1862 Mother Maria Benedicta Bauer, prioress of a cloistered Bavarian community, sent missionaries to America to teach immigrant children, and then came herself to the Untied States, founding the Racine Dominicans. The community engaged in educational and health care ministries through most of its history. Some 282 current (157) and former (125) Franciscan friars returned usable questionnaires, out of “some 300” current members given questionnaires and 211 former members who had been sent questionnaires, for response rates of about 52.3% and exactly 59.2% respectively.5 The names and home addresses of the former Franciscan friars came from an association of former members (“Fringe Friars”) of the Sacred Heart Province of Franciscans, a part of the order located in the central portion of the United States. The Provincial Ofce distributed the questionnaire to current members. The order, formally known as the “Order of Friars Minor,” traces its origins to the mendicant movement of Saint Francis of Assisi in medieval Europe. A small number of German Franciscans were invited to Quincy, Illinois, to minister to German Americans in the nineteenth Century. The Sacred Heart Province and Quincy University developed out of that small initiative. Among the 127 former Racine Dominican sisters, two had become religious in other communities, so that there was a total of 144 female religious in the sample, and 125 others, 91 of whom had married, 32 staying single, and one reporting a same-sex partner (see Table 4.1). Among the 125 former Franciscan friars, 5 had become diocesan priests, so that there was a total of 162 male religious in the sample, 104 of whom had married, 7 staying single, and 4 reporting same-sex partners (see Table 4.1). The former members are not only characterized by a high rate of marriage but by marital stability.

5

For further details, see Blasi with Zimmerman (2004: 17–22).

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vocation versus vocational status Table 4.1. Domestic Status of Respondents Racine Dominican Sample

Franciscan Sample

Total

Total

Former Members

Former Members

Celibate

53.5% (144)

1.6% (2)

57.4% (162)

4.0% (5)

Married

24.2% (65)

51.2% (65)

34.3% (95)

76.0% (95)

Single

11.9% (32)

25.2% (32)

2.5% (7)

5.6% (7)

Divorced/ Separated

3.7% (10)

7.9% (10)

1.8% (5)

4.0% (5)

Remarried

1.5% (4)

3.1% (4)

0.7% (2)

1.6% (2)

Widowed

4.5% (12)

9.4% (12)

0.7% (2)

1.6% (2)

Same-sex Partner

0.4% (1)

0.8% (1)

1.4% (4)

3.2% (4)

No answer

0.4% (1)

0.8% (1)

1.8% (5)

4.0% (5)

100% (127)

100% (282)

100% (125)

Total

100%

(268)

Table 4.2. Educational Attainment Means of Respondents

Level of Attainment

Racine Dominican Sample

Franciscan Sample

Current Members

Current Members

Former Members

Less than High School

1.4% (2)

0.8% (1)

2.5% (4)

High School

2.1% (3)

9.4% (12)

7.6% (12)

0.7% (1)

1.6% (2)

1.3% (2)

2-Year Degree

Former Members

0.8% (1)

Bachelor’s Degree

31.7% (45) 40.2% (51)

8.3% (13) 16.0% (20)

Master’s Degree

48.6% (69) 40.9% (52)

59.9% (94) 52.0% (65)

Ph.D., Law, M.D., etc.

12.7% (18)

5.5% (7)

14.6% (23) 21.6% (27)

No answer

2.8% (4)

1.6% (2)

9.6% (12)

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anthony j. blasi Five items from the questionnaire are used in regression models:

1) An eleven-step semantic differential item that asked the respondents to indicate how important “the concerns of working people in your political views” are, from “Unimportant” (scored 1) to “Very important” (scored 11). The 149 current Franciscan friars who answered this item had a mean score of 8.87; the corresponding mean for the 123 former Franciscans was 9.14. Because some elderly friars in an assisted living facility answered the questionnaire and no comparable access was gained for elderly former friars in such facilities, the difference between the two means may be an artifact rather than a real indicator of a difference. It is also important to note that this pertains to the perceived interests of the working class, not the perceived importance of charitable works. In any case, both gures represent a considerable level of importance being placed on the concerns of working people in the politics of both current and former friars. For the 135 current Racine Dominican sisters who answered the item, the mean score was 9.61; the comparable gure for the 122 former sisters was 9.05. Both gures represent a considerable level of importance being placed on the concerns of working people in the politics of both current and former sisters. 2) An eleven-step semantic differential item that asked the respondents to place themselves on a continuum from “Extremely conservative” (scored 1) to “Extremely modernist” (scored 11). The 148 current friars who answered this item had a mean score of 6.93; the comparable mean was 8.01 for the former friars. Aggiornamento or “updating” seems to have led many friars to leave the order, which they may have perceived as inadequately implementing the kinds of change Vatican Council II called for. The means for the Racine Dominican respondents fell between the two gures for the Franciscan respondents. The 134 current sisters who answered the item had a mean of 7.89, and the 125 former sisters had a mean of 7.45. 3) An eleven-step semantic differential item that asked respondents to indicate the importance of “Reading about religion, religious topics, and the church,” from “Unimportant” (scored 1) to “Important” (scored 11). The 151 current friars who answered this item had a mean score of 8.69; the comparable gure for the 120 former friars was 7.44. The means for the Racine Dominican respondents were quite similar. The mean score for the 134 current sisters who

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answered the item was 8.95, and that for the 119 former sisters who answered it was 7.85. The fact that former members placed less importance on such reading may possibly reect the fact that their waking hours are taken up with daily tasks and obligations that are taken care of institutionally in the religious communities. 4) The number of years in the community, beginning with a prenovitiate (postulancy) program. For the 155 current friars, the mean was 41.70 years. Understandably for the former friars, the mean was much smaller—11.88. Nevertheless 11.88 years represents a signicant portion of one’s life; the former friars in many cases were not merely “trying out” religious life. For the 141 current Racine Dominican sisters who answered this item, the mean was 53.81 years, a somewhat higher number than for the current friars. This may simply be a result of women having longer life spans. The number of years in the community for the 123 former sisters who answered the item was about the same as that of the former friars—11.56. Again, this represents a signicant portion of one’s life. 5) An ordinal scale, indicating the educational attainment of the respondents. The religious and former religious from both the Racine Dominican and the Franciscan samples have on the whole high levels of educational attainment. Given the relatively advanced ages of the samples (ages spanned 43 to 97 for the Dominican sisters and former sisters, with a mean age of 69.1 years, and spanned 38 to 88 for the Franciscan friars and former friars, with a mean age of 63.7 years), the educational attainments likely represent completed educational careers—i.e., the respondents will not likely be undertaking further studies. In both samples, and for both the current and former members, more than half of the respondents had graduate degrees (see Table 4.2). This is not surprising since the sisters worked for the most part as nurses and hospital administrators and as teachers, and the friars worked for the most part in parish ministry; most of these functions were associated with at least bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the nal decades of the twentieth century. The mid-century pope, Pius XII, encouraged members of religious communities to acquire appropriate professional preparations for the works that they undertook, an imperative followed-up for the female religious communities in the Untied States by the Sister Formation Conference movement of the mid-fties (Wittberg 1994: 210–12).

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In addition, a question eliciting information on the respondents’ domestic status was used in the analysis. Of the 277 current and former friars who answered the question about their present domestic status, some 58.5 per cent of the current and former friars were celibates, 2.5% were simply single, 1.4% were in long-term gay relationships, 34.3% were married, 0.7% were remarried, 1.8% were divorced or separated, and 0.7% were widowed. Of the 268 current and former sisters who answered the question, some 53.7% were celibates, 11.9% simply single, 24.3% were married, 3.7% divorced or separated, 1.5% remarried, 4.5% widowed, and 0.4% in long-term same sex relationships. Hypotheses Taking the importance respondents place on working people’s concerns in their politics as the dependent variable, given especially their general middle to upper-middle class level of educational attainment, suggests a dimension of a personal vocational trajectory that would be related to the other questionnaire items mentioned above. The modernist scale, operationalized in the form of a semantic differential item, involved the respondents assuming the perspective or role of others and comparing their own set of religious beliefs with those thought to be held by most others in their reference group.6 This is an instance of self-identication, of proactively dening oneself, as opposed to simply acknowledging a group membership or social category. To place oneself toward the “Extremely conservative” side of the “Extremely conservative” to “Extremely modernist” continuum is to suggest a personal biography that includes resisting, or at least resenting, such themes typical of the Second Vatican Council as the implications of vowed poverty cited above. To place oneself toward the “Extremely modernist” side is to suggest that one has embraced the general change embodied in the Conciliar and Post-conciliar texts and to have made it a dimension of one’s personal vocation. Of course, resisting the Conciliar changes can also be indicative of a vocation, but the particular vocation in question here is one that has embracing the concerns of the working class as an

6 “The concept of reference group may be used to designate that group, real or imaginary, whose standpoint is being used as the frame of reference by the actor” (Shibutani 1961: 257). The semantic differential form of questionnaire has been used to study reference groups (see Quarantelli and Cooper 1966).

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important dimension. My hypothesis would identify higher scores on the “modernist scale” as positively related to placing great importance on the concerns of working people. Note that the perspective adopted here assumes that the subject is proactive in developing a personal self-concept; this is theoretically and methodologically important in the symbolic interactionist tradition of sociological research (see Blumer 1969: 12ff.; Weigert and Gecas 2003). In the particular research technique used here, however, we cannot claim to capture the actual initiatives of the subjects under study; rather, their proactivity is implicit. As suggested above, placing importance on reading about religious and church topics could be an indicator of vocational discernment. Admittedly there could be discernment without reading and reading without discernment, but it would be odd to place importance on reading if the latter were irrelevant to one’s purpose in life or to have such a purpose in the modern world, saturated as it is with publications, and not read about that purpose. Consequently I hypothesize that placing great importance on reading about religious and church topics would be positively associated with the indicator of the important dimension of vocation, placing importance on the concerns of working people. A dialectic between a personal vocation and an institutional statusvocation suggests that for those respondents for whom the institutional status is a satisfactory embodiment of the personal vocation the number of years in a community would be a mere function of age; it would have no anticipated relationship with something such as placing importance on the concerns of working people. For those whose vocational trajectory takes then out of and beyond the institutional status, however, there may be a prolonged effort to make the institutional status “work” as a concretization of one’s life calling. Here too I hypothesize that the number of years spent in the religious institutional state will be positively associated with the indicator of the important dimension of vocation, placing importance on the concerns of working people. Finally, a vocation that would engage the world from the vantage point of a commitment to poverty rather than ee from it can be expected to drive one into acquiring cultural, as opposed to material, resources for exerting inuence in the world. In the present era this takes the form of formal education. Consequently, I hypothesize that the level of educational attainment would have a positive association with the indicator of the important dimension of vocation, placing importance on the concerns of working people.

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The regression models that are reported in Table 4.3, entering the predictor items in the order in which their associated hypotheses are given above, only really support the rst two hypotheses. The standardized regression coefcients indicating the association between the modernist scale and placing importance on working people’s concerns is consistently positive, achieving statistical signicance in ve of the seven columns. Since the samples are not random but simply total quantities of questionnaires returned by total known populations, statistical signicance levels cannot be taken as rm criteria for accepting or rejecting hypotheses; they are reported more as a convention. The smallest of the coefcients for this predictor appears in the column for current members of the Franciscan friars; since the theme of poverty is so central in the Franciscan tradition, the attendant focus on the concerns of working people may be as much an aspect of “traditionalism” for some of the friars as it would be of a modern concern. The coefcients are higher for married respondents than for celibates and for those former Racine Dominican sisters who are single.7 The modernist identity appears to be more strongly related to the poverty-dimension of vocation among the married than among the non-married. The standardized regression coefcients indicating the association between the importance placed on reading and on that placed on working people’s concerns is similarly positive across all of the columns, achieving statistical signicance in four of the seven columns. The coefcients are larger for the Franciscans than for the Racine Dominican sisters; only that for the total Racine Dominican sample has a sufcient number of cases for it to achieve statistical signicance. The coefcients are once more higher for the married respondents than for celibates and for those former Racine Dominican sisters who are single. Placing important on reading about religious and church issues, a particular kind of quest behavior, appears to be more strongly rated to the poverty-dimension of vocation among the married than among the non-married. The number of years lived in the religious communities appears to have little relationship with placing importance on the concerns

7 There were only seven single former Franciscan friars—too few for conducting a regression analysis.

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Table 4.3. Regression on Importance Respondents Placed on Concerns of Working People in their Politics (Beta coefcients) Married Vowed Former Celibates Members Racine OFM Racine OFM Modernist scale .188* .103

.317*

Importance reading

.114

.227* .256

Years in community

.036 –.066 –.175

Education

.138 –.024

N

126

143

Single Former Members Total Racine OFM Racine OFM

.328* .215

—

.245*

.232*

.405* .109

—

.139*

.298*

–.007

.418

—

.057

–.070

.016

.098

.472*

—

.059

–.026

60

71

27

7

236

231

*p < .05

of working people in respondents’ politics. The hypothesis is clearly disconrmed as a general statement. However, there is the curiously large positive coefcient for the single former Racine Dominican sisters, not statistically signicant simply because of the relative small number of respondents in that category. It is difcult to draw any conclusions from a regression model that is based on only 27 cases, but the single former sisters who had lived longer in the community may well have acquired a vocational dimension from their experiences there that did not come by way of modernist theology or reading about religious and church issues. Since the Racine Dominican community is a relatively “liberal” or progressive one, some of these former members may have felt out-of-place in the community because of more traditionalist identities, but may have acquired that one poverty-related dimension in a practical or experiential manner, despite their theologically traditionalist commitments. In a similar way, the respondents’ levels of educational attainment were an important predictor of placing importance on working people’s concerns only among the single former Racine Dominican sisters. That one positive standardized regression coefcient is the one statistically signicant one across the columns. In general, the hypothesis is disconrmed; there may well be many reasons to obtain advanced education quite apart from a vocation that includes a dimension of placing

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importance on working people’s concerns. However, some women who left the community, driven by a vocation of that kind rather than by a desire to marry, may well have pursued further education as part of their vocational quest. Discussion The data used in this analysis were not collected with a study of vocation, in contradistinction from status-vocations, in mind. Because of the generally advanced ages of former religious—suggested by the generally advanced ages of current religious—the original intent behind the data collection was social-historical. The questions asked were: What had become of the large numbers of people who left religious communities in the late 1960s and the 1970s? What impact did their formations in religious communities have on their life courses? What were their experiences in community and in the leaving process? In a secondary analysis, I have approached the data with a different question in mind: Are there traces of a dialectic between instances of personal vocation on the one hand and institutionalized status-vocations on the other? The results of the analysis are perhaps not denitive, but they are suggestive. The emergent narrative is one in which young men and women project their self-concepts into an avowedly altruistic service that had been presented to them institutionally as a more or less pre-packaged status-vocation. They may well have set out from the rst with an inchoate sense of a vocation in response to the cry of the working poor or with an even more formless sense of a call, but in the course of discernment they realized that the cry of the working poor and of those who experience injustice is important in their own lives. There is a resonance between the institutional status-vocation, with its vow of poverty, and their underlying personal vocation for a time, but there is much in the institutional religious life that is irrelevant to that quest or even opposed to the realization of the men and women’s underlying vocations. The “modernist” (perhaps a poor term) theology and what they read in their quests furthered their personal vocations, but carried them beyond the institutionalized status-vocations in the process. Married life provided an occasion for realizing the personal vocations for some, but for others, who had tried without success to make the institutional status-vocations work for a longer period of time, their

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Table 4.4. Mean Semantic Differential Scores: Importance of Working Class Issues in Personal Politics (Racine Dominican Respondents), by Occupation Occupation

Current and Former Sisters

Current Sisters

Former Sisters

Social work/service

10.17 (12)

10.00 (7)

10.40 (5)

Religious/pastoral

9.89 (27)

10.09 (23)

8.75 (4)

Education Admin.

9.57 (7)

9.33 (6)

— (1)

Nurse/medical

9.56 (16)

9.80 (5)

9.45 (11)

Medical Admin.

9.50 (2)

— (1)

— (1)

Teaching

9.29 (104)

9.55 (51)

9.04 (53)

Counseling

9.14 (7)

9.20 (5)

9.00 (2)

Other

8.96 (56)

9.38 (16)

8.80 (40)

Total

9.35 (231)

9.65 (114)

9.06 (117)

underlying calling led them to further education, either to develop further resources to commit to the general cause or as an occasion for further discernment. No doubt, further research is called for. What follows are a series of suggestions based on data that are too sketchy to be used for actually testing hypotheses. They rather raise questions for consideration. Table 4.4 shows mean scores of our dependent variable, the semantic differential item asking the respondents to indicate the importance of working class issues in their personal politics. The mean score for this item among the twelve current and former Racine Dominican sisters engaged in social work or social services was higher than for any other occupational category. The vocation may well have expressed itself in an occupation that involves serving as an advocate for people who have problems, but recipients of such service are often thought of as people marginal to society rather than those having the status of worker in as opposed to at the margins of society. One may well hypothesize a relationship between advocacy for the marginal and advocacy for the working class; that is to say, the underlying vocation need not be too particular about the category of society to which it is professionally oriented. Indeed the “values clarication” prospective social workers undergo during their training may sensitize them to class issues as well as the problems of marginal individuals.

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It should also be noted in Table 4 that “Religious/pastoral” category of occupation has a particularly high score mean for the twenty-three current sisters working in that eld, but a particularly low one for the four former sisters employed in that way. Four is too small a number to allow us to draw any conclusion, but one may well suspect that a “liberal” or “progressive” community of the Racine Dominican Sisters was simply too uncongenial an ecclesiastical environment for more conservative sisters, and that a small number still intending to work in ministry left and took up such work as laywomen. When using the term “conservative” in this context, it needs to be understood in only relative terms. Being only somewhat “conservative” in a liberal environment can make one a deviant in the very context in which one should be able to take acceptance for granted—one’s home community. What is of interest in the present discussion is the suggestion that the content of that “deviance” is the absence of a vocation dened in terms of a political sensitivity to the concerns of the working class. The low scores of the “other” category should also be noted; among the former sisters these may well be women in roles that are very conventional in terms of gender roles—home makers, for example. If a vocation implies anything, it is a willingness to break convention. The issue of conventionality and unconventionality arises in the data reported in Table 4.5 as well. Here it is apparent that those in, for Catholics, non-normative statuses, such as those divorced or separated and those remarried (presuming they are not widows who remarried), are the ones with the highest mean scores. Breaking with convention in one dimension of life may free one up to respond readily to a vocation in another dimension. The only really low mean scores appear for the celibates who no longer belong to the Racine Dominican community; there are only two such respondents, and they left that community to be celibates in a more conservative setting. Table 4.6 reports the mean scores on the importance of working class issues for personal politics, for the Franciscan population of respondents. On the whole, the scores are lower for the male Franciscan respondents than for the female Dominicans. This may simply be an artifact arising from gender response sets or of manners of expression that developed differently in the two communities. These data cannot settle that issue for us. As with the Dominican sisters, it is the respondents in social work or social service, among the Franciscan Friars, who have the highest mean scores. However, the current friars have higher scores than the former ones, reversing the pattern observable among

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Table 4.5. Mean Semantic Differential Scores: Importance of Working Class Issues in Personal Politics (Racine Dominican Respondents), by Domestic Status Occupation

Current and Former Sisters

Current Sisters

Celibate

9.57 (137)

Married

9.38 (63)

9.38 (63)

Single

8.28 (32)

8.28 (32)

Divorced/separated

10.00 (10)

10.00 (10)

Remarried

10.00 (4)

10.00 (4)

Widowed Same-sex partner Total

9.61 (135)

Former Sisters 6.50 (2)

8.50 (10)

8.50 (10)

— (1)

— (1)

9.35 (257)

9.61 (135)

9.05 (122)

Table 4.6. Mean Semantic Differential Scores: Importance of Working Class Issues in Personal Politics (Franciscan Friar Respondents), by Occupation Occupation

Current and Former Friars

Current Friars

Former Friars

Social work/service

9.15 (13)

9.75 (4)

8.89 (9)

Religion/pastoral

9.01 (85)

9.04 (78)

8.71 (7)

Education Admin.

8.00 (4)

Teaching

9.13 (45)

8.74 (19)

Teaching + other

8.88 (16)

8.88 (16)

Counseling

9.00 (13)

4.50 (2)

9.82 (11)

Other

8.92 (76)

8.36 (133)

9.05 (62)

Total

8.99 (252)

8.86 (133)

9.13 (119)

8.00 (4) 9.42 (26)

the sisters in Table 4.4. The former friars who work in education, but not as administrators, also have high scores. The two current Franciscans who work as counselor have notably low scores. The former friars as a whole have higher scores than the current friars. What the table does not reveal is that in the 1970s when many of the former friars left the Franciscans, the community authorities were perceived to be conservative and particularly opposed to involvement in social

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Table 4.7. Mean Semantic Differential Scores: Importance of Working Class Issues in Personal Politics (Franciscan Friar Respondents), by Domestic Status Domestic Status

Current and Former Friars

Current Friars

Celibate

8.88 (154)

Married

9.04 (95)

9.04 (95)

Single

9.43 (7)

9.43 (7)

10.00 (4)

10.00 (4)

— (1)

— (1)

Widowed

10.00 (2)

10.00 (2)

Same-sex partner

10.00 (4)

10.00 (4)

Divorced/separated Remarried

Total

8.99 (267)

8.87 (149)

Former Friars

8.87 (149)

9.40 (5)

9.14 (118)

movements. Consequently, it was not the relatively conservative friars who left but the more progressive ones. Later cohorts of authorities appeared who were and are much more progressive. Consequently the dialectic between community membership and a vocation dened in terms of a “liberal” or “progressive” issue is not as straightforwardly apparent in the data when organized in terms of occupation. In Table 4.7 the issue of conventionality and unconventionality arises again. Those in non-normative, for Catholics, domestic statuses have higher means on the semantic differential item about the importance of working class issues in personal politics—the divorced/separated and those with long-term same sex partners. The celibates have a lower mean score, as do the married. One can conclude that future research should not only highlight the dialectic between a vocational status as dened by membership in a religious community and a vocation as dened by a sensitivity to working class issues, but several other biographical dimensions of people’s lives as well. Thus, there is the whole question of a dialectic between occupational statuses as dened by “jobs” and vocations: Do the former further the latter, or are the latter expressed in the former? Is there a relationship between unconventional gender role occupations and expressions of vocations? Is there a relationship between unconventional domestic statuses and the unbridling of vocations? The data are clearly suggestive.

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References Bibby, Reginald W. and Merlin B. Brinkerhoff. 1974. “Sources of Religious Involvement: Issues for Future Empirical Investigation.” Review of Religious Research 15: 71–79. Blasi, Anthony J. with Joseph F. Zimmerman. 2004. Transition from Vowed to Lay Ministry in American Catholicism. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Blumer, Herbert. 1969. Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Cohen, Steven M. 1974. “The Impact of Jewish Education on Religious Identication and Practice.” Jewish Social Studies 36: 316–26. Elkind, David. 1970. “The Origins of Religion in the Child.” Review of Religious Research 12: 35–42. Fichter, Joseph H. 1961. Religion as an Occupation: A Study in the Sociology of Professions. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Goldner, Fred H., Richard R. Ritti, and Thomas P. Ference. 1977. “The Production of Cynical Knowledge in Organizations.” American Sociological Review 42: 539–51. Gurvitch, Georges. 1958. “Sociologie en profondeur.” Pp. 157–171, in Traité de sociologie, vol 1. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Kincheloe, Samuel Clarence. 1929. The Prophet: A Study in the Sociology of Leadership. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago. Kosa, John and Cyril O. Schommer. 1961. “Religious Participation, Religious Knowledge, and Scholastic Aptitude: An Empirical Study.” Journal for the Scientic Study of Religion 1: 88–97. Loand, John and Norman Skonovd. 1981. “Conversion Motifs.” Journal for the Scientic Study of Religion 20: 373–85. Ouédraogo, Jean-Martin. 2006. “Virtuoses, lacs et compromise religieux chez Max Weber.” Pp. 91–131 in Médiations et compromis: institutions religieuses et symboliques sociales, edited by Paul-André Turcotte and Jean Remy. Paris: L’Harmattan. Pontical Council for Justice and Peace. 2005. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference. Quarantelli, E.L. and Joseph Cooper. 1966. “Self-conceptions and others: A further test of Meadian hypotheses.” Sociological Quarterly 7: 281–297. Remy, Jean. 2006. “G. Simmel, tension entre religiosité et religion: une transaction permanente.” Pp. 153–185, in Médiations et compromis: institutions religieuses et symboliques sociales, edited by Paul-André Turcotte and Jean Remy. Paris: L’Harmattan. Sacred Congregation for Religious and Secular Institutes. 1975. “Apostolic Exhortation on the Renewal of Religious Life.” Pp. 680–706, in Vatican Council II. The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, edited by Austin Flannery. Northport, NY: Costello. Second Vatican Council, 1975. “Decree on the Up-to-date Renewal of the Religious Life.” Pp. 624–633, in Vatican Council II. The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, edited by Austin Flannery. Northport, NY: Costello. Shibutani, Tamotsu. 1961. Society and Personality: An Intractionist Approach to Social Psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Simmel, Georg. 1908. “Die Selbsterhaltung der sozialen Gruppe.” Pp. 494–613 in Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Stark, Werner. 1967. The Sociology of Religion: A Study of Christendom, vol. 3. New York: Fordham University Press. Wach, Joachim. 1944. Sociology of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Weigert, Andrew J. and Viktor Gecas. 2003. “Self.” Pp. 267–288, in Handbook of Symbolic Interactionism, edited by Larry T. Reynolds and Nancy J. Herman-Kinney. Lanham, MD: AltaMira. Wittberg, Patricia. 1994. The Rise and Decline of Catholic Religious Orders: A Social Movement Perspective. Albany: State University of New York Press.

CHAPTER FIVE

VOCATION AND VOCATIONAL “CRISIS”: A STUDY OF ITALIAN FORMER PRIESTS Giuseppe Giordan However strange it may seem, there are no up-to-date scientic studies in Italy on the phenomenon of leaving the Catholic priesthood on part of men who had devoted themselves denitively to that ofce inside the church. This absence is all the more strange, and for certain aspects culturally intriguing, if we think that in this country there are about eight thousand former priests.1 The only contributions on this topic are by Silvano Burgalassi (1970a, 1970b). Burgalassi’s approach is strongly linked to a “religious sociology,” entirely centred on the institution of the Catholic hierarchy, and marked by normative theological concepts.2 The interest of researchers in Italy, in particular of historians and sociologists of religion in recent years has frequently dwelled upon the character of the Catholic priest, highlighting his particular role both in relation to the institution of the Catholic Church and to Italian society in general.3 In addition, there have been contributions that have analysed the perception the priest has of himself, highlighting both the elements of satisfaction and self-fullment and the more problematic aspects related to difculties and sometimes to suffering (Garelli 2003). While reecting on the priest’s identity, Enzo Pace (2003: 276) points out that there might be a tension, not always well integrated, between

1 As to precise data on former priests in Italy, there are no ofcial gures; however, according to estimates commonly reported as trustworthy, the most credited number is eight thousand (see, for example, the magazine Jesus, August 2006, p. 9). 2 Studies on this topic are not extensively developed even in other countries, although there are researches that have tackled the question scientically. Blasi with Zimmerman (2004) is particularly relevant, both for the data gathered and the detailed bibliography; see also the contributions by Oviedo (2004), Schoenherr (2002), and Louden and Francis (2003). 3 The Italian literature on this topic, both from the historical and the sociological points of view, is quite extensive; for the sociological approach, cf. Of (1998) where it is possible to nd the bibliographic references of the most interesting scientic contributions; for the historical aspect see Guasco (1986, 1990, 1997).

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the function he has to perform in agreement with the religious organization to which he belongs and his own personal charisma: “If it is taken for granted that a priest feels he is part of the Church and that out of this feeling he gets his sense of responsibility for the tasks he has to accomplish, it is not as evident how he tries to reconcile his personal, subjective spiritual expectations with the objective goals that the institution to which he belongs sets for him.” From a more strictly pastoral point of view, studies dealing with the thorny subject of the lack of priestly vocations have multiplied; hence the role of the priest is studied in accordance with more balanced programming on the part of the bishops and the hierarchy. Data on the quantitative consistency of the Italian staff have been available for many years (Brunetta 1991, Dalla Zuanna and Ronzoni 2003, Diotallevi 2005). The problem considered in this context concerns the possibility of ensuring the presence of a priest in all parish churches: considering on one hand the more and more reduced number of vocations to priesthood and on the other hand the progressive ageing of the in-service clergy, the trend is often to reduce the number of parish churches, closing some of them, or entrusting the care of more communities to the same priest. Although various difcult aspects typical of the role of the unmarried Catholic priest in the contemporary society are highlighted in the studies cited above, none has dwelt specically on the phenomenon of the Catholic priests themselves who leave their ministry. As it is easy to perceive, this silence reveals much of the peculiarity of a choice that, however marginal it may be, certainly is not irrelevant in the Italian Catholic clergy. The reasons for this silence, however, are manifold and are to be sought especially in the peculiarity of the character of the Catholic priest in relation to the role of the quasi-monopoly of the Catholic religion in the Italian social and cultural context. This silence is linked to the stigmatization process that still deeply marks the choice of leaving the Catholic priesthood, a choice that is perceived negatively by the religious institution as well as by a part, more or less extensive according to the different social and cultural contexts, of the society within which the subject happens to live. The Catholic priesthood is placed at the center of a complex net of relations that concern the individual and the organization to which he belongs, his personal identity and the role he is expected to play, his public and private life, the cognitive dimension and the emotional and affective aspects of his life, his relation with the sacred, and the

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organization of power. Precisely because of this interlacing of relations and dimensions it is not easy to investigate the deep reasons that urge a person to make such an “unbecoming” choice, particularly in a context such as the Italian one, where the Catholic Church’s evaluations are “diffuse” cultural references—and besides, it is not even easy to investigate how most people in the society feel about this choice. On the other hand, an in-depth study of leaving the priestly ofce certainly might offer important indications of the change that the Church and the society are experiencing in Italy, and it might show how the different perceptions of such behavior are indicative of the evolutionary trends that re-dene the relation between religion and culture inside that social context.4 The present contribution is presented as a rst step in a wider and more in-depth study of the phenomenon of leaving the ministry on part of the Catholic priests in Italy. My research is based on in-depth interviews with 25 diocesan priests who have left the ministry in the period from the beginning of the 1960s until today.5 The areas investigated are extensive and examine the most diverse contexts for the motivations that have caused this choice. One specic focus has been on whether the choice of leaving the priesthood could be explained by the impossibility of holding fast to celibacy, or if instead the cause was to be found in a more complex kind of uneasiness, linked to the new social and cultural context that redenes the role of the priest. Particular attention has also been directed to the relevancy of the training received in the seminary, especially in relation to the vision of the world that was offered and to the role that the priest was expected to play. A nal focus has been the redenition of the former priest’s identity, both on the personal and on the social side, after choosing to leave priesthood; his relation with the surrounding context, the

4 The peculiar function of the Catholic religion inside the Italian society has been closely examined by various sociologists; cf. Cipriani (1988), Garelli (1986, 2005), Nesti (1985), and Diotallevi (2001). Of particular interest is the contribution by Pace (2003), because it analyses the function of the priest inside the Italian social and cultural context. 5 It is not possible to report here in detail the content of the interviews; therefore I will conne myself to those aspects that seem most signicant to the problems that characterize the choice of abandoning priesthood. The sample of the 25 former priests has been chosen taking into account the different ages; hence eight have been ordained before Vatican II, with the remaining seventeen ordained after it; the interviews have took place in fall 2005 and are restricted to former priests now living in the north of Italy.

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management of the stigma and how he got over it, and the possible prospect of a new integration into the Christian community. The stories of these former priests are often stories of suffering, but at the same time they reveal also a new approach to the understanding of their “new” identities. The rst task of the research was to gain the condence of these men and create an appropriate space that allowed them to run again through a path that had cost them so much labor, especially at the psychological level. In addition, it took time to become attuned immediately to their experiences, which is also due to the particular reserve that characterizes their condition. Among the stories gathered, no two are identical; however there are common traits that recur quite regularly across the different experiences. The theme I have treated with particular attention concerns the idea of “vocation,” closely linked to the idea of “God’s will.” The choice of leaving the priesthood is marked by a “vocational crisis,” and this does not lead all the people interviewed to the simple negation of their “vocation,” but it may lead to “reinterpreting” it. In this passage this appears a rather interesting change between a traditional epoch, in which vocation was immutable and the contemporary epoch, in which vocation is the result of continuous reassessment, open to the many and various experiences of life. What has emerged undoubtedly sets up a track that can be used to investigate this phenomenon further: if on the one hand it is impossible to report all the pieces of the puzzle, on the other hand what follows seems to represent the most important trends in the “big picture.” The Priest and His Image Pace (1997: 542) denes priests as people who have specialized in dealing with the sphere of the sacred and are charged by the competent authorities and by the community with the task of performing a duty that not all ordinary mortals can legitimately perform; therefore priests share the same property that is characteristic of the sacred: the condition of being separate from the secular sphere. Just because they have to do with a context that is considered to be radically different from the wordly ambit, far from ordinary everyday life, they too participate in this separation state, emphasizing it with particular external signs.

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Within the Catholic priesthood, it is theology that denes the features of the role that characterizes this personage inside the ecclesial institution. It is interesting to observe the specicity of the “theological” characteristics of the role of the priest, because it is specically these that highlight quite a problematic gap between the “angelic” expectations of the role and the concreteness of everyday life. As a matter of fact, while the theological view outlines an image of the priest totally detached from the earthly occupations and preoccupations, almost paradoxically in the Italian social and cultural context his role is much more practical and factual; it is that of a personage one may turn to for all kinds of reasons, from religious questions in the strict sense of the word to much more mundane problems such as nding a job or getting a recommendation for a particular business. Marco, the oldest among the interviewees, ordained at the end of the 1950s when Mass was still celebrated in Latin and wearing a cassock was compulsory, illustrates this situation very clearly: At those times it was quite generally accepted that society was similar to a pyramid, and that the priests were at the top of it and the congregation was at the base in a subject position. Besides, we priests explained to the believers that this structure was by God’s will, and this couldn’t but increase our social prestige. When I was ordained, at the age of 24, I was as respected as the mayor of my village and as the doctor in the hospital. . . . Indeed, my opinions were more considered than were theirs.

More than with reasons of a theological and spiritual nature, Marco justies his choice of becoming a priest by referring to the excellent education imparted in the seminary, a level of education that, at that time, outside the seminary only the richest could afford. Beside education he adds the gratication deriving from being able to help others, both spiritually and materially. Certainly at the beginning he felt as if he had been called by God, and hence he had the “vocation,” but as years went by after being ordained, this role seemed to him as “clothes that didn’t t him any more.” Marco’s experience, from this point of view, is very similar to that of Enrico, who was ordained priest at the beginning of the 1960s. For Enrico too, the idea of being in a position of helping other people had been the motive that impelled him to devote himself to God, but for both of them this perspective had not been sufcient to keep their vocational choice sound and lasting. To procure other people’s happiness or the social recognition of one’s role, did not guarantee the accomplishment of personal fullment, and, on the contrary, it led to

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the need for something deeper than the state of being a priest could ensure. The question of the role, however, must not be simply connected with the social position or with “things to be done”: It touches more deeply the essence of being a priest. According to Catholic theology, the consecrated person acts, by means of the Holy Spirit, as if he were Christ himself; the priest, in his most intimate and deepest experience, completely belongs to Christ and is unceasingly urged to comply with him. Here is the foundation of the necessity of relinquishing one’s points of view, one’s expectations, of giving up living according to one’s feelings and emotions; this is a principle that has remained unaltered across time even if the training framework and the education strategies have changed (Guasco 1986, 1990). According to Giovanni’s, ordained at the end of the 1970s, this setting actually led to denying one’s liberty: At a certain point I realized I was living in a structure that places the group’s needs before the person’s needs, and before the necessity of meeting the legitimate requirements of free expression of one’s ideas and of one’s feelings: acting like an instrument of a supernatural call had caused me to lose my identity. . . . I no longer knew what I wanted, what I liked, what I believed to be right. Instead, I knew what had been taught to me to be right to think and want.

According to the theological view, giving up one’s subjectivity to conform to Christ more fully is counterbalanced with the certainty of the objectivity of the role that the priest is expected to play: a “transguration” that however, as we have just seen, is not always adequately interiorized.6 And the law of celibacy, crucial for the comprehension of Catholic priesthood, is founded exactly on this imitation of Christ: a form of identication that has often led to separating the bodily element from the spiritual, proposing models that, consciously or unconsciously, subordinated the physical dimension to mind and soul to the point of considering the body as a possible cause of temptation and sin.7 From the experiences reported by the interviewees about their training at seminary it is possible to trace a certain kind of evolution as far as the theme of celibacy is concerned. If in the 1950s the aspect of “ghting”

6 Obviously the question cannot be reduced to a simple interiorization, but it also concerns the social and cultural changes that re-dene the very role of the priest. 7 This, in spite of the fact that the ecclesiastical law of celibacy, obligatory for the Catholic priests in the Latin rite, is optional for the Catholic priests of Oriental rite; hence the Catholic Church already provides for the presence of married priests.

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against the temptations of the esh was emphasized, in the 1960s new rationalization strategies were proposed that are more respectful both of women (no longer seen tempting demons) and of one’s own body, to the point of utilizing, more and more often in later years, knowledge of a psychological nature in order to recognize the deep emotional dynamics and the most relevant needs of the subject. The difference between training in seminary and the concreteness of life in the world is a common trait to all the experiences we have gathered. In other words, all the interviewees have perceived the gap between the image of the priest somehow idealized during their training years and in that shared worldview, and the reality of everyday life, causing as a consequence a signicant number of shattered hopes. Andrea, one of the youngest interviewees, ordained in the middle 1990s, acknowledges that the training he had received in the seminary was “open” to the world; nevertheless he points out that even this type of training has been inadequate to face the actual problems of everyday life: When I went out from the seminary I thought I knew how to cope with my ofce: I had studied the Bible and morals, and this made me feel secure, ready to teach what to do to my congregation. The impact with reality, however, was very hard: the groups in the parish church were smaller and smaller, and often they were not willing to listen or to implement what I had learned. . . . The “clear and well dened” ideas I had studied in the seminary appeared to me to be unable to face the complexity of people’s life. Not to mention the old things to carry on even if nobody believes them any more: novena, processions to the saints, blessing everything, celebrating masses repeatedly.

For Giorgio, also ordained in the 1990s, the passage from the seminary to real life was marked by other problematic characteristics. The most problematic aspect of seminary training was the inability to live real relationships in depth: when we were together the atmosphere was always joyful, almost as if we were bosom friends or barracks pals, yet scarcely able to go deep into the most private aspects of life. Once out of the seminary, I found I was alone. Relations with the other priests were always formal, and when we met we always talked about pastoral problems and never about our life and our actual needs . . . Besides I realized that the attitude of obedience had actually kept me as a child, willing to say yes in order to have a little favor in exchange. The role that had been assigned to me was getting more and more inadequate, to the point that I often felt as if I were a puppet in the hands of other people.

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In other words, being educated to listening to other people’s needs and necessities, prior to one’s own needs and necessities: according to the interviewees, this “forgetting about oneself ” at a certain point makes one lose one’s identity and one does not know any more what is the meaning of one’s life; besides this, it leads to not being able to read inside oneself clearly, and to hiding one’s deep truth from oneself. A progressive crumbling process of the idealized image of the priest, as it had been inculcated during the seminary years and then defended more or less strongly during the rst years of priesthood, led all the interviewees to question themselves about the main issue that concerns the very meaning of their life inside the ecclesiastical structure. A personal question that, however, is part of the more complex dynamics of the modern epoch, is that of disputing all the authority gures who want to impose their command or their truth. If the context of the traditional world could support the mythical image of the priest in some way, the condition of the modern and postmodern epoch seems to emphasize its fragility and inconsistencies. That is, in the contemporary era the complex interconnection between conformity to a given role and the legitimate need of freely expressing one’s individuality often leads to a critical situation, which can nd the most diverse outcomes, from a new more creative form of awareness of one’s own vocation, to the decision for leaving priesthood. In any case it seems that what is at stake is the challenge to re-dene one’s identity in a social and cultural context that “de-mythologizes” the angelic role of a priest who seems not to understand or appreciate that much his radical choice of being unmarried. At a Certain Point All the interviewees, as they tell the story of their vocations, resort to an expression that is identical even in its lexical formulation in order to dene the moment when they seriously considered the possibility of leaving the priesthood: “at a certain point.” At a precise moment that each remembers clearly, even if recalling it takes effort and in some cases opens up an old wound not yet totally healed, the difculties were no longer faced as a reason to impart new vigor to their ght against the “temptations” threatening their consecrated lives, but much more realistically became an insurmountable obstacle with which he had to come to terms. Contrary to any other type of job, to move from the

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priestly profession involves difculties that are not conned to the search for a new job. What has been illustrated above highlights the different components, of a symbolic nature, associated with values that, besides being associated with both personal and social expectations, play a part in building up the priestly identity. Precisely these complex elements make the choice of leaving the priesthood particularly hard and deeply felt. What is radically debated is not simply a profession, but much more integrally, it is a person’s identity, his social acceptability, his relation with himself and with others, besides the obvious question of his material subsistence. To renounce one’s vows, for the Catholic priest, in a sense means to lose everything. Not only do the prestige and the recognition that directly or indirectly were accorded him vanish, but they even change sign, often becoming objects of exclusion and blame for a choice that is not accepted inside the ecclesiastical world. Before getting to “a certain point,” however, the priest in this critical position undergoes a period of internal turmoil in which the individual considerations can be valued as positive or negative according to the perspective one takes: either to leave priesthood or to pursue one’s loyalty to the choice of consecrating oneself. It is a period of extreme uncertainty, in which the rst reaction has been, for all the interviewees, “to resist, resist, resist!” In all the experiences, however, sooner or later the moment comes when the most intense prayer or simply taking one’s time are no longer sufcient. The priest “going through a crisis” usually confers with his seniors and with some trustworthy brothers, but the indications that are given to him are nearly always to persevere, to “hold out,” also to avoid the scandal that the choice of leaving would cause the Christian community. The feeling that all the interviewees have of this kind of “help” is that the institution tries to save itself, and that it is not able to understand how a person’s life can develop also “beyond the