What are the alternatives, marriage or some form of religious life?
The single life, someone claimed, is a failed vocation.
For some, being single may be seen as being second-class citizens in the Church or a failed vocation. This perspective is utterly, and even obnoxiously, unrealistic and misguided.
As the Second Vatican Council taught, every baptized person is called to follow Christ closely by living according to the Gospel and making its teachings known to others.
Thus, the core message of St. Josemaría and the aim of Opus Dei is to contribute to the evangelizing mission of the Church by fostering a life fully consistent with their faith among Christians of all social classes, in the midst of the ordinary circumstances of their lives, and especially through the sanctification of their work.
For the sake of the apostolate, in addition to priests, some lay men and women embrace celibacy as a gift from God. This enables them to dedicate themselves more fully to the formational activities of Opus Dei. They continue to be lay people and hold the same positions in the professional world and within the Church as before, and they earn their living through their ordinary work.
Their being "ordinary Christians" cannot be understood merely as "not belonging to a religious institute." Rather, their being in the world must be understood as a positive participation in God's creation of the world and redemption. God has entrusted the world to all of us to liberate it from the influence of sin, trying to be holy in marriage or as celibates, within the family or in one's profession, and in the most diverse social activities.
St. John Paul II wrote that we all share a fundamental vocation to love as Jesus loves, to live out the Two Great Commandments. That's what we must get right.
There is nothing more challenging than the universal call to holiness, to die to ourselves, taking up our crosses each day, and offering all to God who, in the Person of Jesus, gave His all for us. None of the so-called hard sayings of the Gospel or difficult and controversial teachings of the Church come close to being as demanding as our fundamental call to love as Jesus loves.
Neither marriage nor celibate life asks more of us than is implied in living our fundamental Christian vocation in the midst of the world. This is what we need to be preaching and teaching. This will produce more marriages and even religious vocations.
Here is an area for genuine development. Let our theologians, in light of the fundamental and universal call to holiness, find a way to appreciate the contributions of so many remarkably charitable, chaste, and courageous single people who live among us.
Perhaps the issue isn't failed vocations, but a failure to appreciate the Christian vocation of a single person in the midst of the world.
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