Category: Uncategorized

Hi, readers!
With the help of Persistent Reader Liz, I’ve found a defect in the anti-spam setup on the stblogs.org server, a mistake that was keeping legitimate users from commenting. (I am so sorry for the mistake and the inconvenience!)
If you had trouble commenting before, give it a try again, and see if things are working better for you now. I’m not sure that this fix has cured all the aspects of the problem.

I’ve been accused of going easy on Fr. Tom Euteneuer because he happens to have been a Marine. I have great respect for the U.S. military and especially for Marines. But just for the record, I don’t believe they’re above criticism. Especially when criticism is warranted. For example, in watching videos coming from soldiers in the Middle East, it’s painfully obvious that U.S. Marines can’t dance. My blogmate Eric Johnson may disagree – and he’s invited to make his case – but here’s what happens when U.S. Marines on operation attempt to dance:

I’ll concede it a strong effort on the part of our U.S. allies. However, it’s clear to any unbiased observer that British squaddies set the dance standard in the Middle East. Just check out this video:

All joking aside, our soldiers rely on each other in the field, where it counts. May Our Lord, through the intercession of St. Michael and St. Barbara, keep safe all allied troops on operation.

Thanks, readers, for your patience during the system maintenance Friday evening.

A few readers have expressed difficulty using our comments’ section in the past week. Catholic Light tech guru Rich Chonak tells me the following might work: “If you delete all cookies for mt.stblogs.org and reload the web page, things should work more normally.”
(UPDATE from RC: Flushing your browser cache may also help.)

I don’t have a solution for this, but I have a problem with how the concept of vocation is commonly applied to the various states of life. It’s even an occasion of suffering for some devout faithful, with people reproaching themselves unreasonably for “not listening” to God; thinking they should have married the prospective spouse, or joined the interesting religious order, or made some other commitment. They blame themselves for past choices and past deferrals, as if God had once sent them explicit instructions by Fedex. But He didn’t and doesn’t.
People would be better off to seek their state in life almost without regard to the concept of vocation, rather than to make it the center of their thoughts. Seek virtue, yes, but vocation? Vocation shows up in the results of Providence, in the past more than in the present or future: in the fact of vows taken, in the approval of the Church for a priest’s ordination.
Even there, our judgment remains tentative, because human intentions can be undone: a marriage may be proved invalid, a religious profession may be dissolved, a priest’s promises may be released. And what we did with good will and moral certainty becomes a sort of accident. Then what: can anything meaningful be said about vocation in those cases?