32. Choose Whom You Will Serve: Discerning, Entering, and Persevering in a State of Life

“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercy of God, that you exhibit your bodies a living host, holy, pleasing God, your reasonable service.” — Romans 12:1, original Rheims New Testament (1582), spelling modernized¹

Every Catholic is called to holiness, but no Catholic becomes holy in the abstract.

The offering of the body, mind, time, work, affection, authority, suffering, and future must eventually take concrete form. A man marries and becomes a husband and father. Another receives Holy Orders and is bound to the altar and the care of souls. A woman enters religious life beneath a rule and superior. Another remains unmarried and serves God faithfully amid duties that Providence actually gives. A widow carries a bond changed by death into prayer, memory, and service. A sick person discovers that dependence itself has become a field of obedience.

Modern life resists this concreteness. It teaches the young to preserve options, curate identity, postpone sacrifice, and interpret every difficult commitment as a threat to authenticity. Years pass while the soul calls drift discernment.

The Catholic question is different:

In what stable order of duty can I give myself to God, serve the salvation of souls, and persevere to death?

That question must not be answered rashly. Neither may it be postponed forever. A state in life is not selected like a style. It is discerned beneath God, entered lawfully, and then sanctified through fidelity.

Before asking whether one should marry, enter religion, or seek the priesthood, the soul must receive the vocation common to all Christians.

God calls every person to know, love, and serve Him; to enter and remain within His true Church; to believe the revealed Faith; to keep the commandments; to live in sanctifying grace; to worship rightly; and to persevere unto death. No particular state can contradict this universal end.

A marriage that requires false worship cannot be God’s will. A supposed priestly path built upon invalid orders or a false ecclesiastical mission cannot be sanctified by enthusiasm. A religious community that teaches heresy cannot become safe because its life appears disciplined. A career that habitually requires grave injustice cannot be excused as provision.

The first test of every proposed vocation is therefore objective:

• Is it lawful?
• Does it preserve the Catholic Faith?
• Can the true worship of God be maintained?
• Does it respect the commandments and the natural law?
• Can its essential duties actually be fulfilled?

God does not call a soul through contradiction. What He commands universally is not suspended by a private attraction.

A state in life is a relatively stable condition carrying characteristic obligations, relationships, and means of sanctification.

Some states are established by sacred or permanent bonds. Marriage creates husband and wife. Holy Orders configures and obliges the ordained man according to the order received. Religious profession binds a person within an approved form of consecrated life. Parenthood creates duties that do not disappear when affection changes. Widowhood carries obligations and sacrifices arising from a marriage ended by death.

Other conditions—employment, study, location, health, care of relatives, poverty, temporary singleness—may change more readily. They are not therefore morally unimportant. They constitute the present field in which duty is known and future vocation is prepared.

This distinction prevents two errors.

The first makes every strong interest a vocation. A talent, occupation, project, friendship, or desire may belong to Providence without constituting a permanent state.

The second treats only priests and religious as called by God. Marriage is a real state under divine institution. The unmarried person also remains beneath Providence and duty. Every Christian life must be offered; not every offering takes the same canonical form.

Many souls become paralyzed because they expect vocation to arrive as an unmistakable interior voice.

God may grant strong attraction, unusual clarity, or a providential event. He is free to lead as He wills. But the ordinary discernment of state in life does not depend upon private revelation. It proceeds through revealed doctrine, moral law, sacramental reality, freedom, aptitude, duties, prudent desire, counsel, opportunity, and the judgment of the Church where ecclesiastical vocation is concerned.

Feelings matter as facts about the soul, but they do not rule it. Consolation may accompany a true vocation; so may fear. Peace may follow a right decision; so may the Cross. Aversion may reveal an obstacle, or merely self-love resisting sacrifice. Attraction may reveal fitness, or merely vanity admiring an image of oneself.

Discernment therefore asks not only, “What do I feel drawn toward?” but:

• What is God’s law?
• What gifts and defects actually appear in me?
• What sacrifices does this state require?
• Do I desire its duties or chiefly its image?
• What do prudent and doctrinally sound persons observe?
• Has the Church admitted me where her admission is required?
• Is Providence opening a lawful path, or am I forcing one?

St. Ignatius of Loyola orders election toward things good in themselves or morally indifferent, held within the hierarchical Holy Mother Church. His method seeks freedom from disordered attachment so that the soul may choose for God’s greater service, not obtain religious language for a preference already enthroned.²

Catholic doctrine honors marriage without pretending that every state has the same objective excellence.

Marriage is holy. Christ raised the marriage of the baptized to a sacrament. It serves faithful companionship, mutual help, the procreation and Catholic education of children, and the remedy and right ordering of concupiscence. The home can become a little kingdom beneath Christ, a school of sacrifice, and a fruitful image of Christ and His Church.³

Consecrated virginity and perfect chastity for the kingdom are objectively higher goods because they renounce a true created good in order to adhere more undividedly to God. St. Paul teaches the distinctive freedom of the unmarried who is solicitous for the things of the Lord, and the Council of Trent condemns the claim that marriage must be preferred to virginity or celibacy.⁴

This hierarchy does not mean that every unmarried person is holier than every spouse, or that an unfaithful religious is superior in merit to a holy mother. Objective state and subjective sanctity are different questions. A spouse may love God with heroic charity; a consecrated person may betray the graces of his state.

Nor does the higher objective excellence of continence mean that a person should seize it without vocation, fitness, law, or grace. The better state in itself is not automatically the state this particular soul may lawfully enter and faithfully bear.

The purpose of hierarchy is to honor God’s gifts, not to feed comparison.

Marriage should be chosen for the covenant and duties God instituted, not merely because one fears loneliness, desires social acceptance, seeks financial rescue, or has become emotionally dependent upon one person.

Before engagement or consent, a Catholic should ask whether the prospective spouse:

• professes the true Faith without demanding compromise;
• understands marriage as exclusive and indissoluble;
• accepts the primary end of procreation and the Catholic education of children;
• possesses sufficient freedom and maturity for consent;
• is truthful about serious matters affecting common life;
• demonstrates chastity, sobriety, responsibility, and willingness to work;
• respects the rightful order of husband, wife, parents, and children;
• can bear correction and ask pardon;
• is free from an impediment that would make marriage unlawful or invalid;
• will help establish a home ordered toward salvation.

Affection cannot answer these questions by itself.

Pope Pius XI teaches in Casti Connubii that Christian spouses must understand the goods of marriage: offspring, fidelity, and the sacramental bond. He also warns that preparation must begin long before the wedding through right formation, prudent choice, prayer, and counsel.⁵

The Church’s law likewise protects consent. Marriage comes into being through the lawfully manifested consent of persons capable of contracting it; no human power can supply that consent.⁶ Parents may advise, test, protect, and forbid what remains unlawful under their authority. They may not manufacture consent, barter a child, or make family ambition the voice of God.

A marriage to a non-Catholic, an adherent of counterfeit worship, or a person determined to raise children outside the Faith places the soul and future household in grave danger. The 1917 Code treats mixed religion with severity because unity at the altar, in doctrine, and in the formation of children is not ornamental.⁷ A vague promise to “respect differences” does not resolve a contradiction concerning who Christ is, where His Church is, or how children must worship.

Courtship is therefore ordered toward judgment. It is not marriage practiced experimentally. Cohabitation, impurity, and premature emotional possession make free discernment harder, not clearer.

“Neither doth any man take the honour to himself, but he that is called of God, as Aaron.”⁸

An interior desire to offer Mass, preach, absolve, and save souls may be an important beginning. It is not yet an ordination, office, jurisdiction, or proof of vocation.

The priesthood contains an ecclesiastical call. The candidate must be tested for faith, intention, learning, virtue, freedom, masculine sex, canonical fitness, and capacity to bear sacred discipline. He must be admitted and ordained by competent authority through the sacrament Christ entrusted to His Church.⁹

Pope Pius XI insists that a true priestly vocation is not a mere subjective attraction. The Church examines the candidate and, through the bishop, calls the suitable man to Orders. The candidate must unite right intention with the spiritual, moral, intellectual, and physical qualities required for the office.¹⁰

This protects both the altar and the aspirant.

A young man may love the priesthood and still need formation. He may possess zeal without stability, intelligence without obedience, piety without judgment, or generosity without health sufficient for the burdens proposed. Discovery of an impediment is not necessarily rejection by God. It may be protection, redirection, or a command to serve in another way.

In the present exile, hunger for priests is acute. That need must not lower the doctrine of priesthood. Scarcity cannot turn self-appointment into mission, abbreviated formation into fitness, or doubtful authority into lawful call. The answer to a famine is not counterfeit bread.

A man who cannot presently find a sound and lawful path should continue praying, studying, working, growing in virtue, and seeking competent Catholic guidance without pretending to be what the Church has not made him. If Providence opens a true door, preparation will not have been wasted. If it does not, the offering can still bear fruit in another state.

Religious life is not private aesthetic withdrawal, a group of friends living together, or a self-bestowed habit.

The religious state involves a recognized form of common or ordered life, the evangelical counsels, a rule, superiors, formation, admission, and profession according to the Church’s law. Its obedience is not obedience to one’s own idealized plan. Its very purpose includes the sacrifice of private will beneath a lawful order directed toward perfection.¹¹

A desire for silence, prayer, enclosure, service, penance, or liturgical beauty may suggest a religious vocation. It may also arise from exhaustion, family conflict, fear of marriage, distaste for ordinary work, or longing to escape a wounded identity.

The candidate must therefore ask:

• Do I desire God, or chiefly refuge from people?
• Can I obey a lawful superior when the command is ordinary and unromantic?
• Can I live charity in community rather than merely imagine solitude?
• Can I accept a rule I did not design?
• Is this institute truly Catholic in doctrine, worship, authority, and mission?
• Is my health reasonably proportioned to its observance?
• Am I free from obligations that presently bind me elsewhere?

The novitiate exists because attraction must be tested in life. The Church requires freedom from force and grave fear for valid profession and establishes canonical conditions for admission and vows.¹²

The present crisis creates a painful difficulty: a soul may possess a real attraction to religious perfection while no accessible community is safe, lawful, or doctrinally sound. Such deprivation should be lamented. It should not be repaired by entering a community belonging to the Vatican II religion, inventing a public religious identity privately, or making vows one does not understand and cannot properly live.

The soul may practice chastity, poverty of spirit, obedience to actual duties, prayer, penance, and works of mercy while asking God to restore lawful religious life. Desire can prepare the offering. It cannot create the canonical state by itself.

Not every unmarried Catholic is presently on the road to priesthood, religious profession, or marriage.

Some are still discerning. Some have not encountered a lawful and prudent marriage possibility. Some carry family duties that absorb their strength. Some live with illness or disability. Some are widowed. Some freely remain celibate for prayer and service without entering a public religious state. Some suffer a vocation delayed or made externally impossible by the crisis.

The unmarried condition must not become a waiting room in which years are treated as morally blank.

An unmarried Catholic still has a body to govern, work to do, relatives and neighbors to serve, prayer to establish, property to administer, talents to develop, and a soul to save. Chastity according to state is not mere abstention. It frees time, attention, and affection for ordered service.

At the same time, a private resolution does not confer the rights, title, habit, authority, or canonical standing of religious profession. Humility accepts the truth of one’s condition while making it fruitful.

The question is not, “Why has my life failed to resemble the expected pattern?” It is, “What does fidelity require in the condition God presently permits?”

If marriage or another vocation remains reasonably possible, practical preparation should continue. If it does not, bitterness must not consume the offering. No chaste life given to God is spiritually barren merely because it is hidden from human categories.

Parents help prepare vocations long before a child names one.

They teach prayer, obedience, work, sacrifice, modesty, doctrine, the difference between authority and domination, reverence for the priesthood, honor for marriage, and esteem for consecrated life. A child raised to avoid every burden will struggle to recognize any vocation, because every vocation is cruciform.

Parents should pray for vocations without scripting the answer. They sin against the order of their office when they discourage priesthood or religious life from worldliness, desire for descendants, social ambition, or fear of losing the child’s company. They also exceed their office when they pressure a child into a sacred state for family honor or romanticize signs that competent authority has not confirmed.

Regarding marriage, father and mother should judge character, faith, danger, readiness, and practical capacity. Their counsel deserves serious weight because affection easily blinds the young. Yet the consent must belong to the man and woman who will bear the bond.

The father’s task is not to choose a child’s life as Pharaoh chose labor for Israel. It is to govern formation so well that the child becomes capable of free obedience to God.

True parental authority prepares the offering and then yields it to the Lord.

A good state may be sought from a disordered motive.

A man may seek priesthood because he wants reverence, intellectual authority, escape from ordinary employment, or immunity from being corrected by a wife and children. A woman may imagine religious life because she wants protection from relational wounds, visible holiness, or escape from a difficult household. A person may seek marriage because chastity feels hard, peers have married, finances seem uncertain, or solitude has become frightening.

These mixed motives do not automatically prove the vocation false. Human motives often require purification. They do mean the soul must stop flattering itself.

Ask:

• Would I still desire this state if its honors disappeared and only its duties remained?
• Which daily sacrifices define it?
• Which of my present faults would wound those entrusted to me there?
• Am I preparing to give, or chiefly arranging to receive?
• Do I love the reality, or a picture of myself within it?
• If God closes this path, will I remain Catholic, obedient, and willing to serve?

The last question is especially revealing. A desire that threatens rebellion when denied has already become too close to an idol.

Vocation is a gift received from God, not a verdict by which the creature compels Him.

Discernment should produce concrete acts.

1. Live in grace

Mortal sin clouds judgment and strengthens disordered attachment. Seek Confession from a lawful priest when available, avoid occasions of sin, and establish serious prayer. One cannot prudently discern a lifelong offering while negotiating with habitual grave sin.

2. Learn what the states actually require

Read Catholic doctrine, not romantic testimony. Learn the ends and obligations of marriage, the sacrifice and authority of priesthood, the vows and common discipline of religious life, and the duties of faithful unmarried life.

3. Examine freedom and impediments

Identify existing vows, marriage bonds, debts, dependents, health conditions, canonical impediments, legal obligations, and family duties. A vocation does not erase prior justice.

4. Examine aptitude

Desire must meet reality. Consider faith, chastity, emotional stability, health, capacity for work, teachability, judgment, perseverance, and ability to live with others. Defects may be corrected; some constitute lasting impediments.

5. Seek competent counsel

Counsel should come from persons who know Catholic doctrine, understand the proposed state, possess no controlling personal interest, and are willing to say no. In exile, a clerical title alone does not guarantee competence or freedom from factional interest.

6. Take lawful preparatory steps

Work, study, learn household skills, pay debts, practice chastity, serve, visit a sound community if one exists, or undertake the formation legitimately assigned. Preparation tests desire by obedience.

7. Set a proportionate time for decision

Some questions need patient observation. Endless vagueness is not patience. Decide what facts must become clear and what steps will obtain them. Review the matter at a definite time rather than reopening it hourly.

8. Choose beneath God

When the state is lawful, freedom and capacity are present, counsel has been heard, and sufficient prudential certainty exists, act. Human decisions rarely arrive with freedom from every fear.

St. Ignatius distinguishes choices that can later be changed from those that are immutable, naming priesthood and marriage among the latter. If an immutable election was made rightly and lawfully, he says, it is not to be made again; the person should perfect himself within what has been chosen.¹³

This is one of the most neglected vocational principles.

A married person should not continue “discerning marriage” whenever another possibility appears. An ordained priest cannot treat Holy Orders as a role discarded when ministry becomes obscure. A perpetually professed religious cannot answer dryness by imagining that vows were merely a season of self-discovery.

The Cross after commitment does not prove the commitment was mistaken.

Every permanent state eventually reveals sacrifices hidden at the beginning. Spouses discover infirmities. Parents lose sleep and freedom. Priests meet ingratitude, loneliness, and fear. Religious encounter monotony and the mortification of obedience. The unmarried person faces hiddenness and the absence of expected supports.

After valid commitment, the governing question changes from “Which state shall I choose?” to “How shall I become holy within the state that now binds me?”

This does not forbid examining validity, seeking lawful separation under grave danger, obtaining a dispensation where the Church possesses power to grant it, or reporting abuse. It forbids using ordinary hardship, temptation, or attraction to another life as though subjective distress dissolved an objective bond.

Vocation can be corrupted by earlier compromises.

A young person repeatedly indulges impurity and then calls marriage a remedy without repentance. Another despises family authority and imagines religious obedience will be easy. A man loves controversy, refuses hidden work, and interprets the desire to teach as a priestly call. A woman absorbs the world’s contempt for motherhood and then insists her aversion is divine guidance. Parents form children for comfort and later wonder why no one can sacrifice.

The lesser error prepares the greater deception.

St. Paul warns that those who do not receive the love of truth may be permitted an operation of error.¹⁴ God is not the author of deception. The soul freely trains itself to prefer a story. Once self-will has been defended in daily matters, it can impersonate vocation with frightening ease.

This warning must be applied inwardly. It is not enough to identify corrupt seminaries, counterfeit convents, worldly marriages, or domineering parents. Ask what attachment in oneself is demanding that God approve a predetermined life.

Pharaoh bargains: obey, but not completely; sacrifice, but not far away; let some go, but keep the rest. The soul bargains similarly: “I will serve God, provided the state preserves this comfort, this person, this ambition, this control.”

Vocation begins to become clear when the soul stops bargaining and places even its preferred future upon the altar.

The present crisis wounds vocational life deeply.

The counterfeit church possesses buildings, seminaries, convents, tribunals, schools, and public recognition while teaching error and administering a new religion. The true Church in exile may appear poor, scattered, juridically obstructed, and unable to provide ordinary pathways in many places.

This produces real suffering:

• young men may find no unquestionably safe formation or lawful path to Orders;
• women may find no accessible community preserving doctrine, rule, habit, liturgy, and authority intact;
• Catholics seeking marriage may find few possible spouses who profess the whole Faith;
• families may lack priests able to advise without imposing factional claims;
• older souls may see years pass while a desired state remains inaccessible.

The wound must not be minimized. Neither may deprivation authorize counterfeit solutions.

Do not enter false worship to obtain a wedding with appearances. Do not submit to a modernist seminary because the altar is beautiful. Do not join a religious institute that professes communion with heresy because the enclosure feels peaceful. Do not invent jurisdiction because souls need priests. Do not accept an unsafe marriage because Catholic loneliness is painful.

God is not honored by acquiring a sacred state through betrayal of the Faith for which the state exists.

During delay, live the preparation that remains possible: doctrine, prayer, chastity, work, domestic skill, debt reduction, health, service, custody of the senses, obedience to present duties, and honest counsel. The waiting soul should become more capable of sacrifice, not merely more practiced in longing.

At the Annunciation, Our Lady does not invent her mission. She receives the word of God, asks the question necessary to understand what obedience requires, and then gives her fiat.¹⁵

Her virginity is not sterile withdrawal. By the operation of the Holy Ghost, she becomes Mother of God. Her hidden life at Nazareth is not lesser because it is domestic. Her presence at Calvary is not failure because the vocation has become sorrow. She remains Virgin, Mother, Handmaid, and faithful Woman beneath the changing form of the Cross.

Holy Mother Church acts maternally in the same way. She receives from Christ. She tests vocations, guards impediments, blesses marriage, calls to Orders, approves religious life, assigns duties, and supplies grace through the sacraments. She does not tell her children to invent themselves.

The vocation crisis is therefore also an ecclesial crisis. Where the Mother’s public order is obscured, her children struggle to know how an offering can be received. Yet her doctrine still protects them. Her older law still exposes counterfeits. Her saints still teach the dispositions without which no restored structure will bear holy fruit.

The soul should remain close to this Mother. Not sentimentally, but obediently: receiving doctrine, refusing false worship, honoring the sacraments, and waiting without self-appointment.

Before entering a permanent state, ask:

1. Is the proposed state objectively lawful and Catholic?
2. Does it preserve true doctrine, true worship, and the salvation of souls?
3. Am I free to choose, or governed by fear, pressure, dependency, lust, vanity, or escape?
4. Do I understand the essential duties and permanence involved?
5. Have I disclosed serious facts that justice requires another party or superior to know?
6. Are there canonical, moral, financial, familial, or health impediments requiring judgment?
7. Do I possess reasonable aptitude, or am I relying upon desire to create capacity?
8. Have I sought counsel from someone competent, orthodox, and disinterested?
9. Have I practiced the virtues this state will require?
10. Would I accept its hidden duties without its imagined honors?
11. Am I willing to be told no without abandoning God?
12. If I enter, am I prepared to stop treating other lives as open alternatives?

No checklist replaces grace, authority, or prudence. These questions expose matters that emotion commonly hides.

Once the state binds, ask different questions:

• What duties arise today from the bond already made?
• Which part of this state am I resisting because it mortifies self-will?
• Have I made another state look holy merely because it contains a different cross?
• Do those entrusted to me receive my prayer, presence, work, protection, correction, and sacrifice?
• Am I using the ecclesial crisis to excuse duties that remain possible?
• What skill, virtue, or repair would make me more faithful now?
• Have I allowed nostalgia for an unchosen life to become emotional adultery against the life I vowed?

The grace of state does not eliminate effort. It supplies help for duties faithfully embraced. Sacramental marriage gives spouses grace for marriage. Holy Orders gives the ordained man sacred character and grace ordered toward ministry. Religious profession places the soul within a rule of consecration. Grace bears fruit through cooperation, prayer, mortification, and perseverance.

The person who continually revisits the road not taken cannot walk the road chosen.

Young souls often ask how to discover their vocation while neglecting present duties.

The answer begins close at hand.

Rise when required. Pray faithfully. Study doctrine. Work honestly. Guard chastity. Learn to keep a room and a promise. Serve parents according to justice. Control money. Accept correction. Finish what was begun. Learn to care for the weak. Refuse false worship. Repair known sin. Become dependable.

These acts do not purchase a vocation from God. They make the soul more capable of recognizing and bearing whatever He gives.

A man who will not govern himself is not ready to govern a household or serve at the altar. A woman who despises hidden duty is not prepared for motherhood or religious obedience. A person who cannot remain faithful in uncertainty is not yet trained for permanence.

The future offering is prepared in the duty of this hour.

A Catholic state in life has three great moments.

First, choose beneath God. Purify the motive. Learn the duties. Receive counsel. Test freedom and capacity. Refuse every path requiring sin or false religion.

Second, enter lawfully. Do not seize what must be received from the Church. Do not imitate a sacrament, vow, office, or covenant while withholding the conditions God established.

Third, remain faithfully. Once a permanent bond truly exists, cease treating commitment as provisional. Carry its cross. Use its grace. Repair failures. Deepen the offering until death.

The City of Man promises freedom through endless options. It produces lonely, unformed, and frightened wills unable to give themselves. The City of God teaches that freedom reaches maturity in a true gift: not the preservation of every possible life, but the faithful offering of this life to God.

Do not ask merely which state will fulfill you. Ask where you may lawfully belong to God, serve those He entrusts to you, and persevere in the truth. Then prepare without fantasy, choose without bargaining, enter without presumption, and remain without looking back.

Continue with The Duties of One’s State in Life, Vocational Seriousness Against Drift and Perpetual Delay, Courtship, Guarded Affection, and Serious Intention, What Is Matrimony?, and What Is Holy Orders?.

Sources and Notes

Footnotes

1. The New Testament of Jesus Christ, Translated Faithfully into English, out of the Authentical Latin (Rheims: John Fogny, 1582), Romans 12:1; spelling modernized. ↩

2. St. Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, nos. 169–189, especially nos. 170–174, trans. Rev. Elder Mullan, S.J. (New York: P. J. Kennedy & Sons, 1914). ↩

3. Genesis 1:27–28; 2:18–24, original Douay Old Testament (1609–1610), spelling modernized; Matthew 19:3–9; Ephesians 5:22–33, original Rheims New Testament (1582), spelling modernized; Pope Pius XI, Encyclical Casti Connubii (31 December 1930), nos. 10–17. ↩

4. 1 Corinthians 7:25–35, original Rheims New Testament (1582), spelling modernized; Council of Trent, Session XXIV (11 November 1563), Doctrine on the Sacrament of Matrimony, canon 10; Pope Pius XII, Encyclical Sacra Virginitas (25 March 1954), nos. 16–24. ↩

5. Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, nos. 10–17 and 112–115. ↩

6. Codex Iuris Canonici, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 9, part II (1917), canon 1081 §§1–2; Council of Trent, Session XXIV, Decree Tametsi, ch. 1. ↩

7. Codex Iuris Canonici (1917), canons 1060–1064; Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, nos. 82–84. ↩

8. Hebrews 5:4, original Rheims New Testament (1582), spelling modernized. ↩

9. Council of Trent, Session XXIII (15 July 1563), Doctrine on the Sacrament of Order, chs. 1–4 and canons 1–8; Roman Catechism, Part II, Sacrament of Holy Orders; Codex Iuris Canonici (1917), canons 968–982. ↩

10. Pope Pius XI, Encyclical Ad Catholici Sacerdotii (20 December 1935), nos. 40–48 and 57–62. ↩

11. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 186, aa. 1, 5, 7–8, in The “Summa Theologica” of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1920); Codex Iuris Canonici (1917), canons 487–488 and 572–573. ↩

12. Codex Iuris Canonici (1917), canons 538–542, 555, and 572–573. ↩

13. St. Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, nos. 171–174, Mullan translation (1914). ↩

14. 2 Thessalonians 2:9–12, original Rheims New Testament (1582), spelling modernized; St. Augustine, The City of God, Book XX, ch. 19, trans. Marcus Dods, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. II (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1887). ↩

15. Luke 1:26–38, original Rheims New Testament (1582), spelling modernized. ↩