Callings and Consequences: The Making of a Catholic Vocational Culture in Early Modern France

Abstract

Christopher Lane’s study offers a fresh perspective on the topic of vocation or ‘calling’ in the context of Catholicism. Lane argues that earlier teachings and practices about vocation, which traditionally had focussed on decisions to join the secular or regular clergy, intensified and expanded amid Catholicism’s ‘rigorist turn’ in seventeenth-century France. The result was a set of beliefs and practices concerning vocational discernment which has had a global impact on the modern era. As noted in Introduction and Chapter 1, Catholicism’s culture of vocation prior to the seventeenth century had centred on the importance of discerning God’s will as it pertained to pursuing a religious calling, which typically meant becoming an ordained cleric or joining a religious order. The Protestant and Catholic Reformations of the sixteenth century, however, emphasized eliminating corruption and sustaining Christian believers, families and communities in practicing a purer faith. This effort depended on everyone—clergy and laity, men and women, nobles and commoners—fulfilling their proper role in a divinely ordered plan to achieve a reformed church and society. In the context of the Catholic Reformation, the Council of Trent’s decrees, along with the writings of Ignatius of Loyola and François de Sales, laid the sixteenth-century foundations for the development of seventeenth-century vocational discernment: the task of selecting one’s path in life in accordance with God’s will.